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Author of “A World Passed By”

“In Their reactions to misfortune different people show different dispositions. Whereas one race is filled with resentment and hatred against their oppressors, others respond by turning to self-examination.

“The Germans belong to the former category, the Jews to the latter.”

This pregnant characterization is taken from Josef Kastein’s recently published “History and Destiny of the Jews.”

It is true, certainly, of the Germans of today. It has often been true of the Jews in the past. And in the present misfortunes of our people, Kastein has sought to take up the old burden of the prophet and rabbi and propose that we “reason together.”

With the stroke of fate hovering over them, the Jews of Germany surely turned with burning interest to Kastein’s new-old interpretation of their destiny. Thousands of assimilated Jews must have shared the sad bewilderment of Dr. Rosie Graefenberg, whose interview in the Jewish Daily Bulletin of April 23, 1933 makes as pathetic reading as the worst Nazi horrors. Other thousands of “good” Jews must have echoed, even though they never heard of it, the sly and bitter pun of their medieval forefathers: “Who is like unto Thee O God, among the dumb?”

Now that the blow has fallen, American Jews too must begin to wonder— after protests and parades— why we Jews must suffer; and, if we must, what virtue therefore lies in insisting upon our Jewishness. It is no answer to say that we are innocent scapegoats; why, we may still ask, must we be the goat? It is no answer to say that we must persist in being Jews because the world won’t let us be otherwise; even if we bow to this inevitability, we still may ask our purpose and our destiny. We may agree that it is ours “to do and die”— but “do” what? and who forbids our asking “the reason why?”

Kastein gives us the age-old reasons. And because they are traditional and because he has put them so eloquently and plausibly, they are well worth examining in this critical hour.

The Jews, he says, were from time immemorial “chosen” by their own aptitude for righteousness — or by cosmic necessity — to create a model society, just toward man because obedient to God. Due to our “sins” we failed to build this society. But the task still lies before us to set an “example” to humanity. The world has resented us, and still does so, because we ourselves have never realized our goal. Hence our historic task remains to be performed; and when it is, refusal and resentment on the part of the other nations will presumably vanish.

As Kastein develops this theme, using the centuries of Jewish history as a continuous proof and turning the vision of the prophets and the sermons of the rabbis into convincing modern language, we sense the grandeur and the danger of it all.

In whole and in detail it too curiously resembles the doctrine of the Nazis.

“God,” says Pastor Hossenfelder, in elaborating the principles of the new German Christians (N.Y. Herald-Tribune, April 6, 1933), “has created me a German.

“Teutonism is a gift from God.”

“God desires that I fight for my Teutonism.”

But the spirit, you will say, of Hossenfelder and Kastein is a world apart. It depends, I fear, on whose ox is being gored. Let us catch some notion of Kastein’s spirit.

“The Greeks,” he says, “possessed neither ethics nor morality … [they] were the most inhumane people of the ancient world … the ideals of virtue and reason remained forever beyond their reach….

“Judea quite rightly saw in Rome merely the representative of stupid brute force… Rome had nothing to offer, except citizenship….

“Christian policy aimed at making its opponents and other religions appear contemptible, at making mere difference a sufficient ground for hatred… Jesus always assumed an aggressive attitude, and invariably met views opposed to his own with extraordinary arrogance, and impatience and fanatical contempt ….

“Spinoza was a Jew only by race; his work can lay no claim to Jewish ideology.

“It [is] possible for a Jew to doubt [Judaism] … but these doubts almost inevitably broke him.”

And, finally, the efforts of the best minds of the Eighteenth Century, the “Age of Reason”, to dispel the ancient prejudices against the Jew are belittled with the exclamation: ” Philanthropy and justice in small doses! Utility as a basis of humanity!”

It seems to me evident that this “garland of friendship”— which is plucked at random and could be enlarged at will — springs chiefly from “resentment and hatred” against oppression. I agree that these passions are in the present circumstances only natural; but I claim that either they belong, as Kastein calls it, to the “German category”, or else, as I suspect, that Germans, Jews, and all peoples react much the same under the sting of suffering.

Nevertheless, the question raised by Kastein as to the meaning of the Jewish past and the destiny of its future remains. His own answer is, in its human passion, magnificent. But will it do?

Is his a reading or a misreading of history ? How can we set up ideals as an “example” to anyone but ourselves, without falling into contempt for others and thereby inviting their resentment? Isn’t the lesson of Jewish — or any other— history, if there is a lesson, that we cultivate our own garden ? And if so, where shall that garden be — and what shall we plant?

I am not arguing — I am asking— in between parades.