The Jews of Hesse

Berlin.

Oberhessen is an old anti-Semitic domain. The petty local bosses of the province, young fanatics between twenty and twenty-five years of age, are seeing to it that its past name shall not be allowed to be forgotten, and are trying to drive the last few Jews from the villages and small towns.

The men in power in the Third Realm have taken some trouble, either from prudence or from a sort of shame, to dampen down the crudest forms of anti-Semitism (which does not mean it could not come to life again in full strength should tactics so demand); but the Storm Troop leaders of Oberhessen have turned the deafest ears to the call for moderation.

Half a day’s ride by motorcar through this rich and lovely farming country, with its grain silos always full and always refilling, provides a wealth of knowledge of the situation of the Jews in Oberhessen, and more is to be had from those among the Christian population who have preserved their humanity and sense of shame.

We were prepared to find here and there a placard at the main gate of a farm property prohibiting Jews from entering on pain of physical ill-treatment, but of these placards we saw not one or two but hundreds. In the villages they are on almost every door; it is a matter of honor to flaunt them. Not to one of the peasants who go on Sunday in their splendid old peasant costumes to the church service does it occur that these placards are the coarsest revilings of the Evangel which they profess.

BRUTAL OUTLAWRY A COMMONPLACE

Worse still is the warning that whole villages cry out in unison: “Jews are forbidden to enter the village.” Really this might fairly be brought before a magistrate for the restraint of what amounts to a breach of the peace. But nobody dreams of doing so. This brutal outlawry of the Jews has become a commonplace in Oberhessen—the Jews themselves no longer take umbrage at it.

They have worse things to endure. For many Jewish families it is an anxious moment when the father of the family lights the Sabbath lights. The window shutters are closed for safety, and in hundreds of cases stones rain upon them. Woe to anyone who ventures, not to protest—nobody any longer has the strength and hardihood for that—but even to ask for some consideration. I know of a case in which a white-haired Jew, a man whose simple piety and warm humanity had earned him in the past the respect of he peasants among whom he lived, who begged for the uproar to be stilled because his wife lay near to death. The reply came from a stone that struck him on the forehead amid a chorus of derision and obscenity.

A WANDERER—ONE OF MANY

She died. When he had buried his life’s companion the old Jew left everything as it stood, house and garden and all that was in them; his possessions had become worthless to him. He collected those few things that his heart still clung to, a few trifles of no interest to anyone else, closed the shutters over his windows, and walked out of the village—jeered at by the young men, slandered by the twenty-year-old hero of this tragedy, greeted with silent sympathy by an old peasant woman. He has never returned.

There are hundreds of such exiles, wandering with the little remains of what they had, in Frankfort; they have abandoned their homes because they cannot endure the malevolence and humiliations to which they were exposed in their villages.

The program of the young “heroes” is to allow them no peace until they disappear. I was told of one young fellow of this type, employed in a town, who went home to his parents on Saturdays. At home he amused himself with a shotgun, aiming through a hole in the roof of his father’s house and breaking the windows of any Jew’s house he could reach. The whole village knows all about it, but there is no police interference with the young wretch. Evidently none of the injured parties dares to make a complaint. They put up with it. The Jew in Oberhessen is every man’s sport.

PROFANE BIBLE BEFORE STUDENTS

The authorities are, of course, perfectly well aware of all this. Ample and incontrovertible evidence could be given by the district authorities or the Brown Houses of Giessen, Wetzlar, or Weilburg, or the Darmstadt authorities. Pastors and school-masters talk about it at their meetings. And it is no ancient history; what I relate belongs to the immediate past. What are the authorities doing against this scandal?

What do the school inspectors do to stop the brutality of a teacher who profanes the Bible lesson by using it to provide amusement for his class at the expense of a couple of Jewish children in their midst—letting them point and laugh at the little victims while he directs mocking remarks against venerable figures of the Old Testament, Abraham and Sarah, Noah before his daughters?

What do the authorities do? It would be unjust to them to say, “nothing.” Regulations are fluttering on all the walls, but they all reveal the clover foot somewhere, and they are constantly being ignored without the slightest action taken against the offenders. They are a hypocritical mask behind which the inhuman scandal still goes on.

Under a recent decree of the Hessian central government in Darmstadt (which, indeed, is nothing but a docile and willing instrument in the hands of the brutal Hessian Statthalter Sprenger), the peasantry are once more permitted to trade with the Jews. Not one of the peasants dreams of making use of the permission. Ask them why and they answer: “It isn’t meant, not a bit of it. It is only for show. They don’t mean us to do business with the Jews—not a bit of it!”

UNDERCOVER BOYCOTT FLOURISHES IN MARKET

The peasant who ventures to take the decree literally would be boycotted; not only that, but he would have a heavy bill to pay the glazier. In the Frankfort cattle market scarcely a single peasant will venture to sell directly {SPAN}#o{/SPAN} Jewish dealers (who are carefully segregated from the “Aryans”). He will sell through a Christian intermediary, to escape notice by eavesdroppers who watch every deal from the opening to the closing of the market. The permission to deal with Jews is eyewash; the boycott is no longer open, but it is more real, more rigorous, than ever.

It is plain that under such circumstances the Jew on the land must gradually starve, that in spite of the most rigid economies his last savings soon must be gone, and then he and his family must leave, to become wan-