The Soviet Way

To many of our young men and women the Soviet way seems a way out of our intolerable dilemmas. They embrace Marxist materialism from more or less Jewish motives. For sooner or later they emphasize the position of the Jews in Soviet Russia. Let us examine that position quite objectively and impartially.

Anti-Semitism is a crime in Russia. Jewish workers are precisely on a par with other workers; in the machinery of the Russian government Jews, probably on account of their high literacy in an illiterate country, occupy a disproportionately large number of positions.

Furthermore: the Soviets admit the principle of cultural nationalism and number the Jews among the distinct nationalities that live in the united republics. What precisely does the application of that principle mean? It means the permission to use the Yiddish language. But all that is written and spoken and thought and decreed in that language must conform to Marxian ideology and to the purposes of the party. Is the Emess, although written and printed in Yiddish, in any sense a Jewish paper? Logically enough, Hebrew is forbidden and Zionist activity is outlawed. Both are non-Marxian and hence counter-revolutionary. Is this a fair statement of the case?

We hear on unimpeachable authority that very many thousands of Jews are thoroughly contented and passionately devoted to the regime that has liberated them and given them equal rights. We hear furthermore that these happy Soviet Jews frantically cut the spiritual bonds that bind them to their people and its historic past, that they cut even familial bonds, that inter-marriage flourishes and that they ask nothing better than to be citizens of the United Soviet Socialist Republics of the Russian people.

I believe all that. I believe furthermore that the Russian invitation to the Jewish people to assimilate is the sincerest that has ever been issued. But I believe all that because it has all happened before. All —all!

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century society expanded and the great era of industrialization set in and it was obvious that in this expanding order there was a place, intellectual and financial and industrial, for the Jewish people. And the ghettos were opened and the Jews were told, first by Napoleon, next in the course of the years by the Prussians and the Austrians and by others that if they would put from them all their Jewishness except some academic religious practices (like the academic use of Yiddish in Russia today) and become wholly like the people of the land and embrace the national ideologies, that then they would be free and equal and happy. And the dazzled Jews rushed out of the ghettos and there were perfect epidemics of both baptism and inter-marriage, so that great communities were more than decimated and the Jews did all they could (even as in Russia) to cut themselves off from people and kin and faith and they became more French than the French and more Prussian than the Prussians and more Austrian than the Austrians, even as today in the only expanding society in the world they are more Marxist than the Marxians and more Russian than Stalin. And if the Soviets were to go to war Jews would fight and die in the Red armies even as my kinsmen fought and died in the armies of Prussia and someone else’s kinsmen fought and died for the liberation of Poland. It has all happened before—all!

No, my young Communist friends would say, no—it’s the real thing this time. The Jews will disappear and merge in Russia and become free human beings in a free society. May I be forgiven for doubting that? The witness of all history is against it and the witness of the spirit. I was invited to go to Russia too. But I did not go, for I made it clear to the emissaries in question (1) that I did not want to see factories. If the Japanese could build factories, so can the Russians. I made it clear (2) that I didn’t want to see Russo-Marxist assimilation, because I was sick to the soul with German and French and American assimilationists and had met, heaven help me, even Poles of the Mosaic faith. I wanted to see free Jews—Jews who, as such, were permitted to cooperate in the so-called building of a new society. The gentlemen in question said that the revolution was still embattled and needed to preserve itself by stringent discipline and defense against counter-revolutiontary activities and could grant rights only to those who were for and with it. Yes, I said, that was precisely the point of view of William II. When the fatherland (or the revolution) is in danger Jews, too, may live and die for it. Yes. The gentlemen departed.

MANY Jews in Russia are abandoning their people and their religion even as as many Jews did in France and Prussia and other countries at a certain time. So a periphery will crumble. Will not the core remain? Jews may abandon folk and Torah. It is the eternal witness of history that folk and Torah do not abandon them, for both are constantly spontaneously recreated out of the very substance of their being. Must we, instructed by history and nature, be forever tied to this self-same wheel? That is the question.