Comment and Reflection on Topics of the Day

Other things are going on in Germany now besides the ill-treatment of Jews. And however much we push the Jewish persecutions into the foreground, the world will refuse to shut its eyes to the other things. We can’t go on accusing everybody who does not join in the denunciation of Germany, of anti-Semitism, and savagery and all sorts of terrible things. Sir Thomas Beecham is more concerned with music than with Jews or anti-Semitism. And when he returns from Germany and says that while expressing no opinion about the treatment of Jews, he must say that he found the country better governed and much more tranquil than on his last visit in 1930, when he was shot at by Communists, it is useless to shout at him that he is a Hitlerist. Poor Lord Snowden has been assailed as an enemy of the Jews because he has reminded people that “the injustices inflicted upon Germany by the terms of the Peace Treaty, the failure of the great Powers to redress her grievances and to implement their pledges in regard to disarmament, and, perhaps, as much as anything, the economic depression and the closing of opportunities for the educated classes, have made the German people desperate and responsive to a leader who voiced their feelings and offered a program of relief.” There has been a distinct cooling-off in the attitude of many Jews to Lloyd George since he declared that Britain must become no party to an anti-German Federation, and entreated the Western nations not to bully Germany into a Communist revolution. I hope that the Lloyd George Colony in Palestine is not going to be affected.

We must not forget that under the Kaiser Jews were kept very much in their place in Germany. Liebermann, for all his recognition as Germany’s greatest painter, could not become President of the Academy till the Revolution overthrew Kaiserism. A Jew could not hold Government office, or an army commission, or a University Professorship. I have in front of me an old copy of a German-Jewish periodical, which contains a report of Selig Brodetsky getting his Senior Wranglership in the years before the War. After (correctly) forecasting that he would end up by being an English University professor, it concludes by remarking enviously that in Germany he would not find that possible.

The German Revolution opened the floodgates. Noble men like Rathenau and Preuss were not the only Jews who found the road (a road to martyrdom it proved to them) opened by the Revolution. There were many who had not their claims. Glib-tongued demagogues, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, find in times of revolution, easy advancement.

There was undeniably too much concentration of Jewish intellectuals into certain professions, like the press, the theatre, the law—not all of them Rheinhardts or Theodor Wolffs. And some of their activities are not to my own liking. I have met some of them.

And on this matter of the professions, I wish the Jews of Germany, Russia, Poland (and England and America) had years ago taken the road pointed out by organizations like the ORT—agricuture and the workshops, and a little less of the professions—the road the Zionists are trying to construct in Palestine, with considerable success.

Above all, what is going on in Germany today is a struggle against unemployment. And human nature being what it is, no unemployed German, whatever his beliefs, is going to complain if he is given a job that has been provided for him by the anti-Jewish purge. The exclusion of women, to make more jobs for men, will help even more. It does not re-establish the economic stability of the country, but the economic policy of the whole world has gone hopelessly wrong, and Germany is no worse offender than the rest.

Those Jews who were in the swim with the old regime are not altogether playing the game when they try to identify their particular political conceptions with the fact that they are Jews, particularly when they did not have so very much to say previously about their being Jews. I find nothing attractive in Emil Ludwig’s declaration that “Hitler suits the German character as it has developed for sixty years far better than we who tried unsuccessfully for a decade to have Western European ideas take root in Germany, but who at the most represented only a small minority. Now the Germans are, so to speak, at ease with themselves.”