The New Anti-Semitic Workings; The New Anti-Semitic Movement
A Review
By Herman Bernstein
THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM. By Israel Zangwill. The Macmillan Company.
THE JEW AND AMERICAN IDEALS. By John spargo, Harper & Brothers.
THE war's aftermath has brought forth a flood of anti-Semitic books
and pamphlets in various lands. The monarchists, the reactionaries,
the anti-Semites of darkest Russia and of militaristic Prussia, in
their quest of a scapegoat, are aiming their old, poisonous weapons
against the Jews. They are endeavoring to fix on the Jewish people
the blame for the World War, and for the peace. They are describing
the Jews as the "Cause of the World Unrest." They are picturing
Bolshevism as an exclusively Jewish movement. They are pointing to
Russia, Germany and Hungary, and then are warning other countries of
the alleged Jewish peril. They have started an organized campaign of
propaganda to tell the world that the Jews are conspiring against it,
that their aim is to break down Christian civilization and impose a
Jewish dictatorship throughout the world. To prove all this
anti-Jewish agitators have exhumed a forgotten and discredited
Russian book containing the so-called "Protocols of the Wise Men of
Zion," by one Sergius Nilus. I have made a thorough investigation of
the Nilus "Protocols" and the Black Hundred literature of the period
of 1905 in Russia, and found indisputable documentary evidence
showing that the so-called "protocols" grew out of a piece of
blood-curdling fiction by a discredited German novelist, involved in
forgery, and were afterward transformed into fact, changed and
elaborated by Prussian and Russian anti-Semites. The documents
showing the various stages of this malicious forgery appear in my
little book on this subject, entitled "The History of a Lie." The new
anti-Semitic "literature" has called forth several books of
importance, revealing the causes of anti-Semitic agitation, exposing
its unscrupulous methods and explaining the dangers lurking in the
un-Christian, anti-Jewish propaganda to the welfare and peace of the
nations.
Lucien Wolf, the famous Anglo-Jewish publicist, has written a series
of striking essays which have now been published in a book form under
the title, "The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs, or the
Truth About the Forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion." In this
little volume Mr. Wolf has analyzed with great erudition the forged
"protocols" upon which The London Morning Post based its charges
against the Jews, and he has proved the falsity of the accusations
against the Jews with regard to Bolshevism.
Israel Zangwill devotes a chapter of his new book, "The Voice of
Jerusalem," to this subject. This chapter, "The Legend of the
Conquering Jew," is a masterpiece. It is quite in the best style of
the famous essayist and novelist, who presents the facts in masterly
fashion, with scintillating empigrams and cutting satire.
Two recent scurrilous books, "Jewry Ueber Alles" and "The Jewish
Peril," carry in their titles this legend of the conquering Jew,
(writes Mr. Zangwill). The latter work a mass of mystical nonsense
translated from the Russian and published by concerted action in
various languages after being peddled in manuscript around the
Governments of Europe and America by notorious Russian anti-Semites
as though it were a precious secret document, though it had already
appeared in print in 1905, prefesses to reveal the secrets of the
Sanhedrim; but the tirades against England for drawing upon the
support of the "Sanhendrim" in her universal intrigues have been
prudently cut out of the English edition, for they would spoil the
game. (For cutting out the whole £10,000 were asked!)
There is no Sanhedrim now extant, no "Learned Elders of Zion" exist
whose meetings can be recorded in "protocols" and "Nilus" seeming to
have discovered this by the time his book reached a third and
enlarged edition in 1911, substituted for his original melodramatic
mendacities the story that his documents --described in the first
edition as stolen from French Freemasonry--were simply the secret
reports of the Zionist Congress at Basle in 1897. Unfortunately for
"Nilus," I happened to be at all the sittings of that Congress,
which was the first, and which I have described in my "Dreamers of
the Ghetto." Nothing could be less like the operations of a Jewish
Jesuitry than this gathering, which laid the foundations of the
Zionist movement, and formulated its program as "the acquisition of a
publicly, legally recognized home for the Jewish people in
Palestine." As this was an absolutely new movement in Jewry,
initiated in spite of great public opposition by a few more or less
impecunious publicists, it seems indeed a strange manifestation on
the part of the secret Semitic gang that ran-and runs-all the papers,
Parliaments and banks of the world, and in whose iconoclastic
propaganda Charles Darwin was a prominent puppet!
Mr. Zangwill then reviews the economic condition of the Jews in
Europe. He points out that in the beginning of the twentieth century
the Jews of Russia, constituting one-half of the Jewish race, had no
staple occupation, and the average possession of the Russian Jew was
under $5. He quotes Sir Stuart Samuel, who recently made an
investigation in Poland and Galicia, to the effect that the large
majority of the Jews there are very poor, suffering severely from
hunger and privation. He adds that Jerusalem has notoriously been a
hotbed of mendicity, where a tenth of a penny sufficed to evoke a
beggar's blessing.
