Editorials

The recent election in Roumania is cause for relief if not for actual rejoicing. And with so much cloud darkening the Jewish international horizon, it becomes a pleasant duty to point to a little silver edge here and there, when it appears. Both by decision of the authorities and the vote of the people, the Iron Guard, the Roumanian embodiment of violent anti-Semitism, has been routed and victory has gone in the direction of the Liberal Party which, if not a liberal party in the English sense of the word, is at least a party which may be described as passively friendly to the Jews. This is the party with which the Union of Roumanian Jews entered into a pact, so that its electoral victory implies an obligation of support to the Jews in return for Jewish support. This pact, however, did not prevent the Jewish State Party from entering its own ticket in the field. Early reports indicate that the government’s Liberals won fifty-four percent of the votes, obtaining 301 out of the 389 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, while the anti-Semites’ slate, headed by the Jew-hater, Prof. Alexander Cuza, polled little more than four percent and the Jewish State Party did about as well. There is no doubt that the victory of his party, the Liberal, entrenches King Carol in authority and in the esteem, if not the affection, of his Jewish subjects.

The peace, or the official assurance of peace which the Jews of Roumania have won, should not make them cocky, but among the reparations to which they are entitled is this: that in Czernowitz, in February, when the gendarmes accused of having cruelly tormented and tortured Samson Bronstein come up for trial—now eight times delayed—that justice will be meted out. It has been made rather a mock of.

NO HOPE OF BALM

There is still no balm in Gilead, or the hope of balm, according to a statement made at a luncheon in London by Lion Feuchtwanger, famous German novelist and Jewish exile. For the Jews of Germany to attempt to reach an understanding with the rulers of Germany is a confession of weakness which it would be futile to make. As for those Jews who have no hope of wiping the dust of Germany from their feet, the only modus operandi for them is to shut their eyes and deny the truth made manifest about them.

It is safe to assume that Dr. Feuchtwanger is better informed about the position of the Jews in Germany than most others. His statement therefore should be pondered by those who believe—and they believe it because they hope it— that a settlement can be made with the enemy. Whether one should accept at full value the dour remarks of Dr. Feuchtwanger or persist in believing that a way can be reached, is probably a matter of temperament. Those who take the pessimistic point of view can point to the fact of oppression; those who incline to the optimistic can always count on Dr. Kurt Schmitt, the minister of economics, for some cheerful week-end statement to the effect that the naughty Germans must stop discriminating against the Jews.

PEACE, OR A TRUCE?

Hungary has at least a realistic minister of education. His name is Balint Homan. The other day a Jewish delegation called on him to make representations about the anti-Semitic outbursts in Hungarian institutions of so-called higher learning. And the realistic Minister of Education Homan said to the delegation in effect: If you wish to kill the spirit of anti-Semitism in our universities, you must help us in the task of finding jobs for our graduates. Or, in other words, if the students know that they are preparing themselves, at the least, for a living and a living wage, they may not listen so attentively to the gospel of anti-Semitism during the period they are at the university. Beneath these words is the confession that anti-Semitism is one of the gospels of despair; it is both gospel and red herring. Sometimes it is one thing more than the other but it always partakes of the qualities of both. A happy and prosperous people wages war neither on a section of its own people, nor on the people outside its borders.

To point this out is not to concur, however, in the veiled suggestion that it is for Jews alone to correct the economic disorder in any country, or that it is their function to pay a heavy ransom for their peace. If all the Jews of Hungary were in the class of employers and all the non-Jews in the class of employees, then Jews, as individuals and as a unit, should stretch a point, but surely the economic set-up is not so simple. But to set a price for peace, if not a noble thing for a minister of education to impose, is at least the basis for a realistic facing of facts and an attempted solution of a difficult social, economic and race problem.

A Prussian decree, just issued, excludes rabbis from sitting as members of the supervisory boards governing elementary schools where children of the Jewish faith attend. Heretofore, any school which had twenty Jewish children was entitled to such representation in its supervisory personnel. Unjust as this may be, it is not a step that you might consider unexpected, in Hitler Germany, and Jews, in Germany and elsewhere, have become accustomed to such things. But what is really contemptible is the demand made upon the Jewish children themselves that when their teacher enters they shall give him the Hitler salute.