The Radicalism of the Jew

Radicalism is a word which has been bandied about in recent years. Some people use it as a weapon of attack. To call a man radical is to beat him down with a club—to demolish him. Very often the term is mixed up in the minds of people with the idea of violence. A radical is a man who seeks to overthrow an institution or a government by force.

This, of course, is confusing an attitude with a technique. There are many people in the world who are radical in their economic, political and social thinking but who prefer to achieve their radical objectives through non-violent means Pacifists are radical. On the other hand, foes of radicalism and the staunchest defenders of the old order, frequently resort to violence and revolution in order to maintain their privileged positions.

There are, of course, economic radicals like the Communists, who believe in achieving their program through force and dictatorship. What is radical, however, with Communists is not their technique but their program. Their technique is as old as the cave man. Lenin did not have to invent the technique of dictatorship. A thousand years of Czarism laid it at the doorstep of his mind. Mussolini learned the same technique from Lenin. And Hitler, from Mussolini. What is radical in Communism is not its method of force and terrorism but its program of a classless society and of the state as the universal employer and paymaster. The Socialists have the same program as the Communists but they reject their technique.

Nevertheless, in the confused and feverish thinking of our day, all radicals are grouped together, and all progressives and liberals are added to them in one vast red network of radicalism. This, of course, is good strategy for reactionaries whose purpose it is to make every movement seeking change at the expense of the status quo, suspect by linking it up with some extreme violent movement against which there already exists strong emotional resistance.

An even more ingenious strategy for reactionaries is to identify all liberal and progressive movements with some group against which there already exists a latent prejudice—the Jewish group, for example.

The Nazis who, at the behest of their industrial and financial overlords, set about uprooting all democratic and liberal institutions in Germany, cleverly resorted to this ingenious strategy. Hitler popularized the idea that “democracy is fundamentally a Jewish concept, not German.” Liberalism and intellectualism are products of the decadent spirit of the oriental Jew —not Teutonic. So is the quest for universal peace. It does not emanate from the genius of the Teutonic race but is a Jewish device for undermining the military power of Germany. Democracy, liberalism, internationalism and peace are radicalism, and all radicalism is Jewish.

Actually, of course, the Jews were only slightly represented in the Community party in Germany, just as they are only slightly represented in the Communist party in the United States. The Jews are predominantly a middle-class folk and their economic interests incline them to liberal or conservative groupings. There are Jews who belong to the extreme right and those who belong to the extreme left, but their numbers are small. The great body of our people is certainly not radical. Overwhelmingly they are liberal and democratic.

Unfortunately we are a very vocal and voluble and eager people and the Jewish Communist is a ##ry tense and aggressive and voluble individual. It is he who becomes the stump speaker and the parade marshal and the pamphleteer. It is he who seems to be everywhere. His volubility, vocability and omnipresence often give the impression that every Jew is a Communist and every Communist a Jew.

The Jew has never sought to overthrow any government by force except those governments which denied him his elementary human rights and which singled him out for particular discrimination. He would have been a fool and a coward if he did not set about to overthrow such governments. But in those countries where he enjoyed equal rights of citizenship, his political interests usually lay where his economic interests were—which is true of all people.

What may have contributed to the widespread notion of Jewish radicalism is the fact that the Jew has been a very ready champion of human rights. He is very sensitive to all forms of oppression. He, himself, experienced oppression and persecution for so long that he is quick to respond to any appeal from wrong and human tyranny.

History, likewise, made the Jew a cosmopolitan. Since the first dispersion of the people, twenty-five centuries ago, the Jew has moved across the face of the world. He has come in contact with many peoples, races, cultures and civilizations. Quite naturally he became less provincial than peoples rooted in one place. He is more internationally minded. He is a ready intermediary between cultures and an interpreter among peoples. He is receptive to new ideas. His very survival depended upon his easy adaptability. Long training in the hard school of life, as well as in the rigorous intellectual discipline of Talmudic academies have sharpened his intellect. His mind is analytical and critical, and while not devoid of its mystic excursions, it is, as a rule, given to straightforward realistic thinking.

History also made the Jew a champion of world peace. No one suffers as much from war as the Jew for, as a rule, he is victimized both by friend and foe. In the lands of the victor, he is denounced as a war profiteer and in the lands of the vanquished he is saddled with the responsibility both for causing the war and losing it.

These factors — the quick response of the Jew to the cry for justice, his cosmopolitan analytical mind, his readiness to entertain new ideas and his great devotion to peace—are responsible, to a large degree, for that radicalism which so many non-Jews are associating with the Jew.

But justice and internationalism and world peace are not radicalism. They are the enduring aspirations of the human race—the eternal life-hunger of men. The Jew must never, out of any fond hope of removing this stigma of radicalism from himself, turn his back upon these great causes of humanity.