The International Scene

Editor’s Note: In the following article Dr. Janowsky, assistant professor of history at the City College of New York, takes stock of the international Jewish scene.

The international Jewish scene resembles the general scene in which fear, distrust, self-seeking and violence, or the threat of violence, have brought humanity to the brink of destruction. Never in modern times have the Jews faced so uncertain a future as at present. Old and powerful Jewish centers are crumbling; homes and lands which Jews have called their own for centuries have become inhospitable; and proud and powerful citizens of only a few years ago are now hapless and hopeless fugitives to whom no one will give shelter, for whom a greedy and callous world cannot find a haven of refuge.

What symbol can portray better the homelessness and hopelessness of the European Jews than the spectacle of 300 odd Jews who have knocked at the gates of so many Mediterranean countries, only to be turned away, and who, in despair, have had to return to the country from which they sought to flee.

In the international Jewish scene the German situation is noted first because it occupies the center of the stage. Hitler and his cohorts have accused the Jews of about everything evil and despicable that distorted and ignorant minds have been able to invent. The fantastic forgery entitled “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” has been disseminated widely and despite its palpable absurdity it has contributed to poison the minds of the German people.

JEW HAS SURVIVED ATTACKS OF DESPOTS

Now, there is nothing new in all this humbug. We have heard these stupidities and slanders before and, what is more, we have survived as a people while the Hitlers of the past are rotting in the dust. Present day Germany has not even improved upon the refinements of cruelty in its attacks upon the Jews. The brutal attacks upon individual Jews, murder, terror, denial of the right to work and earn a livelihood, and the impoverishment and pauperization of a whole people, bullying and harassing of children in the schools — all these diabolical atrocities have been perpetrated before in Tsarist, Russia and elsewhere.

Why then do we cry out against German persecution as never before? Is it because the 600,000 German Jews react to pain differently from the 3,000,000 Polish Jews or the 1,000,000 Rumanian Jews? Is it because the German Jews were better-to-do while the Polish Jews had been accustomed to degradation and persecution?

I have said that Germany constitutes a threat to Jews throughout the world because until recently persecution of Jews was associated with the dark forces of humanity, with the backward and brutalized peoples. It was the corrupt, decayed and medieval Russia of the Tsars which persecuted the Jews; it was uncivilized Rumania and half-civilized Poland which persecuted the Jews. The civilized, progressive, and forward-looking countries of the West granted the Jews equal rights and discountenanced anti-Semitism.

The Germans, however, have made anti-Semitism respectable even in the West; they have enabled the Jew-haters who formerly preached their gospel skulkingly and in hushed whispers to come out into the open and brazenly face the world. The Germans have been recognized as a cultured people, a people who have produced scholars, scientists and philosophers. When seemingly cultured men permit the persecution of Jews, honest people elsewhere might give credence to the forgeries and lies which are concocted to justify attacks which cannot otherwise be justified.

The Nazis are a danger to all Jews because they have spread their anti-Semitic venom throughout the world. There is not a country or province, no matter how God-forsaken, but has been infected with the Nazi poison. South America, Africa, the Far East, regions of the world which have not known Jew-hatred or even Jews have now their influential and noisy preachers of hate.

A story is told of a Japanese diplomat who came to Berlin and requested a German statesman to recommend a professor of anti-Semitism for a Japanese university. When told that there was no such chair in the German university, he was amazed. “What!” he exclaimed, “you talk anti-Semitism day and night and have no one to teach it?” “But,” said the German, “why do you need such a professor when you have no Jews?” ‘We haven’t,” said the Japanese, “but we hear that they are coming, and we want to be prepared.”

But Germany is not the entire Jewish scene, all-pervading that it is. There are several other pressing problems which render Jewish life so precarious at this moment.

