Three great world movements marked the end of the Middle Ages for the Jews of Western Europe—the Renaissance, the Reformation and the French Revolution. Two of these movements are now in definite retreat.
The Renaissance stimulated the spirit of free inquiry among the peoples of Europe. It ushered in the epoch of intellectual emancipation. It was destined to shake the foundations of superstition, bigotry and intolerance. The Jew stood to gain from this liberating movement of the mind and spirit of man—and the Jew did actually gain.
The Protestant Reformation destroyed religious uniformity in Western Europe. It ended the religious imperialism of Roman Catholicism. For more than a century after Luther, the Protestant and Catholic Churches waged a most determined and ruthless war over the issue of religious hegemony or monopoly. After many bloody and inclusive battles it became evident that the problem would not be solved by war but only on the basis of compromise. The compromise was religious toleration, not merely for Catholics and Protestants, but also for the numerous sects which had sprung up within Protestantism itself. This principle of toleration was destined to benefit the Jewish group also. The Jew was sooner or later included within this compromise of toleration.
The French Revolution established the rights of mankind against the rights of the State and Church. In place of the divine rights of State and Church there were enthroned the divine rights—the inalienable rights—of Man. Man was invested with fundamental rights over which neither the State nor the Church had any power to veto. They were his by virtue of his humanity and not by virtue of his membership in any political or religious grouping. The Jew was destined to benefit from this revolutionary movement also—and he did benefit. While the fires of the French Revolution were still raging — in 1791 — the Jew received his French citizenship. The doctrines of the French Revolution spread over Western Europe in the wake of the armies of Napoleon; and wherever these doctrines triumphed, the ghetto walls fell. In spite of recurrent political reactions, the Jews, by the end of the third quarter of the Nineteenth Century, were at home politically in nearly all lands of Western Europe.
Today the ideas symbolized by the Renaissance and the French Revolution are in sharp retreat. Dictatorship is now established in two-thirds of Europe; and dictatorship is implacably set against the spirit of free inquiry and all freedom of thought—the essence of the Renaissance—and against the doctrine of man’s inalienable rights—the essence of the French Revolution. Dictatorship must in self-defense suppress all intellectual freedom. It is compelled to regiment all thought, to prescribe all dissent and criticism, to exploit education for propaganda purposes, to make every writer a state functionary, and every newspaper a party bulletin. It is compelled to defend the principle which Mussolini summarized: “Beyond the State—nothing!” There are no inalienable human rights, no constitutional guarantees, no charters of liberty. The individual has no recourse and no refuge in the absolutist state—no appeal to a law which is above party or men or to any inviolable principle of abstract justice.
The Jew stands to suffer a serious decline in status as a result of this new development. His security lay in the uninterrupted progress of free inquiry among men and in the development of freedom of thought unshackled by political partisanship. His security lay in those inalienable rights which the French (and American) Revolution proclaimed. Under the new dispensation the Jew is again entirely dependent upon the will or the whim of the party in power, or of the dictator. If they do not choose to tolerate him, his position becomes desperate.
The gains of the third movement—the Reformation—in terms of religious toleration, are being nullified today in some absolutist states through the substitution of racial intolerance for religious intolerance. Racial intolerance is far more menacing to the Jew than religious intolerance. Religious intolerance wished to assimilate the Jew. It was eager to welcome him as a convert. It proffered him full equality. It recognized his essential human worth. Racial intolerance repels the Jew. It does not wish to assimilate him ever. It insists upon isolating him permanently and upon degrading him politically, socially and economically.
With the spread of dictatorship in the world, the Jewish people has entered upon very serious and trying times. Its salvation lies not in preferring one kind of dictatorship to another—Communism to Fascism. All forms of state absolutism are inimical to the best interests of the Jewish people. Our security must be found in the future, as in the past, in the great doctrines of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity—doctrines which are today in recession. It is only when these liberal doctrines which set aside for all men certain sacred areas of personal rights and privileges which no organized group dares trespass, are again vindicated and firmly re-established, that the Jew will be secure in the Western World.
Liberalism is in eclipse today. Its spokesmen are apologetic. Some liberals are even flirting with communism whose methods and technique are the very antithesis of those of liberalism. They have been persuaded that salvation can come only through dictatorship. They are convinced that the world is going communist. They are certain that the next world war will see the end of capitalism and the triumph of communism, all of which is, of course, pure speculation—much of it highly fantastic.
The spirit of liberalism, which is not, as so many liberals lightly assume, the product of capitalism, but of the unappeasable life and liberty hunger of the human spirit, has not yet abdicated. It is still deeply entrenched in the heart of man. And as all forms of dictatorship are beginning to expose their inherent and fatal weaknesses, liberalism is again beginning to fight its way across the aberrations and obsessions of our age to its imperial position in the life of society.
The Jew who was long ago warned not to try “to force the End,” should cast in his lot with those who, in these turbulent and confused times, are still holding steadfastly to the vision of a free and liberal society wherein progress must be achieved without sacrifice of those values which alone are the true test and measure of progress, even if its tempo seems slow.
Lieutenant Solomon Braun of the French Army was one of the members of the 1897 expedition to Lake Tchad that was wiped out by the Tuaregs.
Robert Clavering, Bishop of Peterborough and professor of Hebrew at Oxford, translated into English in 1705 several of Maimonides’ works.
G. B. STERN DELAYS TRIP
G. B. Stern, whose new novel, “Shining and Free,” will be published by Alfred A. Knopf early in March, will not come to the United States this Spring for a lecture tour, as previously announced. Miss Stern has just cancelled her arrangements and has postponed her lecture tour to the Fall
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.
