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.]

The death of the famous Danish-Jewish critic, George Brandes, is commented on in numerous editorials in the Jewish and non-Jewish press.

Brandes’s Jewish origin and the Jewish characteristics in his mental makeup, despite his slight relations to his race and its problems, are emphasized by the “Jewish Morning Journal” of yesterday, wherein we read:

“The great Danish critic was as slight a Jew as conceivable, yet we are justified in taking him into the list of our great. The Jewish origin should not be altogether despised at a time when some pseudo-scientists are declaring that the Jews are spiritually lower than other races. The Danish Jew, whose original name was Kohn, stood much higher than the average literary critic. The literary world listened attentively to his words. A line in one of his books could make or break the reputation of a writer. And though he was read only by the select few and never had any sufficient income from his works, he nevertheless exerted an influence as no one else on the literature of his time. Such a spiritual force cannot be regarded as inferior.

“Brandes was also in other respects a Jew, a typical West-European Jew of the time in which he attained his development, that is, the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He was the personification of the liberalism of that period. His faith in the progress of and in the achievements of liberal ideas was unbounded. Even in his critical works on literature he was more the liberal than the strict critic of art. He sought and saw in literature only the striving toward progress and the struggle for freedom. Beauty for its own sake did not interest him much; the Jew in him was always in search for something more substantial, for something in literary masterpieces that might benefit the world. Art for its own sake is a matter for the Greeks; Goethe could be a reactionary; but a man whose father’s name was Kohn, could not be anything but a progressive.”

Brandes will continue to hold a high position among the teachers of his age, declares the N. Y. “Evening World.”

“With the death of Dr. Georg Brandes at the age of eighty-five, one of the most virile and dynamic characters in literature passes from controversy to judgment,” the paper writes. “Just what that judgment will be is conjectural, but that it will rank him high among the great writers and thinkers of his age there can be no doubt.

“His ‘Main Streams in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century’ is a masterpiece which will abide. His monographs will live, losing nothing of their vividness with time. His historical lectures and works humanizing history by making it revolve around men, and not exclusively around abstract principles, did much, it is said, to revolutionize the teaching of history in Europe. His renown was world-wide in this sphere of intellectual activity, and his excursions into other fields, while tending to make his name familiar with thousands not given to the reading of criticism and history, will probably contribute nothing to his ultimate fame.”

The cosmopolitan breadth of Brandes’s outook and writing is pointed out by the New York “Times”, which observes:

“For many years he had been recognized as the greatest cosmopiltan literary critic of his time. He had apparently taken all knowledge as his province. He was as deep in philosophy as he was in poetry, history and the drama. Widely traveled, he had established those personal contacts and first-hand impressions without which the interpretation of a nation or an epoch tends to smell too much of the lamp. Brandes knew living men and women as well as books. His extraordinary range of reading and reflection was without a parallel among his contemporaries. Some ventured to compare with this monster of learning Brunetiere in France and Menendez y Pelayo in Spain. But neither of them really carried as many guns as the great Danish critic.

“Brandes made several incursions into public life and international polities, but not all of them were happy. More and more as time went on his chief praise, among his own people as well as by foreigners, was due to the extraordinary breadth of his knowledge of contemporory letters, and to his ability to penctrate into the life of peoples whom he had to study as an alien.”

OTTO H. KAHN HEADS COMMITTEE TO AID HABIMA

A luncheon meeting was held Sunday in the home of Otto H. Kahn, to further the cause of the Hahima Players and to discuss plans with a view to ultimate establishment of that organization in Palestine as its permanent home.

In addition to persons interested and the Director of Players and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Naum Zemach, the meeting was attended by Feodor Chaliapin and Dr. Chaim Weizmann, President of the Zionist Organization. It resulted in appointment of an organization committee, headed by Mr. Kahn, which is to formulate plans and appoint a permanent committee.

Otto H. Kahn, banker and Chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Company, celebrated his sixtieth birthday on Monday.

Otto Kahn was born in Mannheim, Germany, and had a training in banking both in Germany and England, where he was connected for five years with the Deutsche Bank.

When he was twenty-six he came to this country and obtained a position with Speyer & Co. Five years later he joined the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. with which he has been identified for nearly thirty years.