OUTBREAKS GROW ALL OVER WORLD

Who has not read of violent outbreaks against Jews in the French North African colonies, in Poland, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, and even in Czechoslovakia, the most civilized of the new states which the World War called into being? In practically every new and enlarged state of Southern and Eastern Europe we encounter economic discrimination against Jews, movements to boycott Jews and deprive them of their livelihood, civil inequalities, educational disabilities and a general tendency to make the Jew the scapegoat for debts, drought, overproduction, and the other causes of privation and suffering with which a crumbling civilization is afflicting humanity. In Russia, too, where anti-Semitism is discountenanced and sternly repressed, the Jews have not escaped.

The socialization of trade and industry has deprived the thousands upon thousands of Jewish petty traders of their means of subsistence. I am convinced that the Russian government honestly desires to rehabilitate these unfortunate beings, but more pressing problems have engaged the attention of the Russians and vast numbers of the declassed, socially degraded and pauperized Jewish traders must become reconciled to the ruin and bitterness which appears to be their fate.

Moreover, sympathetic as one might be with the heroic efforts of the Russians to build a new social order, we must not forget that Hebrew culture is condemned in Russia and the entire cultural heritage of the Jews is ridiculed and denounced. Even in the countries of western Europe and the United States anti-Semitism has reached proportions which can no longer be contempuously ignored although in our own country the preachers of hate are, to my mind, not quite so dangerous as yet.

ECONOMIC FORCES WREAK HAVOC

Now it is true that the Jewish problem throughout the world is today largely colored and aggravated by anti-Semitism. But it would be a mistake to ascribe all Jewish troubles to anti-Semitism. Were the Jews accepted and treated everywhere on a footing of absolute equality, we would still have to face problems well-nigh insoluble because of economic forces which have adversely affected all peoples and have worked havoc with the Jews. The Jews as a middle class engaged in trade and industry have prospered and still prosper where free competition has obtained. But free competition began to decline before the World War and was dealt a death-blow by the War.

Today, it has been discarded in many countries, and state capitalism, concentration in commerce, industry and banking, in department stores and chain stores, the decline of international trade, the growth of cooperatives and the resulting limited opportunities have deprived the Jewish small business man of his subsistence. Inflation in Central and Eastern Europe has likewise caused the wealth of the Jews to melt away and disappear, because Jewish wealth did not consist of material objects but of money, mortgages, loans and the like.

Moreover the disillusionment, economic impoverishment and intellectual and moral stability which remained as a legacy of the war, have led all peoples to draw in, to freeze in, upon themselves and to close their gates to immigration. As a result, the means of escape which emigration once provided has been cut off and the Jews have been left to their own resources. Only American relief has stood between millions of pauperized Jews and starvation.

But resignation and despair are not satisfying answers to any question, no matter how staggering. We must seek out the few constructive efforts to solve the problems of the Jew and support them. Palestine is one such effort; Biro-Bidjan another; and minority rights a third; the maintenance of Jewish institutions and identification with the Jewish group are still others.

There is another solution. When we are attacked we must strike back and the boycott against goods made in Germany is therefore an excellent policy. Normal people do not hush up attacks and slanders against them. They marshal their forces and strike back. And we are not alone in combating the dark forces of reaction and intolerance. There are liberal-minded and tolerant people throughout the world, who are our friends. With them we must cooperate to make the world a better place to live in.

Many will no doubt complain that I have found no solution of the Jewish problem which lies ready at hand and can be realized immediately. That I grant, and moreover maintain that there is no easy solution for so complex a problem. But when you complain of the element of time involved in attempts to deal with the Jewish problem, I refer you to the profound truth uttered by an unknown Jewish workman in Palestine.

When Dr. John Haynes Holmes visited Palestine, a Chalutz pointed to a bleak and barren hilltop and prophesied that Jewish labor would render it fruitful. Dr. Holmes looked at the inspired laborer in amazement. “Why,” said he, “you will have to carry soil in shovelfuls and handfuls to make that rocky hill bear fruit and that will take a hundred years.” Undaunted, the Chalutz answered, “What is a hundred years in the life of the Jews?”