Dr. Samuel Schulman Replies to Attack of Rabbi Herbert Goldstein on “so-called Liberal Preachers”

March 10th, 1930.

To the Editor,

Dear Sir:

As you saw fit to report, in your issue of March 10th, the attack which Rabbi Herbert Goldstein made on me before his Congregation in his sermon on Saturday morning, you will permit me to reply. I would not have taken any notice of such unprovoked personal attack, if it were not for the fact that I do want your readers to have a clear understanding of what is involved. Rabbi Goldstein accuses me and Dr. Fosdick, as “so-called liberal preachers” who have “pussy-footed the issue and have made their protest a sorry appendix to the white-washing of the actual facts of the illiberality of Soviet Russia’s liberalism.”

Dr. Fosdick can take care of himself, but I want to assure Rabbi Goldstein that those who know my ministry for forty years in this country, know that I have never pussy-footed anything. And when I speak from the pulpit, I do not speak, in the first place, as a “liberal.” I speak as a Jew and as a Rabbi. I have always defended the Jews, and what is more, even Judaism in this city, against attacks from all sources, “liberal and illiberal,” while many Rabbis remained discreetly silent. And in this Soviet matter, I want to assure this zealous Rabbi, that it required more moral courage to do what I did, than merely to be an echo of the leadership of others.

If the Rabbi refers to the address that I delivered at Congregation Emanu-El, Sunday morning, March 2, on “Religion, Liberty and the State—Abroad and at Home,” in which I discussed the whole question of the relation of government to personal liberty, he should have, in a gentlemanly way, quoted what I said and given his reasons for criticizing it. If he referred to my signing of the protest, he has no right to question my motives.

It is evident that he does not know what he is talking about. The Soviet government is not priding itself upon its “liberalism.” I venture to say that liberalism is for it, something bourgois, at which it laughs. The Soviet government is engaged in a tremendous experiment of the socialization of Russian life, industrial and agricultural. Incident to that experiment, it is treating the individual very rigorously. I did make clear that the Soviet government is making it hard to perpetuate the Jewish religion in Russia. But I have nothing to take back from what I said, that the Soviet government, at its worst, is better than the Czaristic government was. The Soviet government is not discriminating against the Jews. If the Jews suffer, they suffer like all other religious bodies, from the anti-religious trend of present Russia. But the Soviet government has shown its good will to the Jews, in its policy of encouraging the Jew to go on the land. There are three million Jews living in Russia, and I wanted the world, including the Soviet government, to know that there are men who take a somewhat different view from that taken by those who have officially organized a protest against Soviet Russia. In my opinion, the present fanatical opposition to religion in Russia, is an inevitable reaction against the conditions in Russia, when the State-Church dominated Russian life and allied itself with the oppression of the masses, with the keeping them in ignorance and with the persecution of religious minorities.

While I respect the convictions of those who have officially organized the protest, I have a right to my own convictions. And as I said in my address, “If we are really in earnest about the world’s peace, we will not encourage the possibility of arousing the religious passions of the Western world, so that they become a trumpetcall to a crusade against Soviet Russia.” In this matter, politics and religion are so interwined, that I consider it best, on the whole, for ministers of religion not to agitate against Russia.

Very truly yours,

Samuel Schulman.