Now-editorial Notes

A Correspondent from Baltimore reported in the Bulletin of May 27 that a bronze bust of Jacob Epstein, of Baltimore, would be presented on that day at a memorial in honor of the “late” philanthropist. This report, we are happy to say, as in the case of the premature announcement of Mark Twain’s death, is grossly exaggerated. Jacob Epstein is enjoying the best of health and is as keenly interested as ever in the humanitarian work he is doing. The bust was presented to the Mount Pleasant Jewish Tubercular Sanatorium at Riverstown, to replace an old crayon portrait which the directors of that institution had placed there shortly after the sanatorium had been established.

We regret the unfortunate error made by our correspondent, and wish Mr. Epstein many more years of happiness in the service of his people.

The brilliant publicist, Dr. George Bernhard, former editor-in-chief of the Vossische Zeitung, now an exile in Paris, where he is editing the Pariser Tageblatt, has suggested that the “ritual murder” issue of the Stuermer, edited by Julius Streicher, Hitler’s governor of Bavarian Franconia, be widely distributed throughout the world. Dr. Bernhard writes:

“The ‘ritual murder’ issue of the Stuermer should be distributed, millions of copies of it, in all the countries of the world. For this newspaper, and this special edition in particular, shows the true visage of German National Socialism and reveals the real soul of the German leader better than do his speeches advocating peace. A disgraceful monument to neo-German lack of culture!”

Kirton Varley, author of a new book on Fascism, in a letter to the Jewish Daily Bulletin, commenting upon Dr. Bernhard’s suggestion, writes:

“The folly of it makes my blood run cold. As well distribute millions of phials of virulent bacteria. This would not expose the technique of German propaganda.”

Dr. Bernard undoubtedly had in mind the impression which the abominable falsehoods contained in the Nazis “ritual murder” issue would make upon intelligent people in other lands. The indiscriminate distribution of such monstrous accusations against the Jews among the uninformed masses of other lands would indeed only serve the purpose of the Nazi propagandists of hate and falsehood. The Nazi agitators would welcome such a widespread revival of the long-exploded myths of “ritual murder. What Dr. Bernhard must have meant was that these Stuermer issues be reproduced with appropriate comment and analysis, so that even the uninformed could see all the depravity and the falsehoods to which the Hitler regime is resorting in its pogrom propaganda at home.

The Tsar’s government tried to stage a ritual murder trial in order to justify its pogrom policy and to discredit all Jewry. The notorious Beilis affair was a deliberate attempt by a dying autocracy to save itself by striking at all Jewry. Though the Tsarist government was still maintaining itself by wholesale executions of innocent people, it met with humiliating defeat when it sought to prove that the Jews used human blood for ritual purposes. The government’s victim, Mendel Beilis, was acquitted and the ritual murder accusation in that instance, as in other instances in the past, collapsed. It was the Tsarist government that was on trial and instead of discrediting the Jews, the Tsarist government disgraced and convicted itself before the whole civilized world.

Now the Hitler regime, in the desperate attempt to whitewash itself before the world, is reviving the methods employed by the stupid and decaying Tsarist autocracy. By permitting the Governor of Bavarian Franconia, the organizer of the anti-Jewish boycott in Germany, to exhume the ritual murder myth and to incite the uninformed German people to pogroms, the Hitler government is following in the footsteps of the Tsarist pogromists.

The Beilis “ritual murder” frame-up, engineered by the Minister of Justice and sanctioned by the Tsar, undermined the last remnants of confidence which the intelligent and right-thinking Russian people still had in the Tsarist government. It was quite natural that a government which stooped to the cruelty of inventing a “ritual murder” accusation against the Jewish race should soon be ruled by an ignorant charlatan and imposter, Rasputin, who dominated the Tsaritsa and the Tsar and sealed the fate of the Romanoff dynasty. Thus the Russian autocracy destroyed itself.

Hitlerism, emulating the methods of the Russian Black Hundreds, is on the road to self-destruction.