World ghettoes of our East Side—are the Jews? Where in New York, in
Cincinnati, in Chicago, in San Francisco? The American Jew is as divided
in his ideals and his behavior as any Gentile. His amusements and his
arts, his family life and his business methods, his loyalties to class,
state and God, are the same tissue of contradictions. Like any Gentile,
he scrambles for the dollar, lives for his belly, shares in the stampede
for cheap delights. As businessman, he also exploits his brother; as
citizen, he votes for the same liars, crude or gilded. He shouts the
same chauvinistic phrases and is ready, with the rest, in time of war,
to rush with the courage of Gadarene swine to his destruction. He enjoys
(and writes) the same inane novels, movies. In a society whose crucial
trait is the abyss between ideal and deed, he—the Jew—is
indistinguishable from his neighbor. Is the “Jewishness” of these modern
Jews a dynamic pattern of action? or is it a mere moldering heap of
sentiment, vanity and habit?
I am speaking of the prosperous American Jew; not yet of the rank and
file, the humble clerks and clothing workers, artisans and mechanics.
These, as Jews, are passive. And in so far as they have Jewish leaders
to make them act (as contradistinguished from labor leaders, for
example), they choose the very type who have grown great by shrewd
collaboration with a world that is the antithesis, in every value, to
what is Jewish. This is a cardinal point in the lethal condition of
American Jewry. Its leaders and spokesmen, in their loyalty to the
exploiting class, have dangerously identified the Jew with a bourgeoisie
that is degenerate and doomed. In the Middle Ages, the Jew was allied
functionally with the rising burgher class whose destiny it was to break
the feudal system. This alliance was one reason for the Jew’s survival.
But burgherdom, in medieval Europe, played a different moral part from
the grande bourgeoisie of today. In the realm of practicable action, the
burgherdom stood for social justice and intellectual freedom, as against
the exploiting landowning gentry and the landowning church. Technically,
the profit system always meant exploitation of labor. But socially, this
early bourgeois exploitation was in the direction of justice, since it
was a departure from slavery and spread the margin of leisure whereby
man’s culture could alone advance. Until the invention of the machine,
some exploitation of men was needed in order that a privileged portion
of mankind could think—and at last, by perfecting the machine, and
spreading possible leisure to all humanity, abolish the need of human
exploitation altogether. The alliance of medieval Jewry with burgherdom
was therefore within the rhythm of advancing social justice, and hence
harmonious with Jewishness. But today, the dominant bourgeoisie is the
power of stratified social injustice: it is the power of war, of
spiritual death and intellectual ruin.
The intensity of American Jewish allegiance to the exploiting class can
be measured by the lives of the prominent Jewish leaders.
Almost without exception they are lawyers, judges, merchants, bankers,
proprietors of newspapers and other vast affairs; men who have grown
great in the American game of grab, men indistinguishable in spirit,
mind and action from thousands of other divided men who (with like
shamelessness) call themselves Christian. In a few instances, they are
writers and rabbis—apologists, rank or subtle, of the exploiting
classes.
Since their deeds are contradictions of their ideals, are such leaders
Jews? Is a folk that such men lead, a Jewish folk? From the Jewish
premise that value and vision must become action, a trait of Jewry has
ever been to create true Jewish leaders.
But it may be said, there are other Jews, greater than these: not
necessarily American, yet the real leaders of Jewry. There are Albert
Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Bergson, Leon
Trotsky ... others. These men are great, and are leaders, and are Jews.
But they are not leaders of Jews. They are leaders of scientists,
philosophers, artists, revolutionists. They and other great Jewish men
of our times are products of Jewish life; but modern Jewry cannot claim
them. They are the offspring of the old communal Jewry which still
existed in their formative years. And the fact that they have been
forced to function quite outside modern Jewry is another proof of its
present dissolution. The Jewish world no longer holds its men of genius;
the highest products of its spirit, of its intellectual discipline and
of its sense of life, leave the parent body. And the world of Jews, in
deadly division from the Jewish spirit, chooses leaders who hasten its
death.
