A protest against racial hatred and racial persecution, particularly pointed at Nazi Germany’s brutal treatment of Jewish citizens, was expressed by Sir Rabindranath Tagore, Hindu philosopher and poet, in a personal letter to N. E. B. Ezra, the Jewish Daily Bulletin’s special correspondent here, which has just been made public by the latter.
“The insults offered to my friend Einstein have shocked me to the point of torturing my faith in modern civilization,” wrote Tagore, who is a leading figure in Indian Nationalist politics. He was referring to Albert Einstein, now an exile in this country.
“I can only draw consolation from the hope that it was an unhappy act done in a drunken mood and not the sober choice of a people so gifted as the Germans,” the letter continued.
GIVES OTHER SIDE
In referring to the Hitler regime in Germany the poet first drew attention to the fact that newspapers have printed different versions of the events there. Tagore remarked that it cannot be denied that the German people were goaded to many acts of desperate folly by the humiliations imposed on them by the victorious nations of the World War.
“Nevertheless if the brutalities we read of are authentic, then no civilized conscience can allow compromise with them,” he concluded.
Dated June 17 and postmarked from Santiniketan, India, where Tagore makes his residence, the letter to Mr. Ezra, who is also the founder and editor of Israel’s Messenger, was primarily motivated to express appreciation for calling the poet’s attention to an article on India printed in the publication.
Excerpts from the letter follows:
“To me racial hatred in any form is a creed of barbarism and I cannot recognize the value of any cause in whose name nations and people indulge their gluttony of violence. We in India are striving to #afeguard our growing spirit of nationalism from this dangerous perversion of racial hatred, and when I see Western nations building their faith on this barbarism and making elaborate preparations for a scientific slaughter, I cannot help feeling proud of my people who, poor as they are and persecuted, yet are unwilling to win human rights through brutish ways. It revives my faith in the undying spirit of the East.
CRIES PROTEST AGAINST HATE
“All my life I have cried against blindness of prejudice that divides man from man and called upon my fellowmen all over the globe to stretch their hands in a common endeavor to realize the nobility of the human in each one of us.
“Today when this most enduring heritage from the truly great ones of all races, is being assailed by the aggressive communalism of the Blacks and the Browns on the one hand, and the fanatic materialistic idealism of the Reds on the other, I once again raise my humble voice of protest and warning, however feeble it may have grown with age.
“In our frantic despair to save the community,” the poet concluded, “let us not crush the free individual on the steps of whose sublime heresies humanity has ever been rising upwards.”
Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, has shown on many previous occasions deep sympathy with the aims and aspirations of Zionism.
URGES JEW-ARAB COOPERATION
In a recent interview, in which he discussed Zionism and its problems ‘thoroughly, he declared that the success of Zionism depends entirely upon Arab-Jewish co-operation, and that its problem cannot be solved in London by any negotiations between the British government and the Zionist leaders.
“If the Zionist leadership will insist on separating Jewish political and economic interests in Palestine from those of the Ar###s ugly eruptions will occur in the Holy Land,” Tagore prophesied in the same interview, showing a deep understanding of Jewish affairs in the Holy Land.
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.
