Digest of World Press Opinion

G. R Chesterton, writing in his Weekly on the Jewish persecutions in Germany, says:

A very large number of humble and harmless Jews, not usurers or even financiers, but fiddlers, actors, schoolmasters, chess – champions, mathematicians, astronomers, and such riffraff, have been beggared and beaten and hounded out of Germany, on the ground that the Jewish culture had grown too powerful or Jewish ideas too prevalent; and that the Jewish spirit is an exclusive spirit and the Jewish God a jealous God. I am not discussing that as a point of politics. There is a Jewish problem; there is certainly a Jewish culture; and I am inclined to think that it really was too prevalent in Germany. For here we have the Hitlerites themselves, in plain words, saying they are a Chosen Race, where could they have got that notion? Where could they even have got that phrase, except from the Jews?

HEBREW REVIVAL FAILED IN 17TH CENTURY

The Near East and India reports of a meeting of the Anglo-Palestinian Club in London, the proceedings of which took the form of a living newspaper. The magazine relates the following impressions:

The “pages” which were contributed including a woman’s page, a city page, a Palestine page, a political page, an art page and an economic page. In. this order the following subjects were dealt with:—”Fascism and Feminism”; “Philistines in Finance”; “Light, Life and Language”; “A Jewless World”; “Israel in ‘Shot’ Land”; “Economic Aspects of Anti-Semitism.” All the “pages” made brilliant and, in most cases, amusing reading, but the only one which had any bearing on Palestine was that contributed by Mr. Leon Simon, who took for his subject the revival of Hebrew as a living language, tracing its growth from the 17th century to the present day.

Mr. Leon Simon, in the course of his “page,” wrote that in the 17th century the Jews were urged to use once again the Hebrew language and to make it a vehicle for expressing their own ideas. It was desired to get the Jews out of their secluded life in the ghetto and to bring home to them modern culture. Mendelssohn and his friends started the language revival movement, but it had a short life in Germany, where the Jews were more in favor of assimilation. The Hebrew revival in Galicia and Poland had much deeper roots.

THE SITUATION IN HITLER’S REICH

The Church Times, a London publication, writing on the situation in Germany, declares:

It is well for the outside world to realize that Jew-baiting in Germany continues as brutal as ever. It is, indeed, the hooligan’s sport, and the police do nothing to curb the hooligan. A correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, recently in Germany, records incident after incident “of the unbelievable barbarism to which, in the middle of the twentieth century, innocent men and women and children are exposed, their claim to humanity and justice forfeited, simply because they are Jews.” The Jews are defenseless. Nothing can be done for them. They must endure persecution “so long as the Third Reich endures.”

JEWS OF POLAND IN BIRO-BIDJAN

The Jewish Layman, organ of the Temple Brotherhood, writing on the migration of Polish Jews to Biro-Bidjan, comments as follows:

History reverses itself. Tens of thousands of Jews excluded from immigration to Palestine turn toward Biro-Bidjan in the same Russia whence a great Jewish exodus began in 1880. Thus if conditions in Russia are bad in general, the suffering Jew is not alone and he lives at least in peace without fear of special persecution merely because he is a member of the House of Israel.

CONCERNING WORLD CONGRESS PROPOSAL

The American Israelite of Cincinnati discussing recent developments around the idea of a World Jewish Congress says editorially:

The National Jewish Labor Committee’s decision not to participate in the April elections to the American Jewish Congress and the fact that the B’nai B’rith, through its president, Alfred M. Cohen, has committed itself to opposition to the World Jewish Congress would seem to indicate that the World Congress will not be held—certainly not according to the plan of its proponents.

Advocates of the Congress have pointed out that there was similar opposition to the convening of the first World Zionist Congress and that this did not deter the Zionists from organizing themselves.

But, plainly, the parallel is not quite exact. The World Zionist Organization represented all those Jews who held the Zionist point of view. It spoke in the name of those Jews and not in the name of others. A World Jewish Congress, however, must speak in the name of all Jews. If, therefore, not all Jews are represented, the purpose of the Congress would fall by the wayside.