Consider now the pitiful, the ironical condition of the Jew. To suffer
for a cause that our soul loves is bearable: is, indeed—since we must
suffer—man’s most enviable destiny. But to suffer for nothing! To be
hated and ruined as a Jew, when one’s life is not Jewish! The Jews of
Germany, taken as a whole, exist _inertially_ because their past way was
Jewish and because it takes more than a generation to destroy a way of
life so strong and so vital. If two hundred years ago, they had ceased
living as Jews, Hitler and the Nazis, who are ignorant men, would
probably not have heard of them. Hitler persecutes them now because in a
confused way he has inherited what was a real reason, then, for a German
in revolt against Western civilization to dislike real Jews who had so
much to do with its creating.
But that is only half the picture. The Jews are allied with an agonizing
and desperate middle class. When that class flourished, the Jews,
functioning in it, were tolerated by it. Now that it droops and its
spoils dwindle, it turns—like a man in a panic—against its weaker
neighbor. It is the principle of “every man for himself”—the basic law
of bourgeois life. Oh, the ironical confusion in the fate of the modern
Jew! He is persecuted by barbarous and desperate men because of ideals
that he no longer lives: and he is persecuted by a class to which, in
the main, he is loyal, because he is a rival of its barbarous way of
life—a way that contradicts his own ideals!
This is Germany today: who doubts that with variations it may be America
tomorrow? that it may be any capitalistic country where the Jew, _in his
present_, is a minority factor in a desperate middle class and _in his
past_ a reminder of the liberal culture of the Western world, against
which that desperate class is in revolt?
b.
Now for the final questions: How can the Jew survive in the modern
world, _and why should he survive_? To answer clearly, I must first
state some of the reasons why he survived in the past. And since the
kaleidoscope of Jewish generations is so great, I take the latest period
of undisputed Jewish health: the Middle Ages (which lasted for the Jews
until the eighteenth century), when the Jews lived, harmonious and
whole, within a Europe of violent divisions, and often savagely hostile.
1. Jewry’s strict unity of ideal and conduct made the community,
although small and surrounded, an efficient body. All its energy was
conserved for itself and applied functionally for survival; whereas in
a greater community where value and deed are divided, there is
conflict, loss of energy, disease.
2. In Judaism, both ideally and actively, there was no separation
between man and group. Although infiltrations from Alexandrian and
Platonized Egypt corrupted the ancient Hebrew knowledge that there is
no personal immortality, this superstition of a surviving individual
soul (the deepest cause of the failure of European cultures) was never
strong against the healthy Jewish unification of individual and
commune. Therefore, medieval Jewry had no destructive egoism—no “great
men”—to mislead it for discordant personal ends. (The egoistic leader
battens on the accumulated egoisms of his rabble.) In Jewry, the
leaders were as organic to the commune as an eye or a brain to the
body. Moreover, these leaders were not soldiers, not megalomaniacs of
fame and money: they were the seers and the thinkers. Here, then, was
a social body whose eyes and brain literally led it—in contrast to our
modern world in which the eye and the brain often appear to be
discards or decorations.
3. Jewry had, despite theological and cultural differences, a deep
community of values with Christian cultural leaders. These recognized
the worth of the Jewish ethic; the beauty of the Jews’ concept of
Godhead as immanent in human action. The best in Christian Europe at
all times respected, and often learned from, the “hated” Jews. And
during the ages when the church was strong, it had enough influence to
defend the Jews against extremities of persecution.
4. Through these times, _Jewry had an economic function_. Its
activities in international commerce, banking, exchange, and in the
practical sciences of communication and of navigation, did a necessary
work in feudal Europe. And this allied Jewry with the struggling
middle class—the burghers who were to inherit and transform feudal
Europe. Without this function and the alliance with a rising economic
class, Jewry’s inner harmony of action could not have saved it. For
there would have been lacking a harmony of function within the larger
body of the Gentile world.
To return, now, to our time; the Jew obviously can survive, if the
immutable essence of the Jewish social organism can somehow be
transformed to function in the modern world. And obviously, the Jew
should survive, if this essential Jewish nature still has a part to play
before mankind. These questions are the subject for a book—which I shall
write, if I live long enough. Here, I can but sketch my answer.
