Shame over Vienna

If the events from Vienna are correctly reported, and there is no reason to assume the contrary, then we—the Jewish people—have by the action and attitude of one of our great urban communities reached a new depth of abjectness and been soiled with a new blackness of shame. No wonder that Theodor Herzl wrote in his diaries in an hour of bitter humor: “I have found a good epitaph for myself: ‘Here lies one who entertained too high an opinion of the Jews.'”

Let me put down in cold harsh words the facts. The Austrian government issued an order that Jews were to go to Jewish schools. By issuing that order the government meant to degrade and shame the Jews. But the government, even that government, miscalculated. That Jewish community is beyond insult and beyond shame. It is futile to try to degrade people whose degradation is complete. For the community protests, the community whines, the community sends out cables.

Instead of making a festal day of the first day of school; instead of sending the children to the Jewish schools in the Leopoldstadt with blue-white banners; instead of immediately thereafter causing the children to strike until Jewish teachers staffed the Jewish schools and the proper courses in Hebrew and Jewish history and philosophy were duly instituted and making the whole civilized world ring with protestations if these demands were not promptly met—instead of that the Vienna community virtually says: It is degrading to be a Jew; we want to cling to the threshold of the servants’ entrance; we are inured to shame and degradation and thrive on it….

I shall not join either the Revisionists or the Mizrachi for both political and philosophical reasons. But, by the Eternal, I understand them well enough. If that is Western Jewry, it deserves to perish. All the whips and scorpions across the frontier have not lashed into these Viennese the lesson that here was their chanc# of salvation, of reaffirmation, of acquitting themselves like free men and not like slaves. Let us hide our heads.

I do not speak without a warrant beyond the cabled news. As long ago as 1925, friends came to me in Vienna with the story that the Alpine Clubs, especially if I remember rightly the club Donauhuette, were applying the “Aryan paragraph.” “How,” said my friends blankly, “are we going to climb and go skiing?” Even then I grabbed my head in despair. “Isn’t it obvious? Found a club of your own. It’s cheap enough to build a few huts.” There was more blankness; there was shaking of heads. “Glauben Sie …” they muttered vaguely. “Ja, aber dann—.” I knew well enough what that unspeakable “Ja, aber dann …” meant.

“Yes,” I said, “then, in that case, you will be openly and officially Jews in a Jewish club. But um Gottes Willen aren’t you Jews anyhow and isn’t it better to be decent self-respecting Jews than Jewish beggars and snobs and time-servers and hangers-on?”

They shook their heads and they repeated “Ja, aber …” They are doing it still. After the Nazi terror they are doing it still; with the vision of the Hebrew and Yiddish school systems in Poland they are doing it still; with a knowledge of the educational system in Eretz Yisrael they are doing it still. They—and how many with them in other lands—will go on saying: “Ja, aber—” Yes, but—until it will indeed (or would be indeed, but for the grace and comfort of our faint rebirth here and there and that Yishuv in the land of the fathers) a shame to be a Jew.

What ails these wretched people and those others in other lands who are like them? We wére not always craven and ashamed. All through the darkest ages of persecution we opposed pride to contempt and an unbreakable ethical front to the pagan tumult and confusions of the world. Is it the emancipation that has so profoundly corrupted and so pitifully enfeebled us? Then it is high time that a new emancipation be substituted for that old one and that a new policy and another spirit pervade that Western Jewry which will otherwise rot away in obloquy and self-contempt.

Take the matter on its shallowest ground, that we are a religious community. Of course we are much more. But take it on that ground. Then the structural analogy between international Jewry and the Catholic Church is complete. Both communities, while primarily religious, possess ethical traditions expressed in special laws and regulations of their own; both have the living tradition of religious and communal laws and regulations and even courts to which their members voluntarily subject themselves; both are accused therefore of forming a state within a state, of being patriotic after a special manner only and of looking for supreme guidance in at least ethical but also sometimes in political matters to a ruler or a council in a foreign land, in Rome and in Jerusalem.

Well, to the eternal honor of our Catholic fellow-citizens in all predominantly Protestant countries it may be said that these accusations and the consequent discriminations have left them unmoved, unawed, unwavering. From the Catholic University in Washington to the handsome school-building in this small town where I live, the land is covered with the evidences of the high self-respect, the unswerving loyalty, the carelessness of vulgar and narrow accusation of Catholic religious community, whereas we are in addition a people with its own speech, its autochthonous ethical vision as well as the creators and sustainers of the mother-religion and the entire moral system of the Western World…. We will change swiftly in our day and in our generation—we Western Jews—or we will perish and there will be, rightly and justly, none to mourn.