Books

Maurice David’s little work in scholarship, “Who Was ‘Columbus’?” should be reviewed a month hence, on what is known as Columbus Day. The conclusions to which Mr. David is impelled, on the basis of his own researches and of those made by other scholars, are:

That the name of the discoverer of the Western world was not Christopher Columbus, but Cristobal Colon, and nothing else.

That he was not born in Genoa, Italy—despite his own assertions to that effect—but in a small town in Spain, Pontevedra.

That he was not a Catholic, but a Jew and, moreover.

That he remained a Jew and that he left indications in his method of signature to indicate the invulnerability of his Jewishness.

The reasoning by which we are led to each one of these conclusions seems sound and strong. There would be less confusion today in the record of Columbus, or Colon, had the discoverer of the Western world not had the motives for concealing his origin and his race that he appears to have had. We see, for example, why, as a Spanish Jew, he would lay claim to citizenship in a maritime port of such great importance as Genoa. Mr. David points out the damning fact that the Spaniard Colon who claimed to have been bred in Italy barely knew Italian, while he was proficient in Spanish. But of course these are round-about reasons, showing that he had a motive for concealing something, but not that he had reason to conceal the fact that he was a Jew. But Mr. David pursues the investigation to the point of proving to his own satisfaction at least that he was a Jew. I quote:

“On all of these thirteen intimate letters but one [letters to his son] the attentive reader can plainly see at the left top corner a little monogram which may seem cryptic to him, but which is, in fact, nothing more or less than an old Hebrew greeting or benediction, frequently used among religious Jews all over the world even to this day.

“This monogram, consisting of two characters, ‘beth’ and ‘hai’, the second and the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet . . . is an abbreviation of the Hebrew words, ‘Boruch hashem’ (Praised be the Lord). Any handwriting expert can confirm this.”

Mr. David quotes further proof that Colon was a Jew; the shape and the letters of his mystic signature which translated into Hebrew equivalent letters form a last confession and a substitute for the Kaddish. The mystic signature, upon which Colon insisted, forms a triangle, or, as Mr. David calls it, a shield of David. Mr. David translates the letters into the following:

Shadai, Shadai

Adonoy, Shadai,

Yehova molai chesed

Nauthai, ovon, pesha, chatuo

It would take too long to take the reader over every square inch of the ground by which Mr. David comes to this conclusion. It seems persuasive enough. With what force Mr. David’s plausible explanation touches the reader must be estimated by the reader himself, who is commended to obtain a copy of this work from the Research Publishing Co.

JOSEPHSON’S PAMPHLET

For the reader who has relied upon the daily press for his knowledge of the German situation, the new John Day Pamphlet, “Nazi Culture: The Brown Darkness Over Germany”, by Matthew Josephson, is an excellent analysis. Thus, if the information, which seems authentic, given by Mr. Josephson is correct, there can be little doubt that the Nazi regime is definitely, directly, and premeditatedly responsible for the death of Professor Theodor Lessing, German liberal philosopher who was recently murdered in Czechoslovakia.

In reporting arrests made in Prague in connection with the murder, the New York Times of September 3 said as follows:

“A strange circumstance is that in an article published in the Prager Tageblatt last February, Professor Lessing had recalled how Eric Hanussen, a German medium who was found murdered in Berlin under suspicious circumstances immediately after the Reichstag fire had predicted Professor Lessing’s death in this year.”

Of this same Hanussen Mr. Josephson says in “Nazi Culture”:

“Before the Nazis came into the market to supply ready-made salvation, Hanussen had something like a monopoly of this business. His weekly, the Berliner Wochenschau, had the biggest circulation in its field, surveying the field of politics and finance, and giving ‘prophecies’ to the masses at reasonable cost. Mysticism, east and west and from around the corner, astrology, palmistry, daily horoscopes, voodoo and wah-wah—everything dripped out of Hanussen’s universal, psychic sponger into the vast hell-scared German middle class. The Nazis ‘absorbed’ Hanussen. And suddenly he began to prophesy all sorts of political developments, with amazing accuracy, through collusion with the plotters. Hanussen had inside information in advance; and the Nazis had their horoscope favorably read every week. For the vulgus, they seemed to have the stars on their side. Hanussen would forecast their ‘successes’ almost to the hour, stunning the populace and winning numberless followers among the superstitious; and Hitler would cry: ‘Destiny has a task for me’. But one day Hanussen was mysteriously assassinated, no one knows by whom. . . .”

This is but one of the instances in which the new thirty-two page John Day pamphlet shows unequivocally that every occurrence which is at all traceable to the Nazis must eventually stand revealed as part of a conscious plan painstakingly prepared by Hitler and his “leadership of talent.”

Mr. Josephson tells us that the technique which these “leaders” adopted took the two forms of terror and high-pressure publicity, borrowed “from the Bolshevists of 1917, as well as from American salesmanship.” In his chapter on the “Springs of Fascism” Mr. Josephson describes Germany as being in an “economic blind alley” and confronted by the two objectives of obviating the Versailles Treaty and overcoming “the menacing proletarian movements”, and tells what has already been told in both French and American publications—that it was the German industrial kings together with the French steel and ammunition cartel “who spawned Hitler, decided when his ‘movement’ should mark time, and when it should go ahead.”

In the same section Mr. Josephson analyzes Hitler’s Four-Year Plan and comes to the conclusion that “German industrialism, with teeming beehives of skilled serfs, will press upon the world market prodigiously, evoking the increasing economic war of embargoes tomorrow; then the more direct war of blood and iron afterward. And in hastening this end, destruction of the organized labor class and forcing it into the depths of bondage, Naziism in Germany achieves what we are coming to recognize as the historic mission of fascism everywhere.”