IBEGIN to believe that Dean Inge, the man they call the Gloomy Dean, is a rather bright person. I know he’s been in the papers a good deal, but the press and public opinion generally create reputations for men who may have many qualities beside that of common sense, and when a man has common sense, he is, ipso facto, witty. Well, the Dena has just made a bright suggestion, which although to cable across the Atlantic, has not yet received the attention it deserves.
Great Britian is raising 100,000 pounds which as you know, comes to half a million dollars, to comes to half a million dollars, to hand over to Soviet Russia for the Coder Sinaiticus, the fourth century Biblical manuscript, one of the chief sources for the Bible. Now the small room, or even a small corner of Old Masters is worth as much. I recall seeing a Rembrandt painting, that one of the woman plucking a fowl, knocked down for $106,000, and as for the woman paring her nails, that is a picture without price, should the museum which owns it ever consent to put it on the block. To get down to books, almost as much as half a million dollars, if not more, must have been paid some time for a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, simply because it was the first printed Bible.
Now the Dean was talking at a luncheon recently for the purpose of arousing interest in Britian in the acquisition of the Codex, for part of the total fund is to be raised by popular subscription and in time there is no doubt the Codex will add up something when the Chancellor of the Exchequer gives the people of Great Britain a listing of national assets.
But the suggestion Dean Inge made was this: Why should not the British pay to Soviet Russia, as part or full payment for the Codex, the remains of the propnet of Communism, Karl Marx, which now rest in High Gate Cemetery, London, in which Marx spent the last years of his life as an exile from Germany? Why not indeed? An exchange of precious dust for a precious text seems fair enough. Or at the least, Soviet Russia might have been willing, at the time negotiations were opened to have put a value of 25,000 pounds on the remains of Marx, which would have required the raising of only have required the raising of only 75,000 pounds. The really hard-boiled Communist might respond that Russia needs the 100,000 pounds credit the Codex will yield rather for machinery which will bring nearer to realization the Utopia for which Karl Marx strove than it needs a reatling coffin-ful of the bones and dust of Marx, but your average Communist might wax powerfully Sentimental over the idea of building about the remains of Marx a mausoleum no less impressive than that within which rest the reamins of Lenin.
As a matter of fact it is sentimental value against sentimental value, Great British doesn’t need the Codex, Soviet Russia doesn’t need the pones of Marx, but Russia might have been persuaded to pay 100,000 English pounds in Ukrainian grain say for the bones of Marx, as England, eventually, will be paying 100,000 pounds in machines, agricultural and other-wise, for-a mere book. But people barter, why should not nations. And in the things they give up for the things they want individuals tell a bookful about themselves. America, for example, would be willing to cancel at least half a million dollars of the French debt for the Mona Lisa and the quantity of debt America would be willing to cancel for frescoes of the Sistine Chpel-if they could possibly be peeled off and reset-is nobody’s bussiness. Now you play the game yourself from this point!
We might perhaps intrude a parenthesis. As the remains of Marx belong to Soviet Russia in the fitness of things, so do the remains of Theodore Herzl belong in, and to, Palestine, not, certainly, in Vienna, where the emergent Nazis are daily threatening Jewish individual and communal life. Various Congresses of the World Zionist Organization have decreed that the remains of Herzi shall be transported to his natural and to his spiritual home and nothing has been done. Indeed, only last Fall a procession to the cemetery in which Herzl’s bones rest was can celled for fear of atracting unplesant Nazi attentions.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
