Books

THERE is, in this writer’s opinion, no timelier book than "The Making of the Modern Jew," by Milton Steinberg, rabbi of the Park Avenue Synagogue. It is a well written, lucid and exhaustive preatise on what ails the Jew of today. In his diagnosis, the author tells not alone of the symptoms, but goes into the patient’s history–a full two thousand years back. A truly fascinating narrative results which, like Lewis Browne’s classic, is, indeed, stranger than fiction, and reads like a novel. One is sorely tempted, instead of reviewing, to merely keep quoting from this book.

"The church, the state and the mob," says Rabbi Steinberg in the opening chapter, "had conspired against him (the Jew). They had persecuted and massacred, suppressed and harried him. . . . By every rule of reason, his very memory should have been obliterated under such circumstances. And yet, stubbornly, uncannily, he persisted and survived. . . . He not only survived but lived joyously, and, within the limits of his own culture, creatively." The author then proceeds to take up, one by one, those factors in Jewish history and creative activities which have made the survival possible. He makes the interesting statement that while still a people on their own soil and under a government of their own, the Jews’ culture and their religion were such as were ready at a moment’s notice, to blossom forth in foreign fields. He cites, among other phenomena, the Golden Age of Jewry and Judaism under the Caliphate in Spain. And where he tells of the Christian conquest that followed, the persecutions and expulsions–one could be led into thinking one was reading the history of 1933, instead of the fifteenth century.

As a matter of fact, Rabbi Steinberg, while allowing that religious indoctrination, to the effect that "The Jews killed Christ," has had a great deal to do with the growth and spread of anti-Semitism, insists that "in the elemental struggle for food lies much of the impulse to anti-Semitism. . . . It is a short step at most from economic resentments to group hatreds. . . . Starvation and unemployment are the ideal habitat of Jew-hate. . . . The philosophy of anti-Semitism has been in the making for decades. It remained until recently the esoteric possession of academic Jew baiters. The German people were won to it because Germany was desperate. . . . Concealed behind the veil of Nazi sophistry lies another factor–the economic. . . . Those whom a false logic could not win, the implied promise of material advantage convinced."

In the light of the events in Germany, the author does not wish any Jew anywhere to live in a fool’s paradise–"If after a century of equality," he insists with brutal frankness, "the Jews of that land (Germany) can again be subjected to medieval barbarism, then the same story may be repeated elsewhere. . . . Whether the Jew contributes or fails to contribute to the thought-life of the world, is of slight consequence. He is damned equally in either case." This situation is almost an automatic answer to the accusation of the Jew as an inveterate radical, although often as not he is condemned as the arch protagonist of the Capital system. But Rabbi Steinberg has a true insight into the souls of the Jewish radical. Says he:

"The fanatical revolutionary on the street corner is then the curious product of rabbinic ethies, of a late entrance into the world, of a natural sympathy with fellows in persecution. Above all, he is the result of a sociaty which nags the Jew into rebellion against itself by refusing him full emancipation." An entrancingly told history of this emancipation and enlightenment ("H a s k a l a h") movement, of the Renaissance period which was a darker time in the annals of the Jewish Ghetto than the Dark Ages–are the subjects of the preceding chapters. In the chapter on "Programs" the author waxes enthusiastic over the Zionist movement because "Labor occupies a unique position in the Palestinian scheme of things. It has been glorified into a doctrine of national salvation. It has become a veritable gospel of liberation. It is the credo of the workers of hand and brain in the rebuilding of the land. . . . Zionism is today the most powerful factor operating toward Jewish survival." It is strange, however, to cay the least, that the author neglects to mention the Labor and Radical movements in the various contries of the Diaspora where the vast majority of the Jewish people will remain, and the influence of these movements on the fate of the Jews.