Then he says:
The Jewish proletariat is not a money success, though he succeeds in
living where others would die, because it has had for so long to
fight artificial disabilities as well as natural. And the power of
surviving among hostile conditions means the power of prospering when
the conditions are ameliorated. It is in America that we find the
greatest aggregation of Jewish well-being, for here conditions have
been peculiarly favorable, though even here there are no Hebrew names
vying in magnificence with those of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Astor or
Pierpont Morgan. The manufacture of millionaires from nobodies,
which is a feature of American life, has been due to the boundless
field of enterprise and to the conditions of social equality which
prevail in the States * * *
Discussing Jewish solidarity, Mr. Zangwill remarks:
I suppose nobody is in a better position than I to give the lie to
the charge of Jewish solidarity; I, whose life has been half wasted
in the effort to bring it about, who for twenty years toiled to unite
the Jewish millionaires in the quest for a Jewish State, and whose
supremest triumph lay in assembling three of them, a British, a
Russian and an American, in one committee room to promote emigration
from a Jewish centre!
Undoubtedly there are Rothschilds in London, in Paris and in Vienna,
and perhaps still in Frankfort. But the fantastic idea that this
concatenation of cousins holds the purse strings of the world and is
ready to plunge it into war without a qualm so that it may finance
the whirlwind and capitalize the storm, is only to be taken
seriously because its effects are serious. One would hve imagined
that the discovery in the Kaiser's archives of a letter from the late
Alfred de Rothschild pleading desperately for the peace of Europe
would have given the quietus to this myth. I well remember how
astonished Dr. Herzl was at discovering-when he tried to engage them
in Zionism--within what a rigid ambit the Rothschilds dared move of
their own initiative, how circumsribed they felt themselves by the
will of the powers, how chauvinistically each branch of the
cousinship responded to its local jingoism.
Another charge against the Jews in the "protocols" is that they have
conspired to secure control of the entire press of the world. Of
this Mr. Zangwill says:
As for the press being in the hands of the Jews, let us bring this
question, too, into the open. There comes to my mind a recollection
of a conversation with the late Leopold de Rothschild at a moment
when The London Times was in low water and in the market and had been
offered to New Court. There is no organ which it would be more
important to have in Jewish hands, whether for the mythical
aggressive or for purely defensive purposes. * * *
The Rothschilds with open eyes allowed the most influential organ in
the world to go to Lord Northcliffe, and thus ultimately to fall into
the hands of an anti-Semitic editor. A quaint way indeed of
conducting a world plot! I know only two daily papers in London of
Jewish editorship or proprietorship, The Daily Express and The Daily
Telegraph, and it is difficult to decide which is more radically
British.
Dr. Herzl was one of the editors of the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna
and its most brilliant feuillentonist, yet never while he lived was
a word about the Zionist movement allowed to appear in this powerful
organ, which was soon alone in boycotting the theme.
Ten thousand European papers owned and edited by Jews would not make
a Jewish press, for they would have nothing in common unless it was
their anti-Jewishness.
Discussing Bolshevism as a Jewish movement, Mr. Zangwill writes:
The red road is not the path of Zion. Nor has it been cut out by
Jews in particular. Its inhumanly rigid straightness is the work of
the Russian ideologue, Lenin. And if there is an excessive
percentage of Jews among the commissaries it is due partly to the
disproportion of Jewish figures in everything and anything, but more
to the general illiteracy of Russia, the vast majority of whose
population is analphabetic. Jewry produces great revolutionary
leaders as it produces great mathematicians or great actors; but its
proletariat is the least revolutionary of all the proletariats, as is
proved by its meekness in accepting revolutions imposed by the
environment.
He then points out that the first generator of Bolshevism was the
fleet at Kronstadt, into which not a single Jew was admitted. Of
Bolshevist leadership he says:
The only piece of luck in the business is that the head and front of
the offense is a Slav. All Israel should set up a statue to Lenin
for not being a Jew.
John Spargo's book, The Jew and American Ideals," is a powerful
denunciation of anti-Semitism which is being transplanted to this
country by agents of foreign reaction and the dead autocracies. Mr.
Spargo explains that he decided to write the book because he had
noticed that some of his personal friends were inclined to take the
"protocols" seriously and that they believed Bolshevism was a Jewish
movement. His brief foreward follows:
This little book was written without the knowledge of any Jew. It is
not a defense of the Jew. It is not a pro-Jewish argument. It is a
defense of American ideals and institutions against anti-Semitism; a
plea for Christian civilization.
Mr. Spargo starts by depicting Henry Ford, the "pacifist who turned
anti-Semite," and by protesting against his anti-Jewish progaganda:
Believing as I do that Mr. Ford is primarily responsible for a
propaganda which is subversive of the best traditions and
institutions of this Republic, and which has everywhere and at all
times resulted in shameful crimes against humanity and in resistance
to every progressive and humane movement, I feel that it is my right
and duty to utter solemn remonstrance and protest.
