Oratory Ended, World Jewry Must Now Act in Crisis – Blumenfeld

Chairman of the Board of the London Express and cable contributor to the Jewish Daily Bulletin

The talking is over for the moment and once more Jews of the world are faced with the stern facts which were once dispelled with oratory. This is not to say that oratory has not a place in the situation that confronts a harassed and perplexed people. It has.

I have seldom read an address more inspiring, more nobly conceived and more beautifully expressed than that which Dr. Nahum Sokolow delivered to the Zionists at Prague. It had in it all the elements of greatness and, surely, its perusal must have planted the seeds of solemn thought in even the least impressionable hearer or reader, Jew and non-Jew alike. If only for the beauty of the words employed by the learned doctor, I think the word should be grateful to Dr. Sokolow for this splendid offer of oratory; all would be grateful, too, except perhaps the Nazi-doped zealots of Germany who are still wallowing in the many-syllabic orgies of their own self-appraisement to the exclusion of everything else, even the sense of justice and humanity.

UNITED PURPOSE AND ACTION

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The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, an enterprise of the greatest importance in the present crisis, has undertaken to transmit these weekly little messages to all parts of the world, and I therefore am not presumptuous in stating here that I am addressing Jews all over the world. This is what I want to drive home. Dr. Sokolow stated it is imperative that there should be unity of purpose and concerted action. This, I take it, applies not only to the policy of Zionists in itself but to all matters appertaining to the Jewish question, whether in Germany, Palestine, Poland, America or elsewhere.

Without this definite, firm irrevocable unity, as well as leadership, you might as well leave matters as they are and hope for the best with the result that inevitably you would get the worst. I do not think that the Zionist Congress was in error when it rejected the Jabotinsky boycott resolution. On the contrary, they were right, for by officially declaring a boycott the Zionists would have put themselves clean out of court either in connection with the League of Nations or with Germany itself, with which eventually they might have to negotiate.

PRAISE FOR MOND, UNTERMYER

No, they were right in my opinion, at least to leave this matter of the boycott to the organization now functioning, to Sir Robert Mond, who will return to London in a few days full of energy after his holiday in France and an efficient machine brought into being by that highly skilled worker in Jewry, Samuel Untermyer. It is to the memory of men like this that Jews of the world will one day devote grateful thought.

There is not any longer the slightest doubt that the boycott which is only in its infancy and only partially organized is taking its effective toll and having an influence on the minds of those who started this insensate warfare in Germany. They would make peace if they dared; they would recall the pre-bellum days if they could. The only thing to do now is to prove to them that the time has gone by when Jews could be trampled on, insulted, degraded, humiliated.

There will be some highly colored reports of the great success of the Leipzig Fair, its increased attendance and wonderful sales. Don’t believe these Nazi reports. the Leipzig Fair has always had as one of its main props the patronage of Jewish buyers from all over the world, particularly Americans. This year you will be counting the Jewish customers on your fingers and then all your fingers won’t be required. That’s the proper answer to the edicts which dispossess decent citizens not only of their citizenship but of their property. You cannot have it both ways. The pity of it is that there are millions upon millions of decent, honest and fair-minded Germans who are utterly opposed to the savagery and stupidity of the Nazis, yet do not dare to demonstrate their disapproval because, you see, Hitler has given Germany freedom—freedom which muzzles.