The International Jew

AND now England sweeps into the orbit of Fascist agitation. The Mother of Parliaments is now challenged by a bastard brood of black-shirted zealots whose avowed aim is to destroy her parliamentary government and all her free institutions which have been her pride and glory for centuries. Ten thousand Britons crowded Albert Hall last Sunday, acclaimed Sir Oswald Mosley and applauded his Anglo-Saxon version of the gospel of national salvation through dictatorship. Europe has now three synoptic gospels of Fascism,–the Latin, the Teutonic and the Anglo-Saxon. Their versions differ slightly but their essential revelation is the same.

Of particular interest to the Jew is the statement which Sir Mosley made to his disciples at that meeting: “In this country there will be no racial or religious discrimination, because that would be anti-British. But I tell all Jews who are citizens of this country that they must put the interests of England before the interests of Jewry. If they use international finance in ways detrimental to England, or if they are leaders of Communism as some of them are, the Fascists will know how to deal with them.”

“I am asked why we exclude Jews from our movement. It is because they are as a class hostile to us. They are for the most part international and we are national.”

The last paragraph is highly significant. In it Sir Mosley summarizes, better perhaps than he himself knows, the real reason for the bitter animus which the reactionary groups throughout the world display towards the Jew. Unlike Hitler, Sir Mosley does not indulge in any fantastic race theories to explain his distrust of the Jews or to incite his followers. Hitler’s racialism has failed to convince the world. It has been laughed out of court everywhere, even in Germany, where the Christian churches are stubbornly resisting it. Furthermore England, unlike Germany, has a vast empire and no English politician would be foolhardy enough to raise the race issue in an empire which embraces portions of almost every race on the face of the earth. Such a move would simply lend fuel to the revolutionary propaganda of all the discontented racial groups within the empire which are none too quiet as it is. The English Fascist is therefore limited in his anti-Semitic crusade to the well known triune of modern anti-Semitism–Jewish international finance, communistic activities and internationalism.

In the case of Sir Mosley, it is Jewish internationalism which is most resented. Because of it, he maintains, Jews must be excluded from his movement. As a class, Jews are hostile to Fascism. They are international instead of national.

And that is largely true. Because of this internationalism, the Jews are, to quote the manifesto of the German student organization of Berlin University, “our most dangerous opponent.”

Fascism must ground itself in an intensive nationalism. Otherwise it lacks any ideologic basis. Its oposition to parliamentary government and to democratic institutions is, after all, only negative. Passions cannot be aroused by such negation. Fascism has no positive economic ideal such as communism has. It needs a positive principle with which to compensate the masses for those rights and privileges of which it deprives them. Nationalism is that principle–an aggressive, militant, centripetal, nationalism, as exclusive, dogmatic and imperialistic as was the Church before the Reformation, demanding the complete surrender of the individual and, in return, promising mystic and magnificent rewards in the golden Hereafter….

The Jew cannot be fitted into this type of nationalism. His experience of the last two thousand years have not permitted him to become provincialized into any such constricted nationalism. He has moved across the face of the earth. His intellectual horizons have extended to the limits of the world. His fortunes are bound up not with the prosperity of any one country achieved at the expense of another but with international prosperity achieved through cooperation, good will and peace. His national messianic hope embraced world unity and reconciliation.

The Jew has been a loyal citizen wherever he has lived and been permitted to share in the privileges as well as in the responsibilities of citizenship. He served his country in peace time and helped to defend it in war. But in the main and to a degree greater than that of any other group, he has been mindful that beyond the nation there is humanity. He has not succumbed as completely as other peoples to the intense nationalism of the Nineteenth Century which culminated in the political disasters of the World War and which has now run riot in Fascism. Years ago, Albert Schaeffie declared that “the Jews are the cosmopolitan element of mankind.” We have our chauvinists, to be sure, but their super-heated nationalism derives no sanction from the spirit of our people. They are blotters which absorbed indistinctly the script of other peoples

The Jew therefore cannot easily be brought into the theoretic framework of Fascism. Even though some Jews would be inclined because of their capitalistic interests, to join such a movement, the main body of Jewry is in active or passive resistance to the central compensatory dogma of Fascism.

The Jew is an internationalist. The term is of course not the antithesis of nationalist but of chauvinist. His greatest spiritual opportunity at the moment is to remain true to his internationalism. He is paying and will pay a heavy price for his allegiance to it. But the future belongs not to egocentric nationalism but to internationalism, not to fragments of humanity, but to humanity itself, just as the future belongs not to militarism but to peace. Nationalism is not enough. The world today is confronted not with the lack of nationalism but with its consequences. It is quite an inadequate human concept. It is not mankind’s ultimate vision. It is a minimum requirement, not a maximum program. Certainly it is not the substance of our own ancestral tradition whose motif is not nationalism but prophetism.

We must not deny this essential characteristic of our tradition, this spiritual mandate of our historic experiences-for the sake of winning temporary relief from attack. The world is being swept by storms of reaction. We must outride the storm. We dare not seek land while the storm lasts. Land will shipwreck us. Our safety for the time being lies in the heart of the storm….

It will not be to our discredit or to the shame of our children of future generations if in an age of increasing spiritual and intellectual nigrescence, when a brutal madness swept over a weary world, we remained the last faithful internationalists among the peoples of the earth.