Daily Digest of Public Opinion on Jewish Matters

[The purpose of the Digest is informative: Preference is given to papers not generally accessible to our readers. Quotation does not indicate approval.–Editor.]

Anti-Semitic passages which remind one strongly of the late unlamented “Elders of Zion” protocols and European anti-Semitic literature at its worst, are contained in a book called “Seventy Summers,” by Poultney Bigelow, formerly associated with the New York “Herald” under Mr. Bennett, who was known for his bitter hatred of Jews. Mr. Bigelow writes, inter alia:

“Today the United States has probably more Jews than all the rest of the world–thanks to the Hirsch fund, and its able political committee in Washington. Our immigration agents may with impunity turn back families of Norwegian, Danish, English or Scotch extraction, and the matter ends there. But let the most undesirable Jew from the Russian border be excluded, and the American Press makes flaming articles about race prejudice. The best lawyers are employed; the best lobbyists invade the capital; Congressmen are cajoled or bullied; a Hebrew senator leads an influential deputation to the White House; the Secretary of State is inundated with Jew-German rhetoric; and in the end a cable instructs the immigrant agent abroad to pass that particular Jew because Congressman Rosenbaum and Senator Pfeilchenblum have an interest in the matter. The Jew wants no farm in Palestine or anywhere else–he wants New York, where he can underbid and undersell, and play with our legal paragraphs.

“It is but little over a century that Jews have enjoyed full freedom of trade in the old world; and in that short time they have managed to absorb the leading roles in money-making to say nothing of controlling the stage and journalism. They cannot yet be elected to a social club of importance, but soon the white race in America will be too poor to afford any club. When that day arrives we shall all join the Ku Klux. We shall then be too hungry to distinguish between good and bad Jews–we shall have a grand and bloody house-cleaning and commence life anew on an old fashioned 100 per cent American basis. Amen!”

Regarding the Dreyfus affair in France Mr. Bigelow finds it was “but the reaction of spirit in a proud people waked up to the discovery that Jews were becoming their masters, and that even their Army List smelt Semitically.” He likewise condones the Kisnineff massacre of 1903 on the ground that the population of that city contained many Jews.

Commenting on Mr. Bigelow’s book the “American Hebrew” of Jan. 22 says:

“What is it the Jews have done to Poultney Bigelow that in his old age he prays God for a pogrom in America? One might suppose that an active publicist of anti-Semitic bias would mitigate his rancor against Jews and everything Jewish and mellow in his outlook after he had passed the psalmist’s allotted three score years and ten. Not so Mr. Bigelow. In his autobiography entitled “Seventy Summers” he proves again that it is the Jew who turns the other cheek and the Bigelow type of Christian who smites it hard and gleefully. Bigelow has not forgiven the competition to which ‘The Herald,’ with which he was associated, was subjected by ‘The World’ and ‘The Times.'”