The Jewish principle of value-in-Being, of God and social justice, of
the _enactment_ of value by individual and group, did not exist _in
vacuo_. It existed within a matrix. And this matrix was the agrarian
economic-cultural world—a world so basally static that the
eighteenth-century Galician Jew shared it, fundamentally unchanged, with
Amos and Isaiah. So long as the matrix held, the Jew could follow the
commandments of his prophets _as interpreted by twenty centuries of
fathers_.
We may now see why the Jewish organism broke in the impact with the
modern world. Modern industrialism destroyed the simple, paternalistic
economy under which the Jewish commune _approximated_ social justice.
And modern thought and science corroded the theologic-ethic form under
which the Jew knew God. To survive, the Jewish principle must be
transfigured into modern terms. Judaism must embrace an again workable
program approximating social justice: and that means the unequivocal
destruction of the unjust anarchy called industrial capitalism. And
Judaism must redefine what it has always meant—or meant to mean—by God.
Now, let the reader answer: Is the principle of social justice needed
today? And that _Man_ may live, must there be, not an anthill system,
but a living social form that nurtures the inward need of every human
being to create and to share his inward vision and value? If your answer
is Yes, then there is need in the world of what has been, for nearly
thirty hundred years, the Jewish principle. And as if history urged that
this cardinal dual need of the world may yet be the peculiar business of
the Jewish people (there have always been, in all nations, saintly and
isolated men who lived and died for it, as greatly as any Jew), the need
stands most forcibly answered in the work of two Jews—Jews of a “new
remnant,” Marx and Spinoza.
I place Marx first, because in the perspective of function he comes
first—although Spinoza lived two centuries before him and profoundly
influenced his thinking. Marx, from the Jewish premise of history as an
organism evolving toward “good,” has given to the industrial world a
realistic logic and a technique of social justice. Time, of course, has
amended or refuted many details of his plan; yet it is nonetheless
categorical that every man who wants to _enact_ social justice in the
modern world must be a Marxist in spirit although he may reject certain
Marxist dogmas. The modern Jew, if he is to exist, must interpret Marx
as a prophet as surely as his forebears interpreted Moses and Isaiah.
Marx (despite chronology) comes before Spinoza, because the social
discord is a disease immediately threatening the survival of civilized
mankind; and because collective consciousness comes before mature
self-consciousness. Marx without Spinoza is an imperative, immediate,
primitive first step in action. Spinoza, without Marx, remains an
abstract philosophy, removed from possible action.
But as Marx is the man who most surely projected the prophetic
aspiration of social justice into a workable modern program, Spinoza is
the prophet who has completed the purifying of the knowledge of God into
the God of inwardness, of substance and of action. If Marx carries on
Moses and Ezra, Spinoza carries on Isaiah and Jesus. It is he who has
best established the organic being of God _in_ matter and in human
thought; who has made rational the ancient mystic intuition that the
cosmic dwells within the man in so far as the man grows self-conscious.
By giving value to matter in a form acceptable to the age of science,
Spinoza will crown the work of Marx, who gives reality to a program of
social justice in the age of machines.
Now, it may be that Spinoza and Marx are the swan song of Jewry: the
final message of a great people before its ultimate death. It may be
that the work of unifying and enacting their contributions shall fall to
other peoples. There is a Soviet Union in the world, and China, and the
two Americas; from such virgin soil may come the fulfillment of the
prophets. I do not know. But I do know that, if the Jew is to survive as
an organic group, he must enact his modern prophets as his fathers
(after rejecting them, also) enacted the prophets of Scripture. And I
conclude by broadly sketching what the modern Jewish way of living must
be.
To begin with (for, I repeat—in the field of action, Marx comes before
Spinoza), the Jew must renounce loyalty to the exploiting class. Without
that, all his “service” is a “vain oblation.” Today, as twenty-six
centuries ago, the word of the prophet is true:
Bring no more vain oblations;
It is an offering of abomination unto Me;
New moon and sabbath, the holding of convocations—
I cannot endure iniquity along with solemn assembly....
