Thumb-nail Book Reviews

The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Jew-Baiting. By George Sacks. (Gollancz).

In the Shadow of Liberty. By Edward Corsi. (Macmillan).

The story of thousands of immigrants and how they were treated by Uncle Sam at Ellis Island is told by Mr. Corsi in this book. Himself an immigrant who came to America as a 10-year-old boy, Mr. Corsi was appointed Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island in 1931, twenty years after his arrival in United States.

Mr. Corsi admits that “Uncle Sam has not always dealt intelligently or humanely with immigrants.” He does not hesitate to say that “at times” the immigrants have been treated more like dumb-animals than intelligent human beings. He finds an excuse in the fact that this practice was carried out only in the years of mass immigration, when tens of thousands of immigrants of every nationality and race poured into the United States every month.

R. B.

The Jew and the World Ferment. By Basil Mathews. (Edinburgh Press).

Nobody can remain indifferent in times like these to the “Jewish problem,’ so that the little book, The Jew and the World Ferment, will prove exceedingly useful where a weightier work would merely alienate the reader’s interest. And Mr. Mathews was just the man to write it. As in The Clash of Color, he has surveyed a world problem in simple terms, and on a broad basis, with sympathetic insight.

Moreover, he sets out to be informative all the way through. For lack of knowledge, it is his plain belief, is too often the reason for the shrug of the shoulder with which too many seek to shelve a vital matter.

B. L.

Both explanations explain nothing. To call a group of righteous means that we are allied with it; to call it wicked means that we are opposed to it in war or business. Mr. Sacks avoids both these pitfalls; he attributes neither good nor bad qualities to the Jews as a whole, and is rightly suspicious of all generalizations as regards nations or races. But his own explanation, which is Marxist, is itself far from adequate. Given that we hate all groups with which we compete, and that we are apt to find Jews among our competitors, it still remains a mystery why Jews are more hated than other competitors. This question Mr. Sacks fails to tackle.

B. T.

The Heritage of Solomon. By John Garstang. (Williams and Norgate).

This important work by Professor Garstang throws light upon the sociology of the Bible. It is a comprehensive history of the Hebrews down to the first millenium B. C. E., in which special emphasis is laid upon the social life of ancient Palestine.

The great merit of the work, which prevents it from being simply a brilliant recapitulation of what has previously been written in this field is the great importance which it attaches to the practices of the present-day Palestinian Bedouin in the light of the sociology of the Bible.

Enrico Guartalla fought under Garibaldi in 1860 and in 1866.