Editorials

The identification of Chanukah with the modern spirit of patriotism is likely to be accentuated now. The extent of the parallel can scarcely have been exceeded at any time since the brave Modin band withstood the furious onslaught of their enemy. The Maccabean spirit is still spoken of as a living factor among the Jews, as if the Maccabean spirit were general in the days of the Maccabees. One ventures to assert that when the term Maccabean spirit is employed as indicative of a period of Jewish history, a large number of Jews in those days are covered with a glory they did nothing to deserve. By the glamor of that sentiment is hidden a mean, contemptible, selfish and decadent spirit which animated many a Jew in the days of the Maccabeans. There were then as there are now many Jews, who were careless of the honor and prestige of the Jewish people; careless of the high heritage, which it was their duty to support and sustain. They utterly disregarded the duty cast upon them by their history.

It is not surprising that the Maccabean spirit is invoked in these days of ruthless attack on Jews and Judaism. The battle which Jews must now wage against their enemies, has in it an element that characterized the struggle of the Maccabeans. It is the worship of the material, rather than the spiritual, of blood and steel rather than soul and sense, which underlies present day anti-Jewish tactics. It was the spirit that the Maccabeans fought. It was exactly the defiance of that spirit which dictated the deeds of Antiochus, the madman. His ruthless onslaught upon the Jews; his desire to “Hellenise”, as the Germans today desire to “Aryanize”, almost makes us think it possible that the War Song of Antiochus, as he marched to destroy the Temple, had something in it about “Greece over all!”

The Maccabean spirit invoked during the celebration of the Chanukah festival, usually indicated the bravery and the valor that the Maccabean heroes exhibited. But it is also symptomatic of the zeal for and love of truth and mercy and justice as it is expression of the hatred of ruthlessness, frightfulness, and blood and steel idealism. It is thus that the ancient links itself with the modern. The Maccabean spirit means the spirit of true Judaism, that refuses to allow itself to be submerged by hostile forces and circumstances.

AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN

The German Day shindig at Madison Square Garden the other evening was enlivened, so to speak, by the antics of several men and women, who took occasion, during Ambassador Hans Luther’s “Heil Hitler!” speechifying, to make known their disapproval of the Swastika. They were ejected without being arrested and the German-American mass declaration of loyalty continued almost unruffled.

Among those who were ejected were Robert Rosenbaum, president of the Federation of German Jewish Societies, and Dr. Fritz Schlesinger, well known in German Jewish circles here. They seem to have been indicated by indignant Hitlerites to obliging policemen, although they themselves insist they weren’t doing anything untoward; they were simply there—and their contention may be incorporated in suit for damages against the Steuben Society—as an expression of good will.

In whose direction, if you please? Towards Adolf Hitler, in Berlin? Towards Ambassador Luther who will not, or dare not, speak except in the baleful shadow of the Swastika? Towards the Hitler Germans in New York who are joyfully subservient to the German victory of force? It seems to be the depth of servility to express good will to them that hate you and persecute you. The pathos of the situation is that these German-Jewish gentlemen in their effort to ingratiate themselves with those who have triumphed by violence, make a sound rather like Germans than Americans, or Jews. Why should Jews, therefore, seek to ingratiate themselves with the un-American allies of the oppressors of their folk? Did Messrs, Rosenbaum and Schlesinger hope to gain some tactical advantage by their presence at Madison Square Garden? At least those others who were shown the door of Madison Square Garden were not supine, they made known their protest, but these men actually regard their protestations of good-will toward Hitlerized Germans in New York to serve as reason for sympathy in their direction.

DR. WEIZMANN TESTIFIES

James G. McDonald, appointed by the League of Nations as High Commissioner for German refugees, and his board of governors sat themselves down at Lausanne, Switzerland, the other day and gave a collective judicial ear to the plaints and to the suggested solutions of the refugee problem submitted by non-Jewish and Jewish representatives. Notable among those who testified was Dr. Chaim Weizmann, representing the London conference of recent date, the Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency.

Dr. Weizmann said in effect that the solution of the refugee problem was not beyond human power, “provided we are not swamped again by a new wave of refugees fleeing in despair from the country of their origin.” Only under such a condition, he continued, would the problem of restraining and adapting to changed circumstances of the refugees prove entirely unmanageable.

But if, apart from the assertion that the refugee problem was within the limits of being solved, the general tenor of Dr. Weizmann’s report was rather gloomy, who shall say that he represents the world situation of Jewry unfairly? “We are unfortunately driven to the melancholy conclusion,” he declared, “that a wave of anti-Semitism is sweeping over the world,” with the result that the “peculiar social and economic structure of Jewry—forced on us by centuries of history, during which we were merely in the role of passive sufferers—cannot be maintained in the face of a changing world.”

Unlike the militant and the wishful-thinking Zionists, Dr. Weizmann does not see Palestine as the only, or even the chief, home-place for the scattered refugees. He expressed the belief in a judicious distribution, naming as the chief centers, the United States, the British Dominions and chiefly South Africa and Australia, French dependencies, territories and mandate areas, some of the South American republics and, also, to an extent, Palestine. It is possible of course that in making these suggestions, Dr. Weizmann was intimidated to a degree by the recent Arab riots and it is also certain that in making them he renewed his lease in the opinion of militant Zionists, on the label of defeatist and minimalist.

If the board over which Mr. McDonald presides is to be anything more than a group to take evidence and publish recommendations thereon, it will have some time soon to serve not only as the world nucleus for relief efforts, but as the guiding director of a minor world distribution of population, assuming—as seems unfortunately likely — that Hitler and Hitlerism lasts.

SCHOLARSHIP

“The Jewish Foundation of Islam”, by Professor Charles C. Torrey of Yale University, has just been published by the Jewish Institute of Religion Press as its latest volume of the Hilda Stich Stroock Lectures on the history and philosophy of religions. It is a fresh examination by one of the foremost Orientalists of our time of the old query of Islamic studies: Where did the camel driver of Mekka, whom the orthodox Muslim dogma would make unlettered, get the materials of the faith which set the whole medieval world on fire and which today, after thirteen centuries, is the religion of some two hundred millions of men? In five chapters of the book an answer is essayed which bristles with points of interest and often clashes with prevailing scientific beliefs.