Cease to do evil;
Learn to do well;
Seek justice....
“_Learn_ to do well!” In our industrial world, this means active
allegiance to the class whose historic function it is to abolish
economic exploitation—the base of social injustice and of war—by doing
away with economic classes altogether. This new allegiance will not be
easy; since the Jews for centuries have been forced to earn their bread
within the middle class, it will have the value, by itself, of a
religious conversion. But this new loyalty as a group does not mean that
the Jew will be submerged in the working class or in any proletarian
body like the communists. He must fight for the workers (and the farmer
and the intellectual, too, are workers), help them with his brain and
body; but he may be detached from them, at least at present, because of
his particular stewardship of values—“the realm of God,” in each man,
with which the harried and hungry worker has not had time to grow
familiar.
The revolutionary proletariat cannot trouble about God. There are good
functional reasons for the atheism of most Marxists. The word “God” has
been monopolized so long by the apologists of the class of exploitation:
theologians, philosophers, poets! To detach (as Spinoza did) the reality
in God from all the accumulated lies is a problem that calls for
subtlety beyond the present anguished state of the masses; for energy
that the masses and their immediate leaders _cannot spare_ from the
day’s struggle. It is unhistorical to expect the active revolutionist of
our time to do more than reject the false “God” of the churches and the
synagogues. Yet the true experience of God must not die even in the heat
of revolutionary battle. The first Marxist ends cannot be won and man be
raised from animal penury and fear into the human stage of security and
leisure unless the individual finds life good: and this can be only
through the Spinozistic sense of God. The experience of the divine in
mortal life must be preserved. Wherefore, there is need today of a
people, scattered through the nations, that know and nurture the
experience of God. By the tradition of ages, by their ancient prophets
and their modern thinkers, the Jews have inherited the challenge and the
_right_ to be such a people.
This Jewish “remnant”—and only the remnant, through the ages, has
preserved the Jew—will be loyal to the class of social revolution; but
through its consciousness of God it will be still separate, and must
remain so. It will understand the functional “atheism” of many
simple-minded revolutionists, and not demand that it be understood in
return. The God in man will be the still secret treasure it must
lovingly preserve against the day when men, free of fear and hunger,
learn to look within themselves where God is. Thus, the Jews will still
be a peculiar people. And they will be subject to the dislike and
distrust of the zealot for whom the word “God” is anathema; although it
was in the name of God that his values of social justice and individual
dignity were preserved and prepared, through the barbaric ages.
Now, a majority cannot rise to so high a challenge of rebirth. Bankers,
merchants, lawyers, professional men and politicians, even artisans and
mechanics among the Jews, will not yield their old allegiance to the
middle class, although that class turns (as it is turning!) against
them. And these will disappear in the general human welter, as Jews have
disappeared in Assyria, Babylon, Alexandria and Rome. But what a
magnificent remnant there may be! The teacher, the doctor, the engineer,
the clear-eyed man of commerce who knows and hates the rottenness of
capitalist commerce, the Jewish worker and the student—above all, the
Jewish student! Already, these are on the side of the productive class
that alone holds the energy to remake the world. Already, they accept
Marx. Let them fulfill this knowledge with devotion to the inward
value—the God whom Spinoza has explored in man and in matter—and there
will be again, in the world, a Jewish remnant!
Persecution? It is already here, even in America; and as the
capitalistic era shrinks, darkens and despairs, it will grow worse. The
lesson of Hitler, in offering the Jew as the traditional scapegoat for
the accumulated rage of a bewildered people, is bound to be learned;
already we have our little Hitlers, profiteers of suffering stupidity
and blindness. The Jewish people are going to suffer. And for those who
are individually and innocently hurt, and who know not why, there can be
no soothing words. Before their anguish, we can only bow our heads,
humbly, as they enact the world-old mystery of pain. But at least, for
the conscious Jew, the real Jew, there will again be reason for
Jewishness, reason to bear his persecution; and comrades to help him
bear it. And if individual Jews die, their death will be in the cause of
humane life; no man can ask a higher guerdon. And the history of the
Jews will hearten them with knowledge, that when a people is ready to be
persecuted and to die for a good cause, the cause lives—and the people.
