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ply to an attack by whom the Detroit priest two weeks ago delivered the statements to which Dr. Wise yesterday took exception.
The rabbi concentrated attention upon the passage in Father Coughlin’s radio address in which the priest placed the blame for the economic depression on the shoulders of six alleged bankers, of whom five are Jewish.
CITES LOAN FIGURES
Of these five, Dr. Wise said, only one, the firm of Kuhn-Loeb, is of any significance in the realm of international banking. Of $8,000,000,000 in foreign loans floated by financial houses, the speaker declared, this firm took care of less than three per cent of the total, whereas J. P. Morgan and subsidiaries floated sixty-eight per cent.
“I hold no brief for the bankers,” Rabbi Wise pointed out, saying that he put forward the facts only to show the falsity of inferences drawn from Father Coughlin’s remarks that Jewish international bankers dominate the field.
Saying that the fate of German Jews has made him sensitive, the rabbi said he was confident Father Coughlin, “as a Christian, as a priest, as an American,” could not want a similar tragedy to be visited upon America and American Jews.
CAUTIONS COUGHLIN
“Father Coughlin, I need not remind you of the commandment which bids men refrain from bearing false witness against their neighbors,” Dr. Wise said. “I cannot believe that you, Father Coughlin, choose to bear false witness against a whole people and thus indict them.
“If, however, you persist in saying that the international bankers are dominantly and chiefly Jewish—and you should know that they are not—you will inevitably bring about deep wrong and great hurt to the Jewish people.
“I appeal to you, Christian, Catholic, priest. I cannot believe that this is your objective. I refuse to believe that you are ready to do a great wrong in order to achieve what you believe to be a great right.”
By placing five Jews on his list of six bankers Father Coughlin implied, Dr. Wise said, that “the Jews of America generally are the rich and possessing and powerful class of America and there are no poor and needy and economically broken among the 4,000,000 American Jews.”
The truth of the matter, the rabbi continued, is that the Jewish mases have suffered like everybody else in the last five years and perhaps, because of employment discrimination, more than most.
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