From a far-off land I came, a sad-eyed, pale-faced, poetic young Jew,
with an unspeakable love of my people burning in my heart. Of
Polish-Russian parentage, there was implanted in my nature an
indefinable sorrow (born perhaps of my father’s and mother’s
persecution), which left me high-strung and sensitive to the
anti-Semitic taunts of my schoolmates.
Given to idle dreaming by some old abandoned shaft or roaming the
deserted alluvial diggings of the little mining town of my youth, I
would conjure up visions of that new world I had so often read
about—that great country where there was no prejudice against my
race—the New Jerusalem.
Shyly hugging to my breast some borrowed American book or magazine I
would seek the shadows of the huge decaying poppet legs and dream over
the pages containing many Jewish faces, and I read with pride and
gratitude of the high places occupied by my people in music, art,
literature and the drama. Filled with Jewish names and good Jewish deeds
was the story of this new Zion, and a longing to be among the great ones
of my people took possession of me. Between my dear father and myself
there was a bond of love too sacred for words, and when I looked upon
his dear face for the last time in this world and bade him a sorrowful
goodby before my departure for the New Jerusalem, he held me close to
his breast and whispered:
“Don’t forget that you are a Jew, and if you need sympathy, love or
help, go to your own race and show your Arba Kanfoth.” (According to
Deuteronomy XXII., 12, the Jews are commanded to wear fringe upon four
corners of their vestures and this command is observed to the present
day by wearing a special garment with these fringes, generally hidden by
the ordinary clothes.)
I carried my father’s words across the ocean in my heart and the memory
of his tear-dimmed eyes and the pressure of his big loving arms has
never left me; in fact, it is so strong at times that I find it hard to
believe that he is not by my side telling me, in spite of many
disappointments, that after all, the Jews are still my brethren and
sisters.
Words fail to describe my feelings as the beauties of the New World
unfolded to me. In wonderful contrast to the melancholy aspect of my own
country was the joyous color of Samoa, with its hallowed memories of
Robert Louis Stevenson, lifted like some fairy veil out of the midst of
the Pacific to give me a glimpse, as it were, of my dream of America—the
New Jerusalem.
Oh, the wonderful days and wonderful nights out on that vast blue
expanse, where God and His stars seemed so near that one formed a good
resolution with every throb of the great engine far down below. On one
of those nights I sat listening to some one playing in the music salon
and I was inwardly thanking the Creator that there was a Puccini in the
world and that he had given us “La Boheme.” There we were, thousands of
miles from anywhere, languidly rolling under a perfect moonlit sky,
listening to the plaintive airs that Puccini had coined for Mimi. There
was hardly a sound but the gentle lapping of the waves breaking against
the vessel’s side till a slight commotion on deck up ahead caused some
of the listeners to investigate. One of the passengers, an ex-Harvard
man, returned with the remark:
“Oh, it’s only some damned Jew. He’s fallen and hurt himself pretty
badly.”
Like a smudge on some beautiful picture was this anti-Semitic sentiment
on such a night, and considering its source I felt deeply grieved. As I
was the only other Jew in the first cabin I made my way to the stateroom
where they had carried the victim of the accident and found him to be a
tender-hearted old man who I subsequently learned had spent a long life
in acts of charity toward his fellow men and women, regardless of creed.
He was returning to end his days in Jerusalem (his Jerusalem, not the
one of my dream), where he could touch again the beloved stones of the
wailing wall.
Something in the old man’s face, that “something” which was in the face
of my father, my brother, that “something” which is in the face of every
Jew, drew me to him, as it has drawn me to all Jews always, and I spent
many intellectual hours by his bedside, picking up grains of wisdom
which he had translated from the Talmud. I wished that the ex-Harvard
man could have known that the old man’s wrinkles were but the pathetic
records of the massacres of his kith and kin which he had witnessed in
his homeland and that he daily prayed for death to efface the awful
memories.
Later on the ex-Harvard man asked me to join in a deck game. I reminded
him that I also was a “damned Jew.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know what you refer to—that was an unfortunate
slip I made the other night—merely a figure of speech, I assure you.”
I found him a charming companion and soon in a cozy corner of the
smoking room we became fast friends and I tried to win him over to think
better of our people.
