Romain Rolland Decries Persecution of Jews; Urges Faith in Future

Romain Rolland, famous French novelist and Nobel Prize winner of 1915, has written a scathing denunciation of anti-Jewish persecution in Germany coupled with a plea to the Jews to emulate their forebears in “keeping their courage and Fath in the future.” in a letter to Longmans, green and Co., publishers, asking that his statement be published here, Mr. Rolland revealed that it was written in reply to “a desperate letter on the subject of the abominable persecutions of the Jewish people in Germany” from N. Aronson, well-known Parisian sculptor and president of the Union of Jewish Culture.

Written Dec. 6 at his home at Villeneuve (Vaud), as an open letter “to the persecuted Jews of Germany” and addressed “Dear Friends”, the statement follows: “I, like you, am suffocated with horror and with grief. no day passes, no hour goes by, that we do not hear rising towards us from every point of the globe the distressful cries of humanity, outraged and strangled. they rise from Germany, Spain and China… one can no longer breathe freely. One’s heart is wrung. We must hold out, nevertheless, and cry out in all the world curses against the executioners.

“O mighty Germany, which I loved,–and still love. I know that the best of your sons, that thousands of honest men and women living under the terror and crushed by shame at the crimes of these madmen, and of these criminals in the sense of the common law who have taken possession of the Government; I know this, for I have listened many times to their fearsome confidences. I have no doubt but that even the proudest and the most upright of your military aristocracy are humiliated and outraged by the unworthiness of the acts of government which they must witness in silence — outraged at the cowardly unleashing of a populace aroused by orders from above against peaceable and industrious men, against unprotected women and children of Germany — humiliated and outraged by the ignoble violence of all the forces of the State against a crushed race, many of whose citizens shed their blood in the great war, many of whose talents constituted the glory of Germany.

“No enemy of Germany could have inflicted such indignity and such immeasurable damage on her as do now these wretched madmen with their theory of racism, dishonoring her in the eyes of the world. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes impoverished France of the monarch for hundreds of years. The persecution of the Jewish people of Germany bleeds their country white, depriving it of the best blood of its intelligence, and the cowardice, cruelty and the indignity of the outrages committed will brand her brow with infamy that hundreds of years will not serve to cleanse.

“But you, my friends, the Jews, whom I see cast down, do not resign yourselves to despair and people and of the eternal justice, which your holy books and your prophets already in the barbarous darkness of days gone by have professed and impersonated, — just as your great men of today do, who are continuing as the forerunners and the apostles of social justice. your place in the history of human progress is enormous. you are paying for it with incomparable misfortune, this will be your Glory. Learn to bear it as your forefathers bore the captivity of Babylon, keeping their courage and faith in the future. In the course of the ages, your people have seen empires crumble and pass away and will likewise see the rule of your persecutors vanish.”