Steed Avows His Belief in Race As Essence of Jewish Quesition

A series of articles, of which this is the third, will be published daily in the Jewish Daily Bulletin from the chapter, “Germanism and Jewry.”

Hitler says in Mein Kampf that it was the rise and growth of the Zionist movement which convinced him of the incompatibility of Jewish aspirations with true Germanism, and confirmed him in his feeling that the Jewish question was one of race, not of religion. Here, for once in a way, I do not altogether disagree with Hitler. Nowadays, at all event, it is more a question of race than of religion; and this circumstance tends to place the Jewish problem, both in itself and in its relations to Germanism, upon a footing that alters the terms of the problem.

For centuries the persecution of the Jews, and Jewish resistance to it, had been inspired, or cloaked, mainly by religiors considerations. I say “cloaked” because economic motives played a part. Thus it certainly was in Russia where the Jews were abominably persecuted in the nineteenth century and where pogroms, or “lightning massacres,” took place without the disapproval if not with the connivance of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. In defending themselves against and denouncing these persecutions, the Jews throughout the world took their stand on religious grounds. Even when Jews were suspected or convicted of economic or financi.. malpractices, it was usual for their co-religionists to attribute to religious intolerance the animosity that was shown towards them. But after the rise of the Zionist movements a noticeable change occurred. The Jewish question came to be looked upon by many Jews, as well as by non-Jews, as rather a question of race than of religion; and it is noteworthy that, in all the illtreatment to which the Jews have been subjected in Hitlerite Germany, the religious issue has not once been prominently raised. This is in accordance with Hitler’s own doctrine. For the first time in the modern world the Jewish problem has been dealt with mainly as a race problem, whatever the underlying social and economic motives may be.

AN ETHNIC UNIT

Those who, like me, have witnessed the regenerating influence of the Zionist ideal upon the Jewish masses cannot regret that Jewry should stand forth as an ethnic unit. When Theodore Herzl, then the literary editor on the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna, started the Zionist movement towards the end of last century, the younger intellectual Jews of Austria-Hungary, and also in Germany, were at the parting of the ways. Contact with the outer world had deprived many of them of the faith of their fathers, and had stripped their minds of the grosser Talmudic wrappings which had enswathed them in their Ghettos, without giving them any other idealism or reasons for faith. In consequence many cultured Jewish youths showed a scepticism that grew increasingly cynical. Some became openly revolutionary. Others sought to merge themselves in Germanism — and were rebuffed. To such as these Zionism came with the force of an evangel. To be a Jew and to be proud of it; to glory in the power and pertinacity of the race, and its traditions, its sufferings, its resistance to persecution; to look the world frankly in the face, and to enjoy the luxury of moral and intellectual candor; to feel pride in belonging to the people that gave to Christianity its Deities and taught monotheism to half the world, a people whose ideas had permeated civilization as hardly ever, if ever, the ideas of a race before it; whose genius fashioned the mechanism of modern trade and finance, and whose artists, actors, singers, and writers had filled a larger place than those of any other single folk–these and similar emotions awoke in youthful Jews a sense of race-worthiness and self-reliance that had long been outwardly lacking.

FIGHTING ZIONISTS

This new state of mind was soon visible among the Jewish students of Austrian universities. Until then they had been despised and often ill-treated. They had wormed their way into official appointments and into the free professions by dint of pliancy, apostasy, mock humility, mental acuteness, and secret protection. If struck or spat upon by “Aryan” students, they had rarely dared to return the blow or the insult. But Zionism gave them courage. They formed associations, practiced athletic drills, and became expert swordsmen. Presently the best fencers of the fighting corps among the German students found that Zionist students could chop scalps or gash cheeks as skillfully as any Teuton. Then the purple caps of the Zionists came to be as respected as those of the most authentic “Aryan” blood-letters.

Equally noticeable was the influence of Zionism upon the masses of Jewry, not excluding those in the Jewish quarters (or Ghettos) of towns where Jew exploited Jew, and where contempt of the Gentile had done duty for self-respect. Naturally the elder generations, within the Ghettos and without, looked upon Zionism with misgiving. They feared that, by coming out into the open, the Zionists would play into Gentile hands. Little more than a year before the war, on March 29, 1913, an influential German-Jewish association, the “Central Society of German Societies of Jewish Faith,” adopted a strongly anti-Jewish resolution which ran: “The society demands of its members not only the fulfilment of their duties as citizens, but German feelings and the exercises of those feelings in civillife….On the soil of the German Fatherland we wish, as Germans, to cooperate in German civilization and to remain true to a partnership that has been hallowed by religion and history. In so far as the Zionist endeavors to provide an assured home for the Jews of the East who are deprived of their rights or to increase the pride of Jews in their history and religion, he is welcome to us as a member; but we must sever ourselves from the Zionist who denies German national (that is to say, racial) sentiments, feels himself to be a guest among a strange people, and only feels nationally (that is to say, racially) as a Jew.”

ON “FOREIGN” SOLL

The statement was naturally published with every sign of approval by the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna, an organ which combined passionate pro-Germanism and effective pan-Germanism with an assimilationist Jewish policy and with vigorous defense of Jewish business interests. But it hardly spoke for the younger Jews who revolted inwardly against assimilation, and denounced assimilationist doctrine. One learned young Zionist did not hesitate to tax assimilationist Jewish historians with mendacity for having suggested that the Talmud, the central organ into which the sap of Jewry has flowed since Biblical times, and has worked the unprecedented miracle of keeping a landless people mentally and physically healthy throughout the centuries, is a mere excrescence raised on the body of Jewry by stress of untoward circumstances. These historians, he continued, have sought to show that the Jews who remained true to tradition, the overwhelming majority of the nation, are degenerates from type; that the Ghetto, the segregation necessary for the preservation of the type, the Ghetto in which the Jews have always lived since their entrance into history, is an invention of the peoples in whose midst they have dwelt; and that the Jewish martyrdom, the inevitable consequence of voluntary segregation, has, at all times and in all places, been due to Gentile brutality. Finally, concluded the young Zionist, these modern Jewish historians have removed the name of Jewry from the list of nations and have made it out to be a mere group of human beings bound together solely by ties of religion, whereas it is, above all a race and a nation.