“I would like to hear your opinion of your fellow Jew after you have
spent, say, twelve months in America,” he said.
Since then I have walked the length and breadth of the great cities of
America, and my very soul has cried out to my fellow Jew: “Suppress
Thyself!” The day I arrived in New York I learned that my dearest
friend, my father, had passed away, and naturally my first thought was
to say the kaddish, a prayer of the Jewish liturgy recited by orphans
for the welfare of the souls of their deceased parents, somewhat after
the fashion of the Catholic mass. Every male of Jewish blood at some
time of his life recites this beautiful prayer. It does not matter how
far one strays from the fold or how much one has denied the faith, there
comes a time when the Jew in him asserts itself and he says the kaddish.
Public prayer among Jews can be recited only in the presence of ten
males above the age of religious maturity, and this assembly is called
minyan. Surely in this great city I would easily find a minyan, I
thought; so I followed the line of least resistance, like any stranger
in a strange land, and sought out the Jewish names best known to the
public. I called at a business house uptown with the name of a great
Hebrew over the door. He was the great man of whom I read with such
pride in the little mining town at the other end of the world. Yes! The
same Jewish face depicted in the huge photograph in the lobby I had seen
in the magazine I had hugged so lovingly at home.
I made my way, full of hope, to his office and was asked by a doorkeeper
my mission. I explained—the doorkeeper was a Hebrew—that I desired to
say kaddish for my father and that I wanted to form a minyan. With a sly
wink he passed me on to several Hebrew clerks and office boys, each of
whom smiled, sneered, and made his little joke about “greenhorns.” Then
I was ushered with many grimaces into the presence of the big man.
Just a minute’s conversation convinced me that he was a Jew in
appearance only, and that he had never known anything of the traditions,
the romance, the art or the literature of our race. He didn’t exactly
know what minyan was, or pretended he didn’t, but recommended me to “one
of our people,” as he put it, who ran a very popular chophouse close by.
I began to realize that I was a stranger among my own people and that
night I walked the streets of great New York with an aching heart.
Everywhere in the hurrying crowds I saw the faces of my brethren and
sisters, thousands, hundreds of thousands of them, hurrying, pushing,
shoving brethren they were, with all the tenderness, the friendship and
the Semitic look gone from their eyes.
“Oh, God!” I thought, “are these the children of Israel? Is this the
persecuted race—that people who had been scattered to the four corners
of the earth?”
Hungry and weary, I made my way as if in a dream to the café of a great
hotel. Everything in the huge room was glaringly false—marble pillars,
oak beams, flowers, were all imitation: a big orchestra sat in a balcony
with an artificial moon and a painted sky as a background; everywhere
were lights, lights and more lights.
From table to table I went but I was roughly reminded that “this” was
reserved and “that” was reserved. Presently glaringly gowned,
bediamonded Jewish women, accompanied by equally vulgar Jewish men,
filed in and occupied every seat, and between mouthfuls of food and
drink their bodies would sway to the voices of other Jews who sang only
of “Mississippi” and “Georgia.” How these people did laugh when they
caught sight of my foreign clothes and my pale, poetic face, and how
they would have screamed with laughter had I shown them my Arba Kanfoth,
that beautiful little token which my poor father fondly imagined would
have made me understood in the New World.
Out into the night I went and found myself struggling in a torrent of
humanity. Every time I received an extra bump or hard push I looked only
to see that my antagonist was a Hebrew. On the street, in the cars, in
the subway, or at the soda fountain, wherever I saw my fellow Jews
blatantly shouting and rudely pushing, I, in spite of my indignation,
felt the love of my race uppermost in my heart, and I wanted to cry out:
“Oh, Jew; dear brothers and sisters, suppress yourselves for the good of
the race! Stand back! For the good of the race!”
Never in the world have our people known such a free country as this,
and it is a privilege to be here, but at times a great fear comes over
me that we are abusing that privilege. Amid the din of Jewish music and
laughter, the newsboys are shouting the names of Jewish murderers (the
Rosenthal case), the gunmen of the city. The bribe givers and the bribe
takers depicted in the news sheets have Jewish countenances. The
gambling house keepers—yes! yes! I know that there are Christians who
are murderers, gamblers and informers, but the Jew is a marked man. He
is distinct, apart, so distinct that in a crowd he is the first noticed.
