A persistent little fellow kept the office telephone operator working overtime the other day with a request that he be allowed to see this department on a matter of “vital importance.” At length, when he was shown in, he hung his umbrella over a cabinet, draped his rain coat over a chair, looked us sternly in the eye, and in the manner of one offering a choice of weapons, announced, “I speak five languages fluently, including English.”
“I’ll take English,” we said, and at ten paces we re-fought the battles of history from the establishment of democratic independence in America in 1776 to the creation of the French Fascist state in 1935.
He is a French Jew with a remarkable memory for names, dates and theories, so remarkable and so accurate, in fact, that we were licked from Waterloo on. Once a member of the French Embassy and now prominent in French social circles in New York, he spoke with authority.
“The American Jew,” he said, “must meet the coming crisis with dignity and with courage. He must meet it reasonably.”
The crisis, it developed, is twofold: Fascism in France, and Fascism in the United States. To meet it with dignity, he revealed, Jews must waste no time in climbing on the nationalist bandwagon in this country. This done, demands upon their courage will not be so great when the Fascist flag is hoisted, side by side with the Stars and Stripes, over the national Capitol. With regard to meeting the situation reasonably, he said, “This is the only way to do so.”
FORECASTS FRENCH FASCIST STATE
He asks that Jews in New York show no great consternation when the French Fascists came into power, a development he has marked on his calendar for the near future. He believes that Doumergue’s fall will not be broken by foreign demonstrations and denunciations. “It will only create international difficulties in a purely national problem,” he said.
The gentleman, whose name can not be identified with these facts, says that Fascism in France does not imply persecution of the Jews. And he believes that it will serve only to bind the Jew closer into the French nation, unless meddlers outside the country precipitate a now non-existent distinction between the French “native type” (he could not call them “Aryans”) and French Jews.
“Thus far,” he explained, “due to the admirable foresight of the French Jews, racial and religious barriers have been wiped out. French Jews have made an effort to contribute men to the army and to every national cause magnificent sums of money.”
WILL SUPPORT ZIONISM
Himself a Zionist, he believes that Zionism will be given favorable support under the French Fascist government, and he says that the synagogue will be carefully preserved as one of the national religions of the New France.
French Fascism, his account made clear, would retain the essential requirements of Jewry, its religion, its history, and its customs, but it would throw off old bugaboos which have forever brought on persecution. Unlike German Fascism, where all but “Aryans” are cast from the fold of the national elect, and more like Russian Communism where racial parity is perfect, what with Stalin’s ordinances against discrimination, French Fascism would be moulded.
The upshot of his discourse, as we understood it, was that French Jewry would no longer be regarded as a race but rather as a religion under Fascism.
“And,” he looked back as he adjusted his raincoat and remove his umbrella from the cabinet, “we’ll have to do the same here in America. We’ll have to find a decent Fascist leader with a rational viewpoint and support him.”
Personally, we prefer to continue to march with democracy…. We have yet failed to find that autocratic regimes have ever been very favorable to Jews and even where this was the case, the favor was just as easily replaced by persecution and terror. One has only to think of the Jews and the medieval kings and princes.
Besides the very essence of Jewish life and history has been the everlasting struggle of the Jew for democracy, so much so that the enemies of Jews chose to use the innate democracy of the Jew as an argument against him.
No, we do not believe the Jew will take kindly even to a French Fascism.
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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.
