World Press Digest

The Manchester Guardian, commenting on the plight of Polish Jews in France in connection with the anti-alien legislation, says:

Bitter cases of injustice are being heard of more and more often. There is, for instance, a Jewish hatmaker who has lived in France for twelve years and has two children; there is a young girl, a dressmaker, who has been fifteen years in the country — the authorities have withdrawn the right to work from both of them. There is a hairdresser with a child born in France. His French employer has been ordered to send the “foreigner” away. As for contracts of employment and “patentes,” it is unreasonable to expect the hunted, struggling, small Jewish employers to manage their businesses as efficiently as the respectable “good citizens” and regular “taxpayers” do. And even these “patentes” are of no use in such a case as that of about forty Jewish small traders in Lille who have just been forbidden to do business in the “marchés,” although they have paid their taxes regularly, have been living more than ten years in the country, and have children born in France.

QUOTES MARX SOLUTION OF WELL KNOWN PROBLEM

The Sunday Referee of London, writing of Semitism and anti-Semitism, says:

Of one thing we may be certain: the bad qualities which are attributed to the Semites are always resident in the anti-Semites themselves and in the system of society from which they spring.

Only an illiterate demagogue like Hitler would maintain that the so-called bad qualities of the Jews—their love of money and power—are to be found only in people of Jewish blood. These particular qualities are shared by ninety per cent of people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.

In a brilliant essay on “The Jewish Question,” Karl Marx wrote: “What is the secular cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his secular God? Money. Very well. Emancipation from huckstering and money would be the self-emancipation of our epoch.

“An organization of society which would abolish the fundamental conditions of huckstering, and, therefore, the possibility of huckstering, would render the Jew impossible.”

It would also render the anti-Semite impossible.

CONFLICTING FIGURES ON REICH EMIGRATION

The Irish News of Belfast reports the following facts from Germany:

The Reich Statistical Office announces that according to its count, there were 500,000 Jews in Germany in 1933. This represents a reduction of 65,000 since the previous count in 1925, and is the first actual reduction since the Jewish emancipation 120 years ago, says a Berlin message.

Half of the Jews lived in the six cities of Berlin, Frankfrut-am-Main, Breslau, Hamburg, Cologne, and Leipzig, with Frankfurt showing the highest proportion to the total population, namely 4.7 per cent.

The Racial Policy Office of the National Socialist party states that according to its figures only 40,000 Jews have left Germany since the introduction of the anti-Jewish legislation and it cites this as proof that all stories of “brutal persecution of Jews in Germany are purposeful lies.”

AN ADMIRER OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES

The New York Times carries the following in its editorial section, “Topics of the Times”:

In the Eighties of the last century there was a young instructor of dead languages at Yale who actually succeeded in creating an enthusiasm for Hebrew among the members of the large junior class; this aside from his theological and graduate students. He taught Hebrew, Assyrian, Arabic, Aramaic and Syriac. His name was William Rainey Harper, and he was so completely spoiled for active life by his liking for dusty Semitic languages that in later years the best he could extract from John D. Rockefeller was a mere $70,000,000 for building up Chicago University, of which he was the first president.

Edwin R. Embree in the June Atlantic calls W. R. Harper “perhaps the most picturesque figure in the whole history of American universities,” and “the dynamic figure of American scholarship.” He was a teacher of Hebrew, but when in the Nineties at Chicago he started in to pay $7,000 salaries to professors he “rocked the academic world,” says Mr. Embree, and laid the foundations of one of the world’s greatest universities.