About Dr. Zhitlowsky

Personally, I do not know Dr. Chaim Zhitlowsky. I never met him, but I know him by his writings. I am not a disciple of his. There are many of his views with which I cannot agree; there are some of his theories to which I cannot fully subscribe. Nevertheless, it has always been my position that I need not fully agree with a great man in order to pay homage to him. Homage is due to any man who devotes his talents in behalf of great human causes in sincerity and in devotion. Unfortunately there has developed in Jewish life in recent years a certain intolerance which manifests itself in a desire to destroy the man who happens to differ with you. Political discussions today, and even cultural and philosophic discussions, have entered the phase of the class struggle. One wishes not to understand one’s opponent but to break and destroy him.

We recognize in Dr. Zhitlowsky a man of exceptional literary talent. In defense of the oppressed and the dispossessed, Dr. Zhitlowsky has wielded a mighty pen, “a pen of iron with the point of a diamond,” that can cut in deep. Dr. Zhitlowsky has been a very voluminous and prolific writer, and his writings have been devoted to the defense of the weak and in protest against oppression. Many will recall his devastating attacks upon Russian tyranny in the days of the Czars. I am told he is a speaker of great force— and the spoken word is still a power today, a great power, even as it was in ancient days.

As a nationalist Jew I appreciate his championing of Jewish nationalism at a time when Jewish nationalism was not only not popular but definitely derided by the Jewish masses. Many of you will recall that period when Socialism was synonymous with internationalism and assimilation, when liberals looked with suspicion and distrust upon any man who believed in nationalism. I believe Dr. Zhitlowsky was the first one in the Socialist ranks who proclaimed the idea of Jewish nationalism. That was an epochal contribution to the thinking of the Jewish people. In its day it was revolutionary. It brought down upon him the sharp and bitter criticism of his own Socialist co-workers.

Dr. Zhitlowsky has been and is a nationalist in the full sense of the word. He wants Jewish nationalism not merely in Palestine, but everywhere where a substantial number of Jewish people live. He calls for the cultural and political autonomy of the Jewish groups throughout the diaspora.

I believe that it was largely due to the efforts of Dr. Zhitlowsky that the spokesman of America who went to Paris after the World War demanded Jewish national minority rights and succeeded in writing into the treaties the national minority principle. Unfortunately, Jewish minority rights have not been quite as successful as some hoped they would prove. But there is a sound wholesome principle involved in the concept of Jewish autonomous group survival everywhere in the world.

There is another feature of Dr. Zhitlowsky’s teachings which has appealed to me and which I, too, have been advocating. Dr. Zhitlowsky is a prime student of economics. He realized early the abnormal status of the economic life of our people. We are crowded in the upper classes. In the agricultural classes we are very little represented and in the artisan and craftsman classes, too, we are not adequately represented. We are a pyramid standing on its apex Dr. Zhitlowsky called upon our people to return to the soil, to root themselves in the land. Dr. Zhitlowsky has labored over a period of years to the end that more and more of our people should root themselves in the soil. He did not ask for a Jewish peasant class. He asked for a prosperous agricultural class. He asked for a Jewish working class—not for a disinterested proletarian class, but for an economically secure and enlightened working class. Upon these two classes, the farmer and the worker, Dr. Zhitlowsky hopes to build a sound and normal Jewish life in the Galut as well as in Palestine. I think that this principle is sound. When the “Yom Haras Olam” comes, it is the class which finds itself on the land and the class which holds within its hand the tools of production which remains, while the middle class and the professional class are sharply shaken and rendered less and less secure.

Dr. Zhitlowsky has been a great advocate of the Yiddish language. He knows Hebrew and he loves the language but it is his thesis, with which I do not fully agree, that inasmuch as Yiddish is the language spoken by most Jews, that it should be taught to our children and that it should become the national speech of the Jew and the language of instruction in Jewish schools.

Now, whether right or wrong, I can understand his point of view. I do not think that the problem resolves itself into a question of either-or. Two languages are not necessarily an indication of national disunity. Many of us are today using more than one language. Jews in Eastern Europe for centuries used Yiddish as their vernacular but also taught their children Hebrew. The two are not mutually exclusive and this issue should not be turned into a battlefield.

Benjamin Franklin, the great American, once said, “If you want not to be forgotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing about.” I believe Dr. Zhitlowsky has done both. He has written things worth reading and he has done things worth writing about. He has helped to guide the thinking of the masses of our people into what I regard very wholesome channels—the channels of Jewish loyalty and Jewish self-respect. For years he was actively identified with the Poale Zion movement and the Socialist Territorialist movement. He was not a narrow, intolerant doctrinaire. Every movement which promised to enrich the life of his people interested him.

It is therefore proper that the Jews of America should not only utilize but seize the occasion properly to celebrate the seventieth birthday of this great Jew. I would call upon all sections of our people, regardless of their economic or political outook upon life, to join harmoniously in celebrating this event.

Pope Boniface IX’s personal physician was a Jew named Manuele.