Between the Lines

To world Jewry, President Masaryk, whose eighty-fifth birthday is being celebrated today, is a great figure. Not only did he lead his own people out of the darkness of age-long political non-existence to the heights of a new national life, but he has always exhibited great interest in the Jewish aims for a national restoration.

The Jews will never forget the part which President Masaryk played some thirty-five years ago, when Leopold Hilsner, a Jew, was condemned for murder on totally insufficient evidence, founded on the old libel of “ritual murder.” Once more the charge was levelled against the Jews as a nation and a wild popular agitation was started against entire Jewry.

A CHAMPION FOR JEWRY

Professor Masaryk was one of the first publicly to protest against the judicial murder of Hilsner which was about to be committed, and against the libel which was agitated against the Jewish people.

Then the violent campaign turned against Masaryk. He was accused of being in the pay of the Jews. Students of the Praha university, incited by anti-Semites, prevented him from delivering his lectures. He became the object of severe attacks in the press. He found himself almost entirely isolated.

For a time he forfeited a good deal of his popularity. But this did not make the least difference to him. He never regretted the part he had taken. He declared that “it was for purely ethnical motives that I took my stand against the superstition of a blood ritual.” This was in the year 1900.

CONDEMNS BEILIS TRIAL

In 1913, when the Beilis “ritual murder” trial was started in Russia, Professor Masaryk again vehemently condemned the accusations. He also protested strongly against the anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia. It was he who brought out that the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia had since 1905 caused the loss of 37,000 human lives.

All his life President Masaryk has stood for truth and has known no compromise. He has unmistakably condemned anti-Semitism and has been a great supporter of the idea that Palestine should be restored as a Jewish national home.

When Professor Masaryk, after the outbreak of the war, fled to London, where he became lecturer at King’s College and started his Czech liberation campaign, he received a great deal of assistance from Jews, especially in America. He has acknowledged this assistance on many occasions.

PRAISES AMERICAN JEWS

In his work, “The World Revolution,” Professor Masark speaks in particular of Justice Louis D. Brandeis as one of the group of intimate friends to whom he showed the draft of the Declaration of Independence of the Czechoslovakian people, before he submitted it to the United States Secretary of State.

“As everywhere,” he writes in this book, “the Jews helped me also in America. In the United States, indeed, I found that the Hilsneriade repaid me, if I may say so.”

In 1907, when Masaryk was in the United States, he was given a big reception in New York by Jewish leaders. It was then that he made good friends of Justice Brandeis, Louis Marshall, Judge Mack, and where he met for the first time Nahum Sokolow.

HELPS ZIONISM

In 1927, Professor Masaryk made the first official visit to Palestine and was given a great reception there by the Jews. It was at this reception that he declared that he hoped and wished with his whole heart that the Jews would achieve their aims in Palestine.

True to his principle of championing human rights, Professor Masaryk was the first head of a state severely to attack the Nazi regime for persecuting the Jews. At the last Zionist Congress, which was held in Praha in 1933, Professor Masaryk, in a statement issued to Jacob Landau, director of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, urged international action by all civilized states against the anti-Jewish persecutions in Germany.