The Human Touch

Ben Sonnenberg, who may be described as a press agent, and who has a face like ten Jews, supplies us with the unsolicited information that he is not interested in Jewish matters.

TAKING THE COUNT

It is curious in what different ways the consciousness of Jewishness comes to different Jews. One assimilated Jew who in his youth had joined the Epworth League and had married a Gentile woman twenty years his senior, discovers his Jewishness in his recoil from and protest against his unhappy marriage. He is so delighted in his second marriage that he writes books against intermarriage, but the fact of the matter is that he is happy in his second marriage because he is happy in his second wife, and not because she is only half Jewish instead of being all-Gentile.

But those who are made aware of their Jewishness by reason of a recall from an unhappy marriage which happens incidentally to be also an unhappy intermarriage may be counted on the right hands of a minyan against the tens of thousands who have been made conscious of their Jewishness by that reputed non-Aryan, Adolf Hitler. I think that it may be safely said that during the past three or four months several hundreds of thousands of men and women have gone to bed, so to speak, Gentiles and have awakened the next morning—so to speak—Jews.

There are old-fashioned Jews in synagogues and yeshivas, even in Germany, who, believing that nothing happens that is not ordained, must wonder at the enormity of Jewish offense. Otherwise, they ask how explain the retribution of the Nazis. Their general theory is that if Jews are being hurt and maligned then Jews somewhere must have committed some offense to have justified the hurts and the malignings. Providence, in other words, is announcing its displeasure through the instrumentality of Hitler and the Nazis. The phrase is Es#iz bashert, it is ordained, it is fated. Many contend that it is by virtue of this philosophy, or of this attitude, that the Jew has survived, not by futile rebellion against the stronger enemy.

But even those who refuse to regard Hitlerism as the means which Providence has elected to compel Jews to return to Jewishness must admit that it is having something of that effect. There are Jews who must be slapped in their pampered faces before they will accept, even to themselves, the fact and the fate of their Jewishness, while there are others who awake to their Jewishness through no offense done them, but through the offenses committed against Jews 5,000 miles away whom they have never seen, and never expect to see.

Among almost perfectly assimilated Jews who have become aware of more or less buried sympathies with their peoples is a New York journalist whose face has been described as that which might be found on a Babylonian bas-relief but whose initials stand for three of the most American names in pre-Civil War history.

There is that famous American journalist who is sometimes a guest on Thomas Lamont’s yacht. Up to the time of Hitler his editorial pronouncements urging a revision of the Treaty of Versailles used to be respectfully quoted in the German press, but no longer.

There was a splendid looking man, one whose name, reputation, person, social conections suggested nothing of the Jew. He was wealthy and accepted; he would have been American Ambassador to Germany had he not been a Jew. Perhaps he did not even know that he was a Jew. He knows it now.

WHO ARE THE CENSUS-TAKERS?

There seems to come a time in the life of every man when someone says to him, "You … Jew!" in just those words or in perhaps some genteel, but no less cruel modification. They said it of Jesus Christ, in all likelihood, and Church of England Jews, like Lord Beaconsfield, did not escape it. There are many ways of saying it. Surely there must be several places which are closed even to that philosopher-journalist who may make his home on Thomas Lamont’s yacht and banker Jews who belong to St. Thomas’ Church, and even peers of England. There are many who swallow the phrase and the exclusions in which the phrase is made deed, like old Aaron Burrell who is one of the chief characters in "Yonder Lies Jericho." But there are tens of thousands of others who are made Jews by being so denominated by non-Jews.

In Hector Bolitho’s biography of the first Lord Melchett there is a touching passage in which we see, for a moment, how homeless in a Gentile world can be even a Jew who has made staggering success in politics, finance, industry. Mr. Bolitho quotes a confidant of Lord Melchett who had met him on a London street on a hot summer’s day and elicited from the peer the pathetic plaint that there was not a home in London where he could call as a friend, uninvited. How many bounders without his wealth and position had at least the privilege of dropping in on friends. This paragraph from the first Lord Melchett’s biography is of particular pertinence in view of the official conversion to Judaism the other Sabbath day of the second Lord Melchett, half-Gentile himself, raised in the Church of England, married to a Gentile and with children therefore only one-quarter Jewish. The act of the second Lord Melchett was a completion of the circle. Ludwig Mond, grandfather of the present Lord, came to England from Germany for the simple reason that, as a Jew, his career as a chemist was limited in Germany. The great-great-grandfather of the present Lord, living in a small German village, was robbed, if not actually beaten, during an anti-Semitic raid in the middle of the eighteenth century. Hitler, in Germany, has done his share in completing the circle.

R. D. Blumenfeld, the London editor, also revealed the manner in which his identity was made known to him, in his first cabled contribution to the Bulletin. I hope I will be forgiven for recalling the passage. He had been attending a Roman Catholic school in a Middle Western town when the class bully spat the word Jew at him. A friend of mine, a novelist, himself a half-Jew, whose children are quarter-Jews, recalls that he had no sense of being anything but a Nordic American until some schoolboy enemy informed him to the contrary. He gave the fellow a good lacing and forgot about it; or, at least, so he thinks, but he knew at least what he was.

There is no passing. If Jews themselves do not recognize all their own, the Hitlers of all times and places will do so for them. You may not wish to be counted, but there is no evading the census, either in boyhood or old age. I do not mean to imply that being Jewish is the sum and substance of a Jewish life. There are other values in life than those deriving from the race or the nation into which you were born; others besides Jews have enriched the common store from which Jews and non-Jews draw their sustenance, but it is as healthful not to evade as it is not to over-emphasize. There is nothing so cowardly as the Jew who proclaims every value but his own, as there is nothing so absurd as the Jew who denies value and meaning to that which is not Jewish.

From one of our European correspondents we learn that to the new converts to Zionism have been applied the phrase, "Hitler Zionists." There is a world of sermon in that two-word phrase, as in the companion phrase which suggests itself, "Hitler Jews." But there are Jews, like the von Meldorf in Mr. David’s novel, "Monsoon," who must be slapped in their own faces before they are ready to acknowledge that they have been counted.