An interesting presentation of the contributions of the Jewish race to the progress and welfare of mankind is given in the current issue of “The Baptist,” Chicago religious journal, by John Snape.
Under the headline “If I Were a Jew” the writer enumerates “some reasons a Jew has for being proud.” He says:
“If I were a Jew I should be proud of it. A people that can boast among scholars a Spinoza, among statesmen a Disraeli, among socialists a Marx, among bankers a Rothschild, among jurists a Marshall, among leaders a Moses, among musicians a Mendelssohn, among poets a David, among prophers an Isaiah, among apostles a Paul, among saviours my Saviour, need not be reticent about its history or ashamed of its influence.
“There are about as many Jews in the world as there are Baptists in the world-in round numbers, 12,000,000 Only there are 8,000,000 Baptists in America and 4,000,000 in other parts of the world while there are 4,000,000 Jews in America and 8,000,000 elsewhere in the world.
“If I were a Jew I should be proud of five things. First of all, I should be proud of my distinguishing peculiarity. This is not a biological peculiarity for, as Lewis Browne has shown in January’s American, in his illuminating ar-tile on ‘Why Are the Jews Like That?’ the blood of the Jews is not pure blood. In Abyssinia there are Negro Jews as black as the real Negroes among whom they live; in Spain, Spanish Jews; in Russia, Slavic Jews; in China, yellow-skinned and almond-eyed Jews; in India, brownskinned Jews. Two things set forth the Jewish peculiarity-sensitiveness and aggressiveness. If I were a Jew and a fellow Jew were criticized, I should not spring to his defense merely because he is a Jew, but because he is right-if he is right.
NO ABIDING PLACE
“If I were a Jew I should be proud of the tenacity of my nationality. I should remind myself as a Jew that I had been driven from pastoral and agricultural pursuits into commercial pursuits for the reason that no race has permitted me ever to settle on its soil with certain permanency. But despite universal persecution I have persisted a Jew. My people were the people of the restless feet-but it was the restlessness of driven necessity. Expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1391, from Spain in 1492-in the very year in which Columbus sailed for a new continent where liberty and religion were to become foundation stones of a nation’s life-and at different times from Russia and Germany and Switzerland and Italy, I am still here and still a Jew. My people have found in Babylon their desert, in Germany their Gethsemane, in England their jugdment hall, in Russia their Via Dolorosa, in Spain their Golgotha. Foxes have had holes; birds of the air nests: but the Jew, like the Son of Man, has not had where to lay his head and call it his own abiding place.
“If I were a Jew I should be proud of the sanctity of my domesticity. Three things have contributed to the preservation of the Jewish family: monogamous marriage respect for authority and reverence for religion. Always the Jew has been a family man: large lands, large flocks, large families were to him, in patriarchal days, marks of the Divine favor. When the American home goes, the American nation will be tossed upon the scrapheap of the forgotten nations of antiquity. May the younger Jews not imitate the Genille example in the reckless looseness with which our marriage ties seem to hold in these modern times.
“If I were a Jew I should be proud of the liberality of my philanthropy. The Jews have been cooperators in neighborliness. Neighborliness is not a matter of latitude, but a matter of attitude. Neighborliness is co-extensive with humanity. It is bounded on the north by human necessity, on the south by human sympathy, on the east by human opportunity, on the west by human practice. God is no respecter of persons. We are not a mob; we are a family. Five of the ten commandments are prohibitions against un-neighborliness. Arthur Brisbane says: ‘Every other successful name in a great city is a Jewish name,’ and Clark Howell of the ‘Atlantic Constitution.’ says. ‘The Jewish people as a whole are among the most patriotic, most charitable and most constructive of any group in the business and national life of the nation.’ In municipal and community life they have been active in civic affairs, in education, in culture and in the economic betterment of the people. In humanitarian projects, in the building of hospitals, in the support of eleemosynary institutions, in the filling of community chests. the Jews of our cities have responded with liberality.
“If I were a Jew I should be proud of my contribution to Christianity. The Bible is my gift to the world, and that was a great gift indeed. I should remind myself that in a recent eight years 9,000,000 copies of a book by a popular author were sold, but that in that same eight-year period 240,000,000 copies of the Bible were sold. It is still the best seller among books. But while I was reminding myself that the Bible, which for the most part is a Jewish book, is my gift to Christianity. I should also remind myself that ‘if Jews created the Bible, the Bible created the Jews.’
“Says Josph Jacobs in his suggestive book on ‘Jewish Contribution to Civilization.’ ‘Without the Bible and Bible religion. Europeans would, so far as we know, be worshipping the gods, probably by animal sacrifice.’
“Woodwrow Wilson, admired and loved by Gentiles and Jews, has also said, ‘The laws of Moses as well as the laws of Rome contributed suggestion and impulse to the new institutions which were to prepare the modern world; and, if we could but have the eyes to see the subtle elements of thought which constitute the gross substance of our present habit, both as regards the sphere of private life and as regards the actions of the state, we should easily discover how very much besides religion we owe to the Jews.’
THE DOCTRINE OF MONOTHEISM
“If I were a Jew I should remind myself that I contributed the doctrine of monotheism to the theological thinking of the world, that in my Jewish Bible the thought of the kingdom of heaven is outlined, and that doctrines like sin and repentance and sanctification and faith and atonement are therein set forth.
“I I were a Jew I should be proudest of my greatest contribution-Christianity’s founder, Jesus Christ. He, too. was the Jew with the restless feet. Constantly he felt constrained to go to the people on the other side. I would make it my business to study his life, his death, his character, his influence.
“Having said all this, permit me to say, in all humility and in all fraternity, that if I were a Jew I should be a Christian.”
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.