It is for this reason that I would have my brethren and sisters suppress
themselves, stand back! I would have real Jews take the worst of a
bargain once in a while for the sake of the race. I would have them once
in a while give up their seats in public conveyances, behave modestly in
cafés, dress quietly, and give up the use of assumed Christian names.
There is nothing so pathetic as the man who, with a Hebrew face, assumes
a Christian name. I never go to a public place without wishing that my
fellow Jew would talk less and appear less ostentatious. When one Hebrew
comes in late to a show, marches down the aisle and on the front row
deliberately obstructs the view of people in the audience as he stands
slowly removing and folding his coat and gloves, he seems to cause more
annoyance than if half a dozen Gentiles did the same thing. When a Jew
stands aside and waits patiently at a ticket window, gives his seat to a
lady on a street car or behaves in a refined manner in any walk of life,
he immediately makes friends for our people.
Most of our people, I have found, have aggressive personalities: it is
this aggressiveness which has enabled many immigrants to pass through
Ellis Island to the ownership of fine apartment houses all within a
couple of years—but sometimes this aggressiveness becomes absolutely
cruel, crushing from the very soul all the tender elements which go to
make up a happy life.
Recently I thought with much bitterness of my father’s last words to me:
“If you need sympathy, love or help, go to your own race.” Ill-health
overcame me and I became involved in debt for a trifling amount. Each
stage of my embarrassment and consequent suffering was contributed to by
a brother Jew. First, the shyster lawyer, without principle or mercy,
then his brutal clerks, sly and grafting. Next, a collector, absolutely
callous, then the process server, and, at last, the “bouncer,” sans
heart, sans soul, sans everything.
If all these agents of misfortune were Gentiles I could have borne it,
but the greatest heartbreak of all was the fact that one and all of them
were brother Jews. Why must a Jew always be in at the death, as it were?
There came a time soon after this when I walked the streets almost
penniless. Seeking work, I applied at the store of a wealthy Hebrew. I
explained to the well-groomed proprietor that I was an orthodox member
of his race and appealed on that ground for a chance. He pooh-poohed the
idea.
“My dear fellow,” said he, “these are the enlightened days, when Judaism
is not taken seriously, in fact, it doesn’t pay. I am a Christian
Cultist, I meet nice people and it helps my business.”
Here was a poor fool with his head like the ostrich’s—in the sand. I
explained to him that being a Jew was not a question of religion but a
question of blood. I told him that if a Jewish leopard ceased visiting
the synagogue to go to a Christian Cultist chapel it did not necessarily
get rid of its spots. I left him scratching his head, and I also lost
the chance of a job in his store.
In and out of offices presided over by men with Jewish faces I trudged
all day. Most of these men, I subsequently learned, belonged to New
Thought, Christian Cultist and other up-to-date churches and
societies—it was good for their business. They called themselves
Christians, but nature’s marks cannot be changed like one’s clothes.
In the great theatrical districts I found thousands of my fellow Jews
who had grown rich over night by coining perhaps a popular song that had
pleased the cabaret-mad crowd or by ridiculous impersonations of their
race upon the music hall stages. A good many of these were young men,
sons of fathers and mothers who had been driven from their own country
with fire and sword.
The mothers and fathers stay at home blessing God every hour of the day
and night for guiding them to such a country as this, while the sons and
daughters are out at the theaters, in the halls and cabarets singing
songs of Dixie. Passing by in this great throng are prominent actors,
critics and playwrights, many under assumed names, simply because their
own names are Jewish.
Flashing across the horizon as I write is a notorious Jewish doctor with
a consumption cure. He could have been famous and honored had he but
suppressed himself, instead of which he, with his commercial instinct
and his press agent methods, made more enemies for the race. Many
Gentiles, I will admit, have had consumption cures, but it remained for
one of our people to float companies and open institutions before the
“cure” was even reported upon by the government.
Tramping the city tired and weary of looking for friendly Jewish faces I
found myself near the City Hall. I approached a milk station and bought
a cent’s worth of the most delicious milk I have ever tasted. A
rough-looking fellow next to me said, as he smacked his lips:
“Pretty good stuff, that,” and perhaps noting that I was a stranger, he
added: “The guy who is doing this milk thing is saving the babies all
right—he’s some rich Jew—God bless him—I’ve got three babies of my own.”
