Books

The German chapters supply both provocation and justification for returning for at least a brief spell to Marvin Lowenthal’s “A World Passed By.” They, particularly, make us realize the pertinence of his own conclusion that Jewish history is literary criticism spiced with massacre. But in our special concern with Jewish history we must not forget that a good deal of universal history is literary criticism spiced with massacre.

Jews, indignant and sentimental, may feel so intensely the historical record of slaughter and injustice practiced against Jews by both Catholic and Protestant that they are likely to overlook the fact that Protestants turned on Catholics and Catholics on Protestants with the same devastating fury.

One wonders, at times, whether Mr. Lowenthal has not, on the contrary, become as callous to the blood-letting in Jewish history as a surgeon is to blood-letting he witnesses, and participates in, on a smaller scale. But it seems to me that a Jew who felt the wounds of Israel in his own body would be incapable of putting the record in such clear perspective as has Mr. Lowenthal. I like particularly the figure in which he summarizes the relation of Judaism to general European history. I therefore make no apology for quoting from his general introduction:

The history of the Jew is a Gulf Stream through Europe, wet and salt like the surrounding waters, taking hues from the same sun, ruffled by the same storms, inhabited by the same creatures but always with a different temperature and an individual direction. From his first appearance in Palestine, the Jew has absorbed the culture of his neighbor and yet maintained his own. And not content with being an ancestor, he has persisted as a contemporary. He has everywhere been a native—with a foreign past and the chance of a foreign future.

This experience, renewed on each generation, has given the Jew a perspective. He has become the natural, if unofficial and often unwelcome, critic of the Western World. In the Joban sense he is the Adversary of the nations. And his history can be used as the touchstone or coordinates of civilization.

Continuing, he gives us what I think we are justified in calling the Semitic Accent of European history.(I hereby place my claim on this phrase for future use; trespassers beware!) And this is the manner in which he summarizes that accent:

Crusaders, we discover, were cutthroats. The Church was a perplexed conquerer, contemptuous and fearful of her victims. Saints wore halos of blood. Easter was a season of the year when a man walked in terror of his life. Christian art was Jewish shame. Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard of the Lion Heart, St. Louis of France, Ferdinand and Isabella are hissed, and Pedro the Cruel and the heretical Emperor Frederick are applauded. Renascence took place in the Dark Ages and the darkest age began with the Renaissance. The Moor at the gate brings glad tidings, and the march of Christian soldiers is the signal of despair. Not princes and warriors change the face of the world, but grubby translators, ink-stained astronomers, and calculating merchants. Patriotism is an appeal to slaughter. The secret of survival lies not in the sword or purse, but in the school. Cities proud of their past are damned as “cities of blood,” and others, unaware of their virtue, are hailed as “righteous places”. The victories of civilization are not recorded on battle monuments, but in a few casual words of English, French, or German, cut on an alien’s tomb.

The statues of the Church Triumphant and the Synagogue Defeated which greet, us at cathedral doors, the patient explanation of the New Faith and the Old repeated on the stained glass within, are mere signs and tags of the long-drawn struggle between Rome and Jerusalem. The battle resounded at every ghetto gate, it raised its smoke at every inquisitional pyre, the cry of it rang through a thousand laws. When the Jew, every morning for centuries on end, drew on his cloak with the little “Badge of Shame” stitched to its sleeve, he donned it as a uniform in the army of his God. When the Christian, obsessed by the mystery of the Passion, time and again accused the Jew of stabbing a Host or killing a child, he, too, was fighting for the honour of his Lord.

When we consider the history of the Jews of Germany, we realize what racial and cultural parvenues are those Nazis who dare impose upon the Jews the persecutions they have. The Jews were in the cities of the Rhine in the track of the Romans. There is a legend that the Jews of Worms refused Nehemiah’s invitation to return to Palestine because, they said, they had a Jerusalem of their own. The Jews of every German city need a Nehemiah today. Titus claimed as his own after the fall of Jerusalem those Jews who were in what is now modern Germany and that claim was continued by the Holy Roman Empire under whose protection they enjoyed some mitigation of death, torture and banishment. We realize what a blessing German particularism was to the Jews, for if one town banished them the neighboring town, in retaliation, not only received them but made them welcome. There was then no “coordination.”

Of course nothing could save them from the vengeance wreaked on them for their supposed responsibility for bringing the Black Death upon good Christians who did not yet know the secrets of cleanliness and proper drainage, nor from the Jew-baiting and Jew-burning Dominicans who, with the smell of Spanish auto-da-fes in their nostrils, came to light German-Jewish funeral pyres. The Crusaders were another major affliction and their descent upon the cities of the Rhine brought so terrible a slaughter upon the Jews that many of them threw themselves into their own auto-dafes as a lesser evil.

In the cities of Mayence, Speyer, Worms, among others, Mr. Lowenthal found curious mementoes of those medieval and yet so modern “purgings” of the Jews. When the individual Germans had wreaked their vengeance upon the living they turned upon the dead, destroyed cemeteries, seized the stones as trophies, plastering them into the masonry of their homes, used them as building blocks and even as house signs.

There are some charming paragraphs on the founder of the Rothschild fortunes in Frankfurt which will reward reading. There are parts of Mr. Lowenthal’s German section that cannot help but summon recollections of Feuchtwanger’s marvelous novel of the court Jew in Germany, “Power”, or as it was published in England, “Jew Suss”. We read of the emergence of this type into the German principalities after the Thirty Years’ War when, as Mr. Lowenthal has it, “Samuel Oppenheimer at the court of Vienna, Jost Leibermann at the court of Berlin, Leffman Behrens at Hanover, paved the way for Moses Mendelssohn, for the salons of Fanny Itzig, Rahal Varnhagen, Henrietta Herz, for the Jewish ‘renaissance’.”

Perhaps it is too soon to say whether Lessing’s patronage of Moses Mendelssohn, which burst open the intellectual ghetto gates of German Jewry, did more harm than good.

JEWISH BOOK WEEK

The seventh National Jewish Book Week opens today and will be observed until May 20. As in the past two years, the Boston Jewish Book Week Committee, in cooperation with the Boston Public Library, is sponsoring a meeting devoted to “The Jew in Literature,” tonight, at the Lecture Hall of the Central Library. The speakers will be Milton E. Lord, Dr. Isaac Goldberg, Prof. Robert E. Rogers, Lee Friedman and Rabbi Harry Levi.

The Committee will also sponsor a radio broadcast during the week. A new edition of “Judaica”, a list of books of Jewish interest in the Boston Public Library, largely augmented and brought up to date by Miss Fanny Goldstein, will be issued shortly.