No, Says C.v. Zeitung; Assimilation a Fact, ‘jewish Type’ Fiction

The “Central Verein Zeitung”, the organ of “The Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith” answers “No”, unequivocally, and it upholds its thesis with the following argument:

The laws and ordinances passed within recent weeks have labeled the Jews an entity which never existed in fact; they have sought to throw all Jews in a single heap. The differences between the Jewish captain of industry and the humble employee, between the orthodox rural cattle dealer and the liberal, urban intellectual, between the internationally famous physician and the unknown traveling salesman have been ignored. Similarly the Jewish type is as non-existent as the German type; instead we have Bavarians, Swabians, Saxons, Franks and East Elbians just as the Jews of Frankfurt, Hamburg, Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna have their individual characteristics and culture, influenced by the local dialect, climate and landscape just as the Germans are locally.

Is there any sense in the creation of minorities which are not really that, nor indeed wish to be, who have no special culture of their own differing from that of their neighbors and who wish to have none?

ASSIMILATION ACHIEVED

The present segregation of the Jews is a less vital fact than the actual assimilation of the Jews, nor can it change this fact. The government will have to accept this fact, and if will as soon as the polemic stage of the revolution is {SPAN}passe#{/SPAN} Italy achieved a nationalistic state without an anti-Semitic plank in its platform. France, on the other hand, following the defeat of 1871, implemented the Jewish question in finding its way to national redemption.

Those who say that assimilation is the wrong method do not solve the problem with that statement. They also forget that adaptation is possible without being a sign of weak character, and that such assimilation was only a natural consequence of living in Germany for centuries, as many Jewish families have.

When the national revolution has reached the stage of looking truth in the eye without blinking, the whole Jewish question will assume different form. For the nonce we are glad that the “spirit of the trenches” is the key slogan instead of “service in the trenches”, and the password to state service. For every Jewish inventor, manufacturer and author, every sacrificing Jewish woman, every purchaser of war loans did his or her duty towards the Fatherland. And the national Revolution will come to realize this.

The questions surrounding the “Jewish spirit” which have strangely preoccupied the Occident for two thousand years, ignore the remarkable variations found in different parts of the globe and must finally be dismissed as erroneous.

Can a movement which places the weal of all before individual good, can such a movement take upon itself the responsibility of discriminating against and excluding a whole group of people whose sole desire it is to base its decisions and actions on the ideas of the nation, as heretofore? Can it shut from activity a half million people by declaring them enemies of Germany—people whose elite have illumined the name and fame of Germany beyond its numerical proportions in politics, business, literature, theater, the film and sport? The real task of the national Revolution lies in the recon-quest of the old security, variety and elasticity which enabled Germany as the heart of Europe to form from the amorphous mass of strange and foreign things wealth and resilience with its own, inimitable stamp imprinted upon it.