Hungering to hear a Jew praised I talked with this man for an hour,
listening with keen enjoyment to the story of one of my race who had
caused his millions to do good for the people irrespective of creed, and
had kept himself suppressed. I learned of this Jew’s efforts for the
dying babies at home and for his starving co-religionists in Palestine
and felt proud. Proud and happy for the first time, I sat in the little
park watching the passing procession till I dozed off into a sound
sleep. My happiness continued in my sleep, for I had a most beautiful
dream.
Before me in my dream passed a grand parade; it was a series of “For the
good of the race” tableaux. All the prominent professional Jews headed
the procession with their real names and the name of their race
emblazoned upon silk banners in letters of gold. Then came all the
Hebrew gambling house keepers bearing aloft broken roulette wheels and
other emblems of a discarded and disgraced “business.”
Next in order was a large army of Hebrews who were professional bondsmen
for arrested street walkers headed by two crooked ward politicians
carrying a huge streamer with the words: “Henceforth we will go to
work.” These men looked a little sad as they marched along thinking of
the easy money they were leaving behind, but the cheers of the multitude
exulting over their great sacrifice somewhat atoned for their agony of
mind. Next followed the amalgamated Jewish usurers, real estate and
company promoters’ union. This part of the parade took four hours and a
half to pass a given point.
All the marchers had discarded their expensive clothing and their
diamonds and were modestly attired. They had also discarded their
automobiles—many of the prominent men in this section carried flags and
banners upon which were inscribed the legends: “We will not lie about
values.” “We will not charge exorbitant interest” and “We will not water
our stock.” These inscriptions were received with incredulous looks of
astonishment, and many of the crowd called out: “We’re from Missouri,”
whatever that meant.
Then came a beautiful torchlight brigade called “The Hebrew Firebugs’
Union.” Nearly all these men had their hair close-cropped and wore
prison clothes, a fact which filled the crowd with relief. Next came
that part of the procession which showed the greatest following among
its marchers. It was the large army of Hebrew “aggressives.” Hundreds
and thousands of them passed by with reformed looks upon their faces.
Oh, I felt so happy as I read the buttons they wore and saw the flags
they carried. Most of the streamers read: “We will suppress ourselves.”
“We will stand back and keep quiet.” “We will be unostentatious.” There
they were, hundreds of well-known faces and types—end-seat hogs,
front-seat hogs, loud talkers, inconsiderates, bargainers and the
terrible army of people that go to make up the crowd which is directly
responsible for the anti-Semitic feeling. The line of them was miles
long.
I was awakened from my happy dream by a rude thump from a Jewish
policeman who hurried me to a police station, where I was surrounded by
shyster lawyers, my brethren, who wanted money with which they could
square other brethren. I could not gain the services of a Hebrew
bondsman because I had no pull. A Hebrew magistrate called me a “bum”
and a loafer for going to sleep in a public park.
“Keep awake in the future,” he said as I was roughly bundled out of the
court.
Keep awake! This is the worst advice he could have given me, for I was
so happy asleep and dreaming that my brethren and sisters had reformed
and had become real Jews for the sake of the race.
I now look upon my police court humiliation as the best thing that could
have happened to me, for a kindly old Jewish scholar, who acted as court
interpreter, was attracted by my appearance. His long contact with human
misery and his great experience with foreigners stranded in a strange
country enabled him to understand me.
That night he took me to his poverty-stricken little room behind a
delicatessen shop in the Ghetto. After supper he went to the street door
and called the neighbors from their stoops. He called them by their
first names and I said kaddish for my father as they stood around among
the pickle barrels.
Since then I have lived among Jews, real Jews. I have learned that
beneath the ragged coat of a push-cart vender there may beat a heart of
gold, and that a poor seller of collar buttons or suspenders may be a
student of the Talmud with a mind that is a gift of the gods.
Leaving the seething, modern, fashionable life of upper Broadway to
enter the religious atmosphere of the numerous schools of Jewish
literature on the East Side entails a violent contrast in conditions.
To see the deeply furrowed, time-scarred faces of the grand old men
pouring over their beloved Talmud is to get a glimpse of another world—a
world of resignation, peace and love.
