Jews Under the Hammer and Sickle

The author, Dr. David Goldberg, is a well known writer and lecturer who has recently returned from his third visit to Russia in recent years.

Until recently we were accustomed to hear but one song concerning the fate of the Russian Jew, and it was universally keyed to the tune of lamentation. The odds were against any one who dared to bring discord into that melancholy at the Harmonic melody by suggesting that the Jew might be tested in the Russian crucible, after all, for life, and not for death, and might even emerge more immune against the forces of dissolution than ever before in his history. The odds were generally against any one who took the long view of Jewish history, instead of the short and obvious one, as a basis of prognosticating his future. The factors from which the complete doom of Russian Jewry might be adduced were visible enough and, a priori, irrefutable.

Said the religious Jew: The ban on systematic religious instruction for the young, coupled with the social-political odium attached to the religious practices of the adult, must in the end lead to the complete dejudaisation of the Jew, and even though he may survive physically, it will not be qua Jew. But he won’t even survive physically.

Said the nationalist Jew: The proscription of Hebrew as the national tongue of the Jews, coupled with the ban on Zionist activities, will be bound in effect to destroy the bond between Russian Jewry and other Jewries, and will also sever them from their past. They can only linger on for a brief time in the manner of a member severed from a living organism; but die they must at the end.

And said the racial Jew: Hating, as they did, their former Pale of settlement as the prisoner hates his concentration camp, the Jews will now be rushing out of it in all directions, thus losing the principal source of their strength as a group, mass adhesion. Dispersed over so vast a land and numerically too small in any one place to create his own social milieu, he will intermarry freely, which means inevitable absorption in the larger ethnic environment.

PERISH HE MUST

So, the verdict on all sides was that if the Russian Jew was not to perish by sword or from hunger, he was to perish in a dozen other ways, but perish he must.

But those taking the longer view of Jewish history, the writer being one of them, have advanced their own line of a priori reasoning which lead them in the opposite direction from the doomists.

They said to the religious Jew: The notion that a Jew ceases to exist as such if he is not a religious is basically erroneous, and even the wise men of the Talmud, though by some fifteen hundred years younger than the wise men of our generation, already knew that full well. They crowned the irreligious Jew with the epithets “outcast Jew,” “renegade Jew,” “apostate Jew,” but Jew withal. Being an elemental, history-tried people, the Jews are bound to produce ethical and spiritual and social equations which would reflect their group essence. These equations make for what may be correctly designated as “Judaism;” that is, the cultural heritage which is bound up with the existence of the Jew as effect is bound up with cause. Certainly, those equations, or Judaism, are bound to take on shape and form, and some of these forms are religious. Yet, the destruction of certain forms, if historic fate so decrees, cannot kill the source from which they spring: the source will in due time create other forms.

They said to the nationalist Jew: The ban on the study of Hebrew as a national tongue and the proscription of Zionist activities are so obviously grounded in political motives that to adduce from them the imminent destruction of three million Jews is certainly puerile. There had been very long periods in the history of the Jew when he spoke no Hebrew and engaged in no Zionist activities, but survived. And what prevents one from hoping that when the dictatorsihp of the proletariat will have run its historical course, the ban on Hebrew and on Zionism will be lifted?

THE NEW PATRIOTISM

And they said to the racial Jew: It is not true that the Jew hated the Ukraine and White Russia, hence that he would rush out of them headlong on first chance. He only hated the designation “Pale,” but that opprobrium has been removed from the land. Now he may even love those countries as motherlands and prefer to remain living there, if only given a chance to earn his livelihood. No doubt, some tens of thousands of Jews will rush to the capitals, but it cannot effect the bulk which will still remain an adhesive mass.

I have just returned from my third trip to Russia, having spent there the months between July and December inclusive, and I am convinced from what I have seen and experienced in both capital and province, that the long view of Jewish history is the only right one by which to prognosticate the surface symptoms of Russian reality. We have seen in the past fourteen months how quickly a Jewry could be destroyed by sources other than Communism, and we have been seeing for years the economic plight of the Polish Jew for which Palestine is at best only a small panacea. But though we have tried to kill the Russian Jew, a priori, by the breath of the mouth so to speak, he still lives and has no other thought but to live. Shall we not reappraise the story of the Russian Jew in a new light, for the lessons it might teach us, and, perhaps, bring in a major note or two? (To Be Continued Tomorrow)