Robert glanced at McCall. The latter had evidently prepared Rabbi Levin and Father Callahan, had probably phoned them before coming to his room. It was a conspiracy, he could see, for his own good.
“Nu, what do you want to know? There is no mysticism in Judaism. It is an open book. There it is, everything.” He pointed to a Bible.
“But he wants to know something about the Jews that will offset this Trick Track Tribe propaganda.”
“What, Trick Track Tribe?” The old man shrugged his shoulders. “Craziness. Foolishness. It can’t last. Mr. Hamilton, can a bad thing, an untrue thing, last? No? Well, then, how can the Tribe live? What do they say? Ask me any questions and I will try to answer them for you as best I can.”
“Mr. Levin,” said McCall, “the Tribe accuses the Jews of planning to overthrow all the Gentile governments of the world through the Third Internationale. Isn’t that the argument, Hamilton?” Robert nodded.
“Nu, they do us credit. They flatter us,” said the rabbi. “How can it be that the Jews, who are only about three per cent of the population, should control the whole world? Is it sense?” He shrugged his shoulders and cocked his head to one side. “Jews? What Jews? You talk as if Jews was a little society, like a lodge. There are American Jews and Russian Jews, German Jews and French Jews, Republican Jews and Democratic Jews, radical Jews and conservative Jews. It’s not like they have a pope to tell them what they shall do.”
“But how do the orthodox Jews feel about internationalism?”
“Ah, the orthodox Jews. They are the Zionists. They are always dreaming that they shall get back to Palestine. So how can they be internationalists? They are nationalists, they want that even the Jews should have their own nation, so how can they be both nationalists and internationalists at the same time?”
“But isn’t Trotsky a Jew and most of the Bolshevik leaders?”
“Trotsky is no longer a Jew. He has been, what you call it in the Catholic Church, excommunicated from the Jewish Synagogue. His parents are Jews, good Jews, and they mourn him like he was a dead one. There can be no religious Jews among the Bolsheviks, but there are some Jews, by birth we admit it—who are leaders. Nu, Lenine is a Gentile. So what does that show? But most of the leaders are not Jews. It is true that there are more leaders among them in proportion to their population. But that is because most of the Jews in Russia live in the big cities where the Bolshevik movement started. And the Jews are better educated than the average Russian. So they are naturally more highly represented in the offices. Trotsky is the only great Jewish leader—the head of the army. But Lenine comes from the nobility and many of the Russian radicals are from the old nobility. But you can’t say that the Russian nobility is radical, can you? But there are no Jews in the tchaika, which is responsible for the reign of terror. They are all Letts. The Jews are mostly translaters, because they are educated to speak several tongues, teachers, minor officials. But they are simply officials, appointed by the government, and they would hold the same jobs should it be a Kerensky again at the head. It’s just like the communists have placed the old Czarist generals at the head of the different army corps. What should they do? They have to fight for the government or they get killed. But the generals under Czar Nicholas who are now leading the Red armies, are they also Bolsheviks? No, a religious Jew or a Zionist, whether he observes all the religion or not, he cannot be an internationalist.”