Black on White

analysis. That seems to me a very bad reason why Jews should eschew Freudian thought.

Another Jew of genius opened new scientific and philosophical vistas by his theory of relativity. Shall we as Jews therefore have no truck with Einstein’s ideas?

And a Jew of genius, similarly, provided the scientific groundwork for Socialist and Communist thought. That seems to me a very inadequate reason why Jews should keep away from Marxist movements.

In the Russian revolution, Jews unquestionably played a role out of proportion to their numbers. Their position as a persecuted minority, their higher literacy and wider acquaintance with Western thought, made that inevitable. The Georgians, being likewise a suppressed minority race under Tsarism, took a share not justified by their numerical strength. Both Georgians and Jews still hold more power in revolutionary Russia than a strict numerical accounting can explain.

The Judaism which is embarrassed by such historical facts is a timorous compromise. Jews who oppose radicalism have every right to attack it, but when they argue that Jews as Jews must steer clear of radicalism, there is reason to suspect that their real motive is fear for the safety of the economic status-quo rather than fear for the Jewish race.