Jewish Question Rooted Deep in European Political History

 

Wickham Steed, former correspondent of the London Times at Berlin, Rome and Vienna, and finally its editor, explains the true nature of Hitlerism and to what extent it may be a menace to peace in his book, "Hitler, Whence and Whither?"

A series of articles, of which this is the second, will be published daily in The Jewish Daily Bulletin from the chapter, "Germanism and Jewry."

If observation of the Dreyfus affair convinced me that the roots of the Jewish question go deep into the very foundations of the social and political structure in Europe, it was not until I went, at the end of 1902, to Vienna, where I was to work for more than ten Wickham Steed years, that the intense, albeit narrower, significance of that question in Central Europe was borne in upon me.

In the Austrian capital, and still more at Budapest, the capital of Hungary, the Jew were omnipresent, save in the uppermost circles of society. They controlled the greater part of the press, the banks and the business world. In the theatre and in music, little or nothing could be done without them; and in Austria, at least, they were very German and pro-German, not to say Pan-German. Even in Hungary, where many of them had Magyarized their names and were among the fiercest of Magyar chauvinists, their pro-Germanism was hardly less evident. Neither there nor in Austria was it possible to ignore the Jewish question.

Dr. Lueger, the anti-Semitic Burgomaster of Vienna, and the Pan-German press saw to that. And the unblushing pro-Germanism of the Jewish liberal press, with the Neue Freie Press at its head, compelled the most indifferent observer to ask why it was that the Jews who were, on the whole, better treated in Austria than they were in Germany, should love the Hohenzollern Empire with so persistent and aggressive a love.

JEW KNOCKS JEWS

I put this question to my many Jewish friends ni Vienna without ever eliciting a wholly satisfactory answer. One of them, an Austrian Jew from Galicia, in whose family Polish was spoken instead of German or Yiddish, replied simply: "It is because the Jews are stupid."

At first this reply seemed ridiculous. If there is one thing on which the Jews, as a race, pride themselves, it is their intelligence; and to attribute stupidity to them sounded like blasphemy. Is there not a Yiddish saying: "The Lord preserve us from Gentile force and Jewish brains?" Yet, on reflection, I came to see what my friend meant. His meaning was that there is a stage at which intellectual pride or sentimental tenacity approaches dull-wittedness; and it has sometimes been wickedly suggested that the conduct which Shakespeare attributes to Shylock in the "Merchant of Venice" is a case in point. Shylock was undoubtedly within his strict right; but even as a business man he behaved stupidly, for he failed to perceive the cash value of the quality of mercy.

From another Austrian Jew, a learned rabbi, I got a different explanation. It was to the effect that, according to Jewish legend, the German, Polish, and Russian Jews–who are called Ashkenazim, as distinguished from the Sephardim, or Western, Spanish and Portuguese Jews–were pro-German for historical and linguistic reasons. After the fall of Jerusalem, he said, the Romans transported large numbers of the Jewish populace to distant regions of the Roman Empire, thousands of them being sent as slaves to a German region on the Upper Rhine. This region was known as Ascania, after the name of its governor, Ascanius. Hence the term "Askenazim." In the course of time the Hebrew speech of these Ascanian or Askenazim Jews was affected by the German tongue of the people among whom they lived, and acquired the semi-German character which marks the Yiddish, or Judisch jargon. In later centuries, persecution by robber barons of the Rhineland led most of these Jews to accept the asylum offered them by the Kings of Poland. In Poland, however, they continued to speak Yiddish and look upon the German language as most nearly akin to their own.

FATHERLAND OVER EVERYTHING

Whatever the value of this theory, in which the learned rabbi may have mingled fact and fancy–for it is a fact that the kings of Poland gave asylum to persecuted Jews from Germany — the Austrian Jews were undeniably pro-German, so much so that they gave their children high-sounding German, and especially Wagnerian, names. An Austrian wag, Count Adalbert Sternberg, once sent the Chamber of Deputies into fits of laughter by exclaiming that the name "Siegmund" had become a Jewish racial designation!

But of other explanations of Jewish pro – Germanism there was no lack, one of them being that, after the German victory over France in 1870-71, the Jews believed Germany to be the rising power and consequently sought to "back the winner." This idea was so strongly held by non-German anti-Semites who ascribed Jewish pro-Germanism to the belief that, in the Greater Germany of the future, which was to extend from Hamburg to Baghdad, the Jews would hold a monopoly of finance and trade.

To me it seemed that some impulse more subtle than the expectation of material advantage was needed to account for the Ashkenazim love of Germany, and to explain why the number of Jews in Austria who identified themselves with the Slav majority of the country should be so small. Hatred of persecuting Russia and of pan-Slavism, may have explained it in part for Germany was the foe of pan-Slavism.

In any event, the Jews who migrated to Vienna from the Slav regions of Austria – Hungary straightway claimed German "nationality," that is to say, racial allegiance as distinguished from Austrian citizenship. When Germanic Germans disowned them, these Jews were wont to reply that they "felt like Germans," an assertion which the Germanic Germans passionately denied. I knew of one instance in which a young Jew from Bohemia committed suicide, after writing beautiful lyrics in German, because it dawned upon him that, try as he would, he could never acquire a truly "Germanic soul."

This was the state of affairs in Austria during the early years of the century, about the time when Adolf Hitler’s outlook was being colored by his surroundings in Vienna and by the influences I have already described.