Inner Obstacles

II. The full re-affirmation of the individual’s Judaism is obstructed by still other and more formidable factors than the shallow pseudo-rationalistic unwillingness to face the patent facts of history and acknowledge the uniqueness of Israel’s character and fate. These other and more crippling factors may well be called the ghetto fears. The psychology of the false, of the at least imperfect and inequitable emancipation has in many men and women reached a rigid and frozen state. It is in their very bones; it was in the bones of their fathers. As citizens of the West they may freely criticize the structure and nature of the absolutist state. As Jews they cling to it frantically.

Their inner inhibitory argument runs somewhat as follows: The absolutist state has granted us certain rights at least on paper on the condition that we be the slaves and henchmen of that state. Hence if we refuse to be that in any measure; if we break that bargain, bad bargain though it be, there is the danger that the absolutist master state will withdraw from us even these imperfect rights and will throw us back into that ghetto from which the emancipation freed our ancestors. Thus ran, quite literally, the argument of the late Laurie Magnus, for instance. If, he argued in a once notorious article in the Quarterly Review, Jews should refuse to be in any respect like other Englishmen, then Englishmen will soon see no reason why Jews should be granted rights equal to those of their fellow-Britishers.

Amid the clamor of Americanization committees and defense leagues and periodical shouts of “my country right or wrong” it is upon the whole no wonder that so many average Jews are stricken by the old ghetto fears and with a sort of sombre and desperate energy seek to play the world’s game. But as a matter of iron fact that game is up. It is up in the practical world of political action; it is up in the very absolutist state, so soon as that state becomes uncompromising in its adherence to its own savage principles.

It became so in Germany; the state there became what all modern states have a latent tendency to become—a completely absolutist or totalitarian state in which it no longer suffices that the individual citizen tries to act and think as the state desires him to do (a condition which the German Jew sought with a tragic completeness to fulfil) but in which the individual citizen must be psycho-biologically the slave-creature demanded by the absolutist state in order that the tribal stupor of the state-slaves cannot possibly be broken.

Now it should at last be clear even to the average Jew that he cannot live with or within the absolutist state anyhow. It necessarily extrudes him; it necessarily in some way casts him out. It cannot tolerate him on its own savage and primitive principles. He cannot make agreement or pact with it. Hence his very best as well as his truest service to his Christian fellow-citizens is to do all in his power by precept and example to prevent the state within which he lives from becoming an absolutist master state.

To take this position is no doubt difficult and intricate. But to take it is his only hope. If conventional hundred percentism, as conceived by the tribal mob, denies him the right to be both an American and a member of his people, both a contributor to American civilization and to the up-building of Eretz Israel, he must deny the principles, false and savage and re-actionary, on which this prohibition is based. For so soon as he consents by any word or gesture to these principles he is lost. He cannot cease, however he contorts and degrades himself, to be a Jew. As such the absolutist state must cast him out; hence he must seek, so far as in him lies, to prevent his state from becoming absolutist.

In Brief: it is his ghetto fear that bring him nearer to the danger of the ghetto in that word’s old and eveil sense; it is by his ghetto fears that he plays into the hands of those who would enslave him. He must insist always and with all possible energy (1) that his rights are not equal rights unless they are equivalent rights—rights of equal value to him as eternally he is; (2) that these equivalent rights mean for him primarily the right to be an American as a member of the Jewish people; (3) that therefore he has no hope of living a worthy life in any but an at least culturally pluralistic state and that (4) therefore, again he is the friend and fellow-worker of all other American minorities, racial and cultural, white or black, who need for their own lives and their own human expressiveness the liberties and flexibilities of the pluralistic state.

He can remember; he can add; he can point out to the Christians who read his Torah in their churches, that many many centuries ago he had already made an attempt at a restricting of state-absolutism. According to the classical laws of his antique commonwealth the stranger, the ger, was to be treated with a superior kindness and love not on the condition of his becoming Israelite, as either assimilationist or proselyte, but in his pecular character of a stranger or sojourner. V’ahavtha lo kamocha. Thou art to love him (the stranger) as thyself. Not only thy neighbor, but the stranger. Long, long ago we invented and practiced the principle on which alone a tolerable life in the dispersion can be based for us.