Books

LEWIS BROWNES “How Odd of God” is as lively as it is informed.

As “an introduction to the Jews” it leaves little to be desired, even if here and there it treads a sensitive toe. The man who wrote it has learning and wit, enough learning to master his theme without suggesting the smell of the lamp and wit enough to enliven his data. “How Odd of God” is not one of those books made from other books; it is enriched with personal memorabilia gleaned from travel and observation in many lands. It is a book to explain the Jew to the Gentile as well as to the Jew.

It is history, theology, anthropology, mythology, current affairs and it contains besides, like so many other works written by Jews nowadays, a warning and a program. I think that perhaps the most fruitful and the most individual chapters, those which are more Browne’s than anyone else’s, are those wherein he discusses what Jews are supposed to be and what they are.

In the beginning of his history, the Jew preserved his integrity and his identity by Talmud and Torah, by the sacerdotilization of every aspect of his life. This is the theme of Mr. Browne’s first chapter, The Seclusive Jew. But he points out in his second chapter, The Exclusive Gentile, that whenever the Jew’s sense of separateness threatened to ware, Gentile hostility made it wax and strengthen. The theme of the book, if it has a theme, is that the Gentile in his hate will not let the Jew die. Perhaps the most astonishing exemplification of this is the history of the converts in Spain, Portugal, Majorca, where even three and four hundred years after conversions, the New Gentile and his descendants are none the less pariahs than were their Jewish ancestors.

POSSIBILITY OF CONTROVERSY

The chapter entitled The Seclusion Wanes has in it the greatest possibility of controversy, for therein Mr. Browne points out that the Talmud no longer provides a way of life for the Jew under modern conditions, that the Law no longer has the power in it to make Jewish the day of the Jew; that in short, “Judaism as a determining factor in the everyday life of the Jews seems doomed.” And he declares this to be the case not only in the United States, because of tolerance, and in Soviet Russia, because of a program, and in England and France, but even in such centers of orthodoxy as Poland, Galicia and Lithuania.

Yet even if the Jew cannot live by Talmud, the same general principles of Gentile exclusiveness which strengthened his ancestor’s sense of Jewishness in the past operates today to make him feel apart, in race if not religion. Mr. Browne, without getting indignant about it, shows what it means to be a Jew even in these enlightened states, and sums up the effects of the German drive on Jewry, and the effects of that drive on Jewry outside Germany.

In the chapter entitled What Jews Are Supposed To Be, Mr. Browne pricks the entire bubble of so-called racial science, contending that there is no pure breed, that even Jews have as little racial purity as the “Aryans,” which latter word has least validity in an chronology. He proves, at least to my satisfaction that: “It is only a superstition that there is a distinct Jewish type all over the world. Actually there are all sorts of Jewish types, and the unlikeness between any two of them is usually far greater than the unlikeness between each and its neighboring Gentile type.”

Later, he conveys the astonishing information that the aquiline nose is not Jewish, that “the most common type of nose among Jews is the straight, or Greek variety!” The chief point is that Jews in any part of the world tend to take on the facial and other characteristics possessed by the non-Jews in whose midst they are.

In the chapter, What Jews Really Are, he develops, and very ably it seems to me, the thesis that Jews, throughout history, have been an urban people and that the basic prejudice against them runs parallel to the prejudice of the country against the town, the type of prejudice H. L. Mencken has written about. He points to Russia, and to Palestine, as the only places where serious efforts are being made to de-urbanize the Jew. His chief proposal is that the Jew must learn to make a living outside the city, that he must be reintegrated with the soil, which he once knew.