He then analyzes the "Great Jewish Conspiracy" of which the Jews are
accused by the sponsors of the "protocols," and describes the
"Mystery of the Protocols" and the various conflicting versions
regarding their origin given by the "Russian mystic," Sergius Nilus,
who introduced a Russian adaptation of German anti-Semitic fiction as
a Jewish plot for world dominion.
Mr. Spargo says:
In closing this chapter it is perhaps well that some record should be
made of these alleged protocols during the World War. Not long after
the United States had begun active participation in the war against
Germany it came to my attention that typewritten manuscripts
purporting to prove that the war was part of a great conspiracy of
international Jews were being circulated. On at least three
different occasions, early in 1918, I was asked about this charge.
I was told then that the British and American Governments were in a
special sense the agents of this Jewish conspiracy. * * *
The "protocols" have been changed many times, from fiction into fact,
and then modified and elaborated to suit every new occasion. The
anti-Semitic agents of reaction and their dupes have endeavored to
prove the authenticity of the so-called "protocols" by pointing to
Bolshevism as a Jewish movement and as the fulfillment of the
"protocols." The anonymous author of "The Cause of the World
Unrest," the anonymous writer of anti-Jewish articles in The Dearborn
Independent, and the agents of the Russian Black Hundreds, the
Russian National Society and the Association Unity of Russia have
published lists of "Jewish" names of Bolshevist Commissaries to show
that Russia is now ruled by the Jews. Many of the people mentioned
in those lists are not Jewish, and many are not Bolsheviki.
Kerensky is to them a Jew, and The Dearborn Independent says that
Lenin's children speak Yiddish. The absurdities to which the
anti-Semites and their dupes resort in their effort to discredit the
Jews are so obvious that they defeat their own ends.
Mr. Spargo has amde a thorough investigation of the question of
Jewish participation in the Bolshevist movement, and his chapter
dealing with this point is illuminating and authoritative. He
says:
I have followed very closely the accounts of the proceedings of the
Bolshevist movement and of the Communist Party, as reported in the
official press, and have paid special attention to the activity of
the Jews. Up to the rpesent my list of Jews holding prominent
positions in either the Soviet Government or the Communist Party
contains less than twenty names, yet I believe it is fairly
complete. It includes the names of Trotzky, Steklov, Zineviev,
Kamenev, Uritzky, Volodarsky, Sverdlov, Ganetsky, Helfandt (Parvus),
Riazanov, Radek, Litvinov, Joffe and Larin. It will be rather
difficult, I think, to name any important omissions. As against
this meagre list of Jews, a very hastily compiled list of non-Jews
who are prominent in the Government or in the Communist Party
contains seventy-five names. In this list I do not include any of
the many former Generals of the Czar's army now holding important
positions in the Red Army and various departments of the Soviet
Government. With entire confidence I submit these incontestable
facts to my readers in reply to The Dearborn Independent.
When it was pointed out that Jews were conspicuously indentified with
the anti-Bolshevist forces, The Dearborn Independent abandoned the
charge of Bolshevism and insinuated another charge. It said: "Look
how the Jews control every phase of political opinion in Russia!
Doesn't there seem to be some ground for the feeling that they are
desirous of ruling everywhere?"
I venture to say, writes Mr. Spargo, that when the history of this
tragic episode in the life of Russia is authoritatively written, it
will be found that Jews have not been responsible for the most
objectionable features of Bolshevism. Not even Trotzky need be
excluded from this generalization, for, while it is true that his
genius made Bolshevism the formidable military power it became, the
brutal excesses of the Red Terror must be charged against such men
as Peters, the Lett, and Dzerzhinsky, the Pole. * * *
I am not here and now concerned to defend the Jew. My concern is the
defense of Christian civilization, of American ideals and
institutions, of the noblest Anglo-Saxon traditions. These things
are our greatest wealth; they are the heritage of our children.
When, therefore, this hateful propaganda imperils these things, it is
both my duty and my privilege to defend them. Anti-Semitism has no
place in Christian civilization; its spirit and its language are both
alien and hostile to our Republic and to the genius of the race of
Milton and Lincoln. * * *
Wherever and whenever there has been an organized propaganda of
anti-Semitism it has invariably been closely intertwined with every
other contemptible force. * * *
I am opposed to anti-Semitism, not alone for humanitarian reasons,
but as a matter of loyalty to America. Anti-Semitism is treason to
the American ideal. * * *
Into the motives of Henry Ford I do not care to enter. I suspect
that they are pathological in their origin. * * * My pity for the
man is as profound as my contempt for the propaganda with which he
has chosen to associate himself. To be capable of deliberately
inciting and fostering race hatred at any time is to cease to be
capable of enjoying the fellowship of decent and just men and women;
to incite such hatred now, in the midst of such unprecendented
suffering and the universal need of fellowship and healing, is a
pitiful self-degradation.
For America's safety and honor I plead for unity against this
sinister foe lurking within the gates, as against all other foes,
no matter under what flag they may be marshaled.
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