Editorials

The Ousting of Theodor Duesterberg from leadership in the Steel Helmets is the most dramatic incident marking the breakdown of the Jewish position in Germany, the end of Jewish emancipation and the complete failure of assimilation.

Duesterberg, who in a fairly recent past which the violent intrusion of the Nazi regime seems to make so very remote, was the presidential candidate of Nationalist Germany, and, as such, a power which even President von Hindenburg had to reckon with. Now he has been forced out of the Steel Helmets, to which he had given a lifetime of devotion. It was his Jewish origin which made it easy for the other Steel Helmet leaders to settle their differences with Duesterberg by way of abrupt dismissal.

The belief that assimilation can offer a solution to the Jewish problem has been negated in Germany. In no country in the world has the Jew made such an earnest effort at assimilation, as in Germany. The Jew in Germany did not, as in Poland, try to maintain his own culture and language. He did not wear the kaftan. His every endeavor was bent upon being like the rest of the population.

Fanaticism is particularly directed against the assimilated Jew—the Jew who acquired wealth or influence—the banker, the department store owner, the lawyer, physician, etc. The little East European Jewish peddler is despised—but it is the powerful, native Jew whom Hitlerism aims at dislodging, deriving its main impetus from economic envy.

The fact that the Jew is only one percent of the population in Germany lends the development particular significance. The Jews comprise one percent of the population of the world, and if they were distributed equally all over the globe they would be one percent of the population of every separate nationality. If assimilation failed in Germany, how can it possibly succeed in countries where, as in Poland, the Jews form 10 percent of the population?

Germany may almost be termed the laboratory of the Jewish problem. If one wished to study the possibilities of assimilation in a scientific manner it is in Germany that he would find his ideal specimen. If with so small a percentage of Jews living in so highly cultivated a country as Germany, assimilation could not be affected, what else remains to be said but that the attempt at assimilation is a failure? The assimilation process has been suddenly and violently halted. Intermarriage, which excludes the Christian participant form holding an official or professional position, the exclusion of Jews with 25 or 50 percent of Jewish blood in their veins from official and other positions, has forced the return to the Jewish community of many who had severed all relation with it.

It is noteworthy that not only the Zionists, but also the organ of the assimilationist group, the Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbuerger juedischen Glaubens, has recognized that from now on the Jew in Germany will have to lead a group existence. The end of the liberal era in Germany signifies also the end of the possibility of the Jewish individual being able to find his way in the world by cutting himself off from his community. The individual Jew must share the collective fate of the Jewish group in Germany.

THE SILVER LINING

The Cloud of the German persecution of Jews is revealing a silver lining. We know where our enemies are clearly enough, but we are also discovering friends in the strangest of places. First came Poland with official protests to Germany on behalf of its Polish-Jewish citizens resident in Germany. The protests, even if conditioned by political factors, seemed to strike a note of sincerity. Then Spain, from which Jews had been banished way back in 1492, invited not only such Jews as Professor Albert Einstein but the average Jew whom Germany was oppressing to make his home in Spain. The Spanish Embassy in Berlin posted a placard on its gates asking the Jews to make Spain their home. And now Cairo, Egypt, joins the international movement of protest and boycott. So the despatches say. But even if the Cairo merchants who are boycotting German goods are Jewish, rather than strictly Egyptian, how can one explain away the fact that a Mohammedan paper published there reproves the Germans—with a quotation from Macaulay!—for being so stupid as to oppress its Jews?