_Postscript_:
This article, which appeared in “The New Republic” in 1933 and was
reprinted in many journals, is itself an abbreviated form of an essay
published in French by “Europe,” of Paris, and in Spanish by “Sur,” of
Buenos Aires. I have used it here, rather than the longer version,
because both are a project or programmatic abstract of the essay I
must someday write, in which all the terms of my argument will be more
fully and fundamentally defined. Recent attacks on socialism and
communism by prominent Jews—rich men, shallow, slavish, scared, of the
kind I have described, or by truckling labor leaders, make the writing
of this essay an imperative duty.
I trust it is clear in my conclusion about the possible leadership
of a Jewish “remnant” in our recreative task, that I have not
mentioned the like necessary role of a Christian “remnant,” only
because this paper deals specifically with the Jews. That the
prophetic-revolutionary strain is not dead in the American
Protestant churches is proved by the labors of such men as Reinhold
Niebuhr—one of the truly creative minds of America.
3. FROM MANY MESSAGES TO MANY PEOPLE
_i. War Is with Us Now
To the First United States Congress Against War, Held in New York, 1933_
Two thousand delegates from every part of the country, and of every
shade of progressive opinion, are meeting in New York in a Congress
Against War. A most laudable enterprise; and a most needed. For war
threatens the world; and with war, civilization, still staggering from
the blows of the last conflict, may definitely founder. The crisis is
immediate and tragic. But no congress of good men can avert it. All that
this congress can do is to bring men’s consciousness to focus upon the
present danger; and to raise men’s consciousness to the pitch of
intensity where it becomes action.
Before everything else, we must become aware that _war is already here_!
The political and economic setup of the modern nations IS war. Battles
on land and sea, millions of lives destroyed, cities and fields laid
waste, are but a concentrated form of the jungle anarchy that is called
“government” in the metropolis, that is called “diplomacy” in the
embassies, that is called “business” in factories, mills, mines and
markets.
So long as we have nations playing the lone game of power and
aggression, or banding together like packs of wolves in “alliance”
against other nations, we have war—_war in peace_. And all the
congresses of the world will not prevail against the inevitable,
periodic outbreak of this constant war into pitched battles.
So long as we have a social system within each nation that divides the
citizens into classes whose economic basis is exploiter and exploited; a
social system in which success means power gained at the expense of
others and enjoyed to the exclusion of others, we have war—_civil war_
in peace, within each nation. The small ruling class is brutalized by
its success in enslaving others; the large classes are brutalized by
their slavery—brutalized the more if they are not conscious of
enslavement. In such a social system (and all the “planned economics” of
capitalism can only make it more dangerous by disguising it), it is
inevitable that the state and the nation will reflect, on a large scale,
the jungle spirit of individual men. It is inevitable that the jungle
greed of such a state and nation will come into conflict with the greed
of other nations where the same system prevails. It is inevitable that
this _normal_ state of conflict shall break out, from time to time, in
formal warfare.
But our present condition of war is even deeper! So long as war prevails
in the internal economic structure of each nation, it will prevail as
well in the internal psychic structure of the men and women who
constitute the nation. A society that is a rationalized jungle of greed
and violence, encourages the lust for individual power in all men and
women and atrophies the social instinct in all men and women. The
members of such a society war upon each other in their individual lives:
and each individual soul is itself the seat of warfare. Of course, such
divided men band together in gangs, classes, nations, to make war upon
other gangs, classes, nations.
War has been the constant condition of what we call civilization. War
between individuals, war between classes, war between peoples—each
seeking profit and power at the expense of others. But there is a new
factor in the situation of today.
Modern science has made war deadlier than it has ever been: so that war
now threatens—not only persons and individual nations, but all mankind.
And this new factor of science, by its potentiality of large-scale
production and co-operation, has also made the old systems of
exploitation and rivalry no longer needed.