R. D. B. Speaks

There was reason some time ago to hope that the Nazi attitude towards German Jews was undergoing a process of reformation and that the pressure would be eased. The latest efforts on the part of the Brown Shirts zealots have dispelled those hopes, and we are again face to face with the stark – naked truth that there is no reason to expect anything but brutality from a brutally-minded people.

I have been away in Italy for the past five weeks. During all my stay in that country I never came in contact with any kind or sort of a Jewish question. So far as my visit in the country of Mussolini is concerned, I can truthfully say that not once did I hear anything about Jews, or Aryans, ore pure-blooded Germans. There were a number of German people in evidence. I did not speak to any of them for two reasons: One is that they do not know what is going on in their own country, and if they did, they would probably quite naturally subscribe whole-heartedly to the policy, the commands and the pleading of their idolized leader who has completely locoed sixty-odd million of square-heads. The other reason is that I am not inclined to offer the amenities of “Gemuetlichkeit” to people who are so stupid as to believe that they are superior beings, when the merest elemental reflection should convince them that thy are just the reverse.

I have been trying to trace a resemblance of Hitler’s idolators to some other form of racial development, and have failed. Parenthetically I know a good deal, or I think I do, about the psychology of backward races. So the Germans must stand alone as examples of the retardation which sometimes affects otherwise civilized peoples. They think they are super-people, though the rest of the world knows they are not. Again I must revert to Mr. Kipling’s Bandarlog people in the tree-tops.

But mere expressions of disapprobation and ridicule do not get us nearer to the solution of the Hitlerite anti-Semitic campaign. Verbal bombs do not blow up the citadel. On returning from Italy I read that the Leipzig Fair was a so-called “great success,” and then we read that nearly all the orders that were placed from abroad were given to business houses also from abroad, so that the Leipzig Fair has simply been of no use to Germany, except to bring to Leipzig some hundreds of commercial people from foreign parts engaged in dealing with one another to the exclusion of the German who formerly did the bulk of the business. So far so good….

I have seen a report from New York that it is proposed to raise a fund of three million dollars to assist in the emigration of Jews from Germany. I have previously dwelt on this subject. I think I wrote in last September or October that if every Jew in the United States were to subscribe a dollar to such a fund, it would be possible to drain the majority of the Jews from stricken Germany. I do not think the sum of three million is adesuate. You ought to try for six or seven million.

Mr. Landau of The Jewish Daily Bulletin, who has come to London for a visit, tells me that he is pleased with the great success that has been achieved by the transformation of the weekly into a daily publication.

I am an enthusiastic believer in the value of the printed word. The Jewish Daily Bulletin ought to have a New York City circulation of at least 150,000 and a provincial distribution of not less than 50,000. If I were a young man in New York, I would go out of my way to work for the wider dissemination of the paper which tells the people of Jewry what is going on in the world. I would work and work and work to help in this effort, for on the spread of the truth will depend the eventual fate of a people. Mr. Landau knows nothing of what I am writing. I have not consulted him. This message may be censored in his New York office on the ground that it harbors too much of propaganda. I hope I will pass. I confess it is propaganda, but what Jewry wants now is progaganda et tous jours propaganda.