It is all very well for some clever-Jacks to sneer at German Jews for standing by their country in spite of persecution and humiliation. But what else can human nature do?
Patriotism is at bottom love of a particular part of one’s country with which one’s innermost memories are bound up. Because a man is a Jew does he feel these things less intensely? People do not suddenly turn their backs on the habits and memories of a lifetime because things have gone wrong. The very use of the term exile for those who, feeling that they can stand no more, make the wrench, is expressive of the uprooting that it involves. There are those who would rather die at home than live abroad. I can well understand them.
There is such a thing as not knowing when one is not wanted, and most people when they find things unpleasant for them go where they can feel more comfortable, whether they are Jews or Irish, Italians, Hugenots, persecuted Catholics, or Doukhobors. But there is such a thing, too, as setting your teeth and carrying on, and saying: This is my country, and I won’t be bullied out of it even if they make things unpleasant for me.
And since there are to be victims anyway, may it not be better that they should fall in their own country, stand their ground, dying for their right to live on the soil that is theirs, than die in flight, in exile? The war for emancipation cannot be fought without casualties any more than any other war.
Would English or American Jews suddenly cease to love England or America and to adhere to English or American ways because a Government had come in that ill-treated them? If the Ku-Klux-Klan had succeeded in dominating America a few years back, as then seemed imminent, would American Jews—all the four million of them—have poured en masse into Palestine, or the Atlantic? And those of them who would go abroad, would the sights and sounds of their American homeland cease to stir their memories and their yearnings?
Did not the Spanish Jews, fleeing from the Inquisition take the Spanish language with them into exile and nurture it, even in their Synagogues—to the present day? Was not a good deal of the anti-Jewish feeling in France, that burst into the Dreyfus Affair, the result of the stubborn French patriotism of the Alsatian Jews who after 1871 refused to remain in Alsace under German rule and wandered into the interior of France, creating prejudice and hostility by their Germanic guttural French and uncouth mannerisms? Dreyfus himself belonged to one of these Alsatian Jewish families.
And as with Hitler Germany now, the Dreyfus Affair was at bottom the uprising of humiliated national pride smarting under military defeat and subjection, and in just the same way seeking to find its own vindication in a “great Jewish conspiracy to deliver France to the enemy.” We shall understand so much more if we look beyond our immediate Jewish concerns.
Hitler would never have come to power had the world treated Germany differently. Nearly two years ago Bruening gave the world due warning. His country’s situation was desperate, he said; it had come to the end of its moral and material endurance. Mr. Garvin, the doyen of English journalists, examining his statement at the time wrote: The Chancellor of the Reich was not defiant, but honest. He did not flaunt or flout; he never said “Whether we have the means or not, we will not pay.” What he said in fact was “We have not the means; and we cannot pay.” For the present and for a long time to come this is the truth. It is futile to blink at it. The Chancellor’s actual words, though incisive and decisive, were mild in comparison with the feeling of the German people. Bruening has done his best for wisdom. Those who do not like Solomon, Mr. Garvin concluded, must deal with Jeroboam in the shape of Herr Hitler.
The world has preferred Hitler. And now that the world has goaded and driven Germany to madness, are we to sing paeans of praise to it because the madman is imperilling Jewish (and other) lives?
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.
