The Red Messiah

The following newspaper report came out of Odessa, Soviet Russia, recently:

“An order restricting the use of Yiddish in the Odessa Technical High School, issued by the newly appointed director, M. Misnikov, has aroused strong protests by the students and teachers, several of whom have resigned. The order provides for cutting down the number of hours devoted to Yiddish language and literature, and the complete dropping of Yiddish in the teaching of several subjects. Hereafter, the order decrees, Russian is to be used in place of Yiddish and all official announcements of the school must be couched in that language. In making the announcement of the order, immediately after assuming his new duties, M. Misnikov remarked: ‘Odessa is not Palestine. ‘ The order is being protested by students and teachers who are demanding that the central authorities reprimand the new director and force him to rescind the restrictive edict. “

In all probability the Soviet authorities will rescind this restrictive edict. Their position on cultural autonomy for all nationalities in the Soviet Union is well known. What should be noted, however, is that the incident did occur and could occur even in Communist Russia, where proletarian economics were to have solved the whole problem of anti-Semitism.

Careful and impartial observers have reported over and over again that the problem of anti-Semitism is far from being liquidated in Soviet Russia and that while the government has ruthlessly suppressed every form of anti-Jewish propaganda as counter-revolution, and has carried on an educational campaign to discredit all forms of race antagonism, there is still a vast amount of anti-Jewish feeling among the masses and even among the governing class which may in time of strain and crisis become serious.

Writing in the Menorah Journal (Spring, 1934) on “Court Action: Soviet Style,” Mr. Leon Dennen states: “It did not take me long last year to discover anti-Semitism in Russia. The older generation retained it from the old days along with other worldly capital. It crops everywhere, sometimes in the most unexpected places. Even among members of the Communist party one encounters this prejudice. One encounters it also in the cooperative stores and in the factories as well as in the theatres. Indeed, anti-Semitism still exists in Russia. “

One wonders whether it is only among the “older generation” in the Communist party and among the older Russians generally that anti-Semitism is to be found and whether the younger generation has been permanently inoculated against it. . . .

Two factors in the future aggravate the problem of anti-Semitism in Russia. They are the factors of “growing nationalism, and increasing material inequality” which Mr. William Henry Chamberlin points to as among the three long-term trends in Soviet life which seem to him most significant at the present time. In his recent volume, “Russia’s Iron Age,” he writes: “This nationalism is visible also in the internal life of the country. A decade ago excessive devotion to his own country was regarded as bad form in a Communist, as savoring of indifference to the international revolution. . . . Now Soviet patriotism is trumpeted in all the newspapers. . . . And, Pravda, official organ of the Communist party, recently indulged in a sentimental outburst that might well have appeared in an Italian Fascist or German National Socialist newspaper.

Increased nationalism in any country of the world, capitalist or Communist, can mean but one thing—increased anti-Semitism!

Material inequality has been growing apace in Soviet Russia. Mr. Chamberlin calls attention to the “strident propaganda for unequal wages, and for higher compensation in more responsible posts” in present-day Russia. He expresses the opinion that “one of the probable future paradoxes of Russia will be that, just about the time when classes have officially been abolished, new classes, based not on wealth or birth but on power, on status in the huge heirarchy of state officialdom, and distinguished by very different standards of living, will become much more visible. “

And with it, undoubtedly, anti-Semitism will become much more visible. For the Jewish economic position in Russia is quite as unbalanced as in most of the capitalistic countries. In Russia, too, the Jews are predominantly an urban population. They are represented, far beyond their proportion to the general population, in what we would h### call the “white collar class” but which in Russia may properly be called the “portfolio class”—the bureaucracy—the political and economic officialdom. The preferred material status of this group in the evolving Communist state is bound to become an ever sharper thorn in the side of the Russian working classes. And their discontent will vent itself, when the hour of stress comes, first upon the Jews—Marxian dialectics notwithstanding.

Therefore, those who are advocating that the Jews of the world should collectively turn Communists in the expectation that Communism will finally solve the problem of anti-Semitism are beguiling themselves and misleading their people. A Jew who believes in Marxian economics as economics, who is persuaded that private capitalism is incompatible with our machine age and that the necessary socialization of our economic system can best be accomplished through the class struggle and proletarian dictatorship and who, furthermore, believes that Communism will yield mankind a sounder and juster way of life, should by all means become a Communist. This is his right and—in view of his convictions—his duty. But a Jew ought not to detour his way into Communism by any fantastic hope that it will solve what may seem to him to be the most urgent and important problem of Jewish life—anti-Semitism. Conversely, a Jew should not become an anti-Communist for the sole purpose and in the fond hope of allaying anti-Semitism. The Jewish people will never appease Fascist Jewbaiters by engaging in zealous and frantic anti-Communistic activities. This, too, is a vain and futile thing.

As a people, we have frequently indulged ourselves in such apocalyptic hopes. On the threshold of every great political or social change we believed that our salvation was near at hand. Thus we assumed that democracy and liberalism would automatically solve the Jewish problem. The progress of science and the rapid increase in popular education would quickly usher in the millennium. The disestablishment of the church and the dissolution of its political power would destroy religious intolerance and would make all men brothers. In every instance we were bitterly disillusioned.

We ought not to invite another heart-breaking disillusionment. The Russian balance sheet, as far as the Jewish people as such is concerned, is not one to make us joyously exultant. The Jew in Russia is subject to no political, social or economic disabilities. But Hebrew culture, of which the writers and rabbis who, at this moment, are coyly toying with Communism, speak so urgently to their readers and to their congregations, has practically been destroyed in Russia. “For us Jews outside Russia the essential fact is that that community is in disintegration which, for many decades, was the principal Jewish force maintaining Jewish learning and revivifying the Jewish spirit throughout the world.” (Harry Sacher, “Jewry Under the Soviets”).

Zionism is proscribed in Soviet Russia, and Jewish religious education which these same writers and rabbis regard as so essential for the American Jewish youth, is prohibited by law to the Russian Jewish youth.

We have had many glamorous Messiahs in our long history—the Messiah of Democracy and Liberalism, the Messiah of Science, the Messiah of Rationalism, the Messiah of Religious Freedom, the Messiah of the Second Internationale, and—now—the Messiah of the Third Internationale—the Red Messiah of the Kremlin.

They have all proved false.

There is but one Messiah for Israel—the Messiah ben David—fashioned out of the life-blood and the soulspirit of our own people, who is destined to suffer in chains, physical or spiritual, in all parts of the world and who will be fully and triumphantly free only in Zion.

The hour of his redemption is of our own determining! . . .