Part 3 (1/2)

Magazine authors.h.i.+p.

News distribution.

The liquor business.

The loan business.

These, only to name the industries with national and international sweep, are in control of the Jews of the United States, either alone or in a.s.sociation with Jews overseas.

The American people would be vastly surprised if they could see a line-up of some of the ”American business men” who hold up our commercial prestige overseas. They are mostly Jews. They have a keen sense of the value of the American name, and when in a foreign port you stroll up to the office which bears the sign, ”American Importing Company,” or ”American Commercial Company,” or other similarly non-committal names, hoping to find a countryman, an American, you usually find a Jew whose sojourn in America appears to have been all too brief. This may throw a sidelight on the regard in which ”American business methods” are held in some parts of the world. When 30 or 40 different races of people can carry on business under the name ”American,” and do it legally, too, it is not surprising that Americans do not recognize some of the descriptions of American methods which appear in the foreign press. The Germans long ago complained that the rest of the world was judging them by the German-speaking Jewish commercial traveler.

Instances of Jewish prosperity in the United States are commonplace, but prosperity, the just reward of foresight and application, is not to be confounded with control. The prosperity of the Jews can be had by anyone who is willing to pay the price which the Jews pay for it--a very, very high price, as a rule, all things considered--but it would be impossible for any Gentile coalition under similar circ.u.mstances to attain the control which the Jews have won, for the reason that there is lacking in the Gentile a certain quality of working-togetherness, a certain conspiracy of objective, and the adhesiveness of intense raciality, which characterizes the Jew. It is nothing to a Gentile that another man is a Gentile; it is next to everything to a Jew that the man at his door is another Jew. So, if instances of Jewish prosperity were needed, the case of the Temple Emmanu-el, New York, might be cited, which in 1846 could scarcely raise $1,520 for its budget, but in 1868, following the Civil War, raised $708,755 from the rental of 231 pews. And the rise of the Jewish clothing monopoly as one of the results of the same Civil War might be cited as an instance of prosperity plus national and international control.

Indeed, it might be said that the Jew has succeeded in everything he has attempted in the United States, except farming. The explanation usually made in Jewish publications is that ordinary farming is far too simple to engage the Jew's intellect and therefore he is not enough interested in it to succeed, but that in dairy and cattle farming where the ”brain”

is more necessary he has made a success. Numerous attempts have been made in various parts of the United States to start Jewish farming colonies, but their story is a series of failures. Some have blamed the failures on the Jew's lack of knowledge of scientific farming, others on his distaste for manual labor, others on the lack of the speculative element in agriculture. In any case, he stands higher in the non-productive employments than in this basically productive one. Some students of the question state that the Jew never was a man of the land, but always a trader, for which a.s.sertion one of the proofs offered is the Jews' selection of Palestine as their country, that strip of land which formed a gateway between East and West and over which the overland traffic of the world pa.s.sed.

[Issue of June 5, 1920.]

”The Jewish Question still exists. It would be useless to deny it . . .

. The Jewish Question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers.

Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution . . . . The unfortunate Jews are now carrying anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.”

--Theodore Herzl, ”A Jewish State,” p. 4.

IV.

The Jewish Question--Fact or Fancy?

The chief difficulty in writing about the Jewish Question is the supersensitiveness of Jews and non-Jews concerning the whole matter.

There is a vague feeling that even to openly use the word ”Jew,” or to expose it nakedly to print, is somehow improper. Polite evasions like ”Hebrew” and ”Semite,” both of which are subject to the criticism of inaccuracy, are timidly essayed, and people pick their way gingerly as if the whole subject were forbidden, until some courageous Jewish thinker comes straight out with the good old word ”Jew,” and then the constraint is relieved and the air cleared. The word ”Jew” is not an epithet; it is a name, ancient and honorable, with significance for every period of human history, past, present and to come.

There is extreme sensitiveness about the public discussion of the Jewish Question on the part of Gentiles. They would prefer to keep it in the hazy borderlands of their thought, shrouded in silence. Their heritage of tolerance has something to do with their att.i.tude, but perhaps their instinctive sense of the difficulty involved has more to do with it. The princ.i.p.al public Gentile p.r.o.nouncements upon the Jewish Question are in the manner of the truckling politician or the pleasant after-dinner speaker; the great Jewish names in philosophy, medicine, literature, music and finance are named over, the energy, ability and thrift of the race are dwelt upon, and everyone goes home feeling that a difficult place has been rather neatly negotiated. But nothing is changed thereby.

The Jew is not changed. The Gentile is not changed. The Jew still remains the enigma of the world.

Gentile sensitiveness on this point is best expressed by the desire for silence--”Why discuss it at all?” is the att.i.tude. Such an att.i.tude is itself a proof that there is a problem which we would evade if we could.

”Why discuss it at all?”--the keen thinker clearly sees in the implications of such a question, the existence of a problem whose discussion or suppression will not always be within the choice of easy-going minds.

Is there a Jewish Question in Russia? Unquestionably, in its most virulent form. Is it necessary to meet that Question in Russia?

Undoubtedly, meet it from every angle along which light and healing may come.

Well, the percentage of the Jewish population of Russia is just one per cent more than it is in the United States. The majority of the Jews themselves are not less well-behaved in Russia than they are here; they lived under restrictions which do not exist here; yet in Russia their genius has enabled them to attain a degree of power which has completely baffled the Russian mind. Whether you go to Rumania, Russia, Austria or Germany, or anywhere else that the Jewish Question has come to the forefront as a vital issue, you will discover that the princ.i.p.al cause is the outworking of the Jewish genius to achieve the power of control.

Here in the United States it is the fact of this remarkable minority--a spa.r.s.e Jewish ingredient of three per cent in a nation of 110,000,000--attaining in 50 years a degree of control that would be impossible to a ten times larger group of any other race, that creates the Jewish Question here. Three per cent of any other people would scarcely occasion comment, because we could not meet with a representative of them wherever we went in high places--in the innermost secrecy of the councils of the Big Four at Versailles; in the supreme court; in the councils of the White House; in the vast dispositions of world finance--wherever there is power to get or use. Yet we meet the Jew everywhere in the upper circles, literally everywhere there is power. He has the brains, the initiative, the penetrative vision which almost automatically project him to the top, and as a consequence he is more marked than any other race.

And that is where the Jewish Question begins. It begins in very simple terms--How does the Jew so habitually and so resistlessly gravitate to the highest places? What puts him there? Why is he put there? What does he do there? What does the fact of his being there mean to the world?

That is the Jewish Question in its origin. From these points it goes on to others, and whether the trend becomes pro-Jewish or anti-Semitic depends on the amount of prejudice brought to the inquiry, and whether it becomes pro-Humanity depends on the amount of insight and intelligence.

The use of the word Humanity in connection with the word Jew usually throws a side-meaning which may not be intended. In this connection it is usually understood that the humanity ought to be shown toward the Jew. There is just as great an obligation upon the Jew to show his humanity toward the whole race. The Jew has been too long accustomed to think of himself as exclusively the claimant on the humanitarianism of society; society has a large claim against him that he cease his exclusiveness, that he cease exploiting the world, that he cease making Jewish groups the end and all of his gains, and that he begin to fulfill, in a sense his exclusiveness has never yet enabled him to fulfill, the ancient prophecy that through him all the nations of the earth should be blessed.