Al Chet Dr. Abba Hillel Silver

One of the sins for which the Jew beats his breast on Atonement Day is the sin “wherein we have sinned against Thee be-tipshut peh—by the stupidity of the mouth.” To which might be added also the stupidity of the pen.

It is only within the last few years, since the mad stampede of Nazi racialism and chauvinism across the face of the world—a stampede which affected our people so disastrously—that certain Jewish voices which had chanted much the same tribal strains of arrogant, truculent group egotism have been tactfully muted in our midst.

In our eagerness to persuade the world and our own fellow Jews that our claim to nationhood was legitimate and that the status of our people in the world should be normalized by re-establishing a national center in Palestine, we were constrained to do a great deal of talking and writing about race, culture and nationalism. Some of it was true. Most of it was rubbish of the Teutonic variety. We drew liberally upon the fantastic race-nation vagaries of German pundits and we gave them one of the characteristic Jewish emotional tropes — the shalshelet for good measure. . . . It was all done, of course, with the best of intentions, le-shem shamayim, as it were, in an effort to demolish effectively the assimilationist and the pseudo-internationalist in our midst. We, therefore, did not stop to scrutinize closely the weapons which we were employing. But they have turned out to be dangerous, double-edged weapons.

Thus one of our Zionist propagandists, in a book provocatively addressed to the Gentile world and written at a time when the Nazi slogans were gaining currency—that the Jews are forever aliens in Germany and in all other Aryan lands, that their interests were forever irreconcilable with those of other people and that their baneful influence should therefore be everywhere destroyed, root and branch — delivered himself of the following thesis:

“Years of observation and thought have given increasing strength to the belief that we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divides all of you from us. . . . The cleavage is there, abysmal and undesirable. In the main we are forever distinct. Ours is one life, yours is another. . . . I do not believe that this primal difference between gentile and Jew is reconcilable. You and we may come to an understanding, never to a reconciliation. There will be irritation between us as long as we are in intimate contact. For nature and constitution and vision divide us from all of you forever—not a mere conviction, not a mere language, not a mere difference of national or religious allegiance. . . . These are two ways of life, each utterly alien to the other. Each has its place in the world—but they cannot flourish in the same soil, they cannot remain in contact without antagonism. Though to life itself, each way is a perfect utterance, to each other they are enemies. . . . We Jews are accused of being destroyers: whatever you put up, we tear down. It is true only in a relative sense. We are not iconoclasts deliberately: we are not enemies of your institutions simply because of the dislike between us. We are a homeless mass seeking satisfaction for our constructive instincts. And in your institutions we cannot find satisfaction. . . . We try to adapt your institutions to our needs because while we live we must have expression; and trying to rebuild them for our needs, we un build them for yours.”

This, of course, is Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler in reverse-Yiddish. It again illustrates the fact that when a Jew becomes a super-nationalist, he gets hold of a wolf by the tail. . . .

Another Jewish writer, an assimilationist who became a Zionist and dawkah, a Revisionist, wrote the following approval of the Nazi offer to give every Jew a one-way ticket to Jerusalem:

“The Gentile who cries ‘Go back to Jerusalem’ is right. Instinctively he feels the Jews alien to his country. He knows that whether the Jews admit it or not, whether they are actually conscious of it or not, they find life irksome and oppressive in the Gentile environment. There is a pressure upon them to be something different, to live somewhat differently from what it is natural for them to be and to live. They are not at ease. That is the reason they have been the severest critics of the laws and institutions, customs, mannerisms and ideals of the various nations. That is why they have been objectionable even when most useful and salutary. That’s what makes it right to say, ‘Back to Jerusalem.’ “

And a Rabbi who took stock recently of the Jewish religion wrote with much tumult and many quotations that “even when God is universalized and monotheism energetically preached, the Jew but reluctantly shares his God, his Father, with the rest of humanity. He still remains a kin of Israel. . . . God, then, is absorbed in the nationalism, or more correctly, in the nationality of Israel. He becomes the national ethos. . . . He is the national God; He is the soul of the nation.”

The abundant references in Biblical and Rabbinic literature which would have given a different picture of the God of Israel, which speak of Him as the God of all men and of all nations and which voice the hope of a coming age when a reunited and regenerated humanity “will be fashioned into one society to do thy will with a perfect heart” — are studiously avoided by this cleric in his eagerness to score a point in his polemic against the non-nationalist Jew.

It is fortunate that Israel can now use the Hitler besom to sweep such intellectual rubbish from its door-steps.

Race and nationalism were never the ultimate vision of Israel or of humanity. Israel’s national life, ever since the diaspora, has been deficient in that it lacked a national center. That deficiency must now be repaired. But this necessity does not warrant either an apotheosis of nationalism, or an apologetic which forever and ever divides the human race into two hostile camps—Jew and Gentile.

None speaks more rapturously of national Gods and of the eternal irreconcilability between Jew and non-Jew than those brutal enemies of human brotherhood, tolerance and cooperation who are today, as the arch-exponents of Race and Nation, devastating the civilized world.

The great Austrian poet, Franz Grillparzer, neatly traced the swift katabasis of all such ideals:

“Von Humanitaet — durch Nationalitaet—zur Bestialitaet.” . . .