“The German situation has brought about one of those great moments in Jewish history which may be productive. It has always been so in Jewish history—the unfortunate moments, the moments of suffering, have led to positive results.”
That is the opinion of a Jewish scientist and scholar who was sufficiently impressed with the seriousness and the victory of the Nazi movement to have moved out of Berlin before the first onslaught of its activity against Jews began. He is Dr. Jacob Klatzkin, the editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica, of which the tenth volume will soon appear. His library and working materials preceded him out of Germany, having been moved to Switzerland a year ago. It is in Switzerland that the future office of the Encyclopedia will be located.
Dr. Klatzkin attended the Zionist Congress at Prague. Although the Congress had not yet come to an end, Dr. Klatzkin expressed the opinion that it had not and would not achieve that momentum of activity for which the time called.
“This was the time,” he said, “when relief and constructive work should have been combined for one definite end. Once the wave of activity is broken, it will be divided into small ripples, to be picked up by any number of organizations and spread out in small undertakings all over the globe. What should have happened was that one central activity be pushed forward to an important and permanent place.
“Zionism, which is Jewish nationalism, must be separated from Fascism,” Dr. Klatzkin said. “There was a time when the error of confusion was made by many Jews, who forgot to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate nationalism. Zionism must be built upon internationally oriented nationalism. Chauvinism must be destroyed. Those who saw a kindred drive behind Zionism and National Socialism lost sight of that difference between nationalism and chauvinism.”
As regards the future of the government in Germany, Dr. Klatzkin says that predictions are impossible. But all activity should be planned on the supposition that the present state of affairs will continue. The fact that, as he believes, national socialism is a victory of national chauvinism and not of national thought does not in any way diminish those instruments of strength which it possesses.
The whole situation, Dr. Klatzkin thinks, will have a most obvious effect on Hebrew literature. First of all it will force a concentration of Hebrew writers in Palestine, since they will make their way there out of Germany and other countries. And that, in turn, will involve a process of change. In the near future it will create an uncomfortable situation. Palestine is already overfilled with Hebrew writers, and in that fundamentally productive country, the writer, as such, must have a psychological structure different from the one he had. There he had enough of a task to propagate the Hebrew ideal; in Palestine he cannot live so easily by sheer intellect. Eventually a more normal organization will be developed; the writer will become part of the essentially productive element of the land and will continue to produce in his own intellectual capacity as well.
Toward the process of adjustment an attempt is being made to establish a large publishing house in Palestine, which will then become permanently amalgamated in the country’s intellectual life. The normal elements of amalgamation will also take place, and from it all the concentration of literary talents on the very ground toward which their talents and dreams had hitherto been aimed will produce a normal flowering of Hebrew literature.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