Within earshot of the thundering traffic of Broadway I stood gazing at
the bowed figures engaged in study and prayer. As I gazed the sordid
walls of the poverty-stricken room faded from my sight, and in their
stead I saw (in my mind’s eye) the wailing wall of Jerusalem or some
ruin of the Holy City—a more fitting background to the rabbinical
figures so strangely out of place in hustling America.
The great passion for the dead and gone past reflected in the
Rembrandtesque faces of the aged students lends to their lives a
religious grandeur which the uptown tourist (hastily passing on a
rubber-neck wagon) would never suspect. Behind many a shabby-looking
little store, or maybe above some corner saloon, are the societies for
the study of Hebrew literature, where congregate the types of Jewish
scholars and philosophers that make the heart of the writer and artist
glad.
Gray-haired, bewhiskered, sad old men, many of whom have tasted only the
bitterness of life—yet such is their faith in the Almighty that they
cling to the praying shawl and Bible to blot out the memory of a
Kishineff—their lives of study and prayer amid abject poverty giving the
lie to the fallacy that the Jew lives but for money.
I have often wandered among these scholars picking up the crumbs of
wisdom which fall from the lips of the old men, grateful that my Jewish
face and blood gave me the privilege to sit and sketch among them.
Somehow or other my ramblings on the East Side are like the calm after
the storm of the uptown struggle.
Many times I have felt the heart tug—the longing to be among my
people—the real Jews—and, leaving theatrical uptown, the land of
make-believe and unrest, I have sought the little schools of study where
the wonderful real old men who live by optimism and nourish their souls
by faith teach me the lesson of patience and the love of humanity.
There is something restful and inspiring when an old man—long, long past
the Biblical three score and ten—places his hand on your shoulder and
murmurs in Yiddish, “It is God’s will.” I have envied the profound peace
of many of these aged students living in the past and undisturbed by
thoughts of the future. Their Jewish view of life is as beautiful as it
is simple. It disregards neither earth nor heaven. It looks to earth and
observes the evil prevailing among men; it thinks of heaven and ponders
on the bliss of “the future state,” and it urges man to strive to bring
heaven on earth, to establish by justice and equity those blessed
conditions on earth which so many associate with heaven.
Their Jewish view of death is equally beautiful. For those who die they
feel no sorrow. Having once torn aside the veil which parts the known
and the unknown, having once entered into the shadow, or rather the
sunshine, of the beyond, they are better off in the other life. Whether
death means eternal sleep or eternal life, those who have left our side,
having passed into the arms of pitiless death, repose in a condition
which should give survivors no cause for anxiety on account of their
beloved dead.
In the pathetic chapter of “The Old Curiosity Shop,” in which Dickens
tells of the death of Little Nell, he makes the Schoolmaster utter these
words of wisdom, on which all who mourn for their dead may well ponder.
“If,” said he, “one deliberate wish expressed in solemn terms above the
bed could call her back to life, which of us would utter it?”
Dickens took this view of death from the Talmud.
The interpretation of a difficult passage from the Talmud, or the
coining of an epigram, is as food and wine to the wise old students, and
there is not an ill in their lives that cannot be soothed or a blessing
that cannot be acknowledged in a quotation from their beloved book. To
watch them at their study and devotions undisturbed by the turmoil about
them is to marvel at the faith which has enabled some of them to live
more than one hundred years with no other interest in life than their
God and their books.
From the dingy windows of the schools the mass of sordid buildings looks
to their eyes like the hills of Palestine, and the shriek of the passing
elevated trains and the clanging of the car bells and the din of passing
traffic disturb them not, for they live in the past.
The alleged Jew of the fashionable uptown lobster palaces—the blatant,
pushing type, who is the direct cause of much anti-Semitic feeling—knows
and cares nothing for the submerged student of his race. The latter is
equally oblivious of the alleged Jew who is contemptuously referred to
as a meshumad (apostate). But while the former stands out in the world
of money and worldly success as a target for much abuse and hatred, the
latter lives with books, unknown and unheeded, drawing from the Talmud a
joy that riches cannot buy and solacing himself with the love of
humanity.
In strong contrast to their fathers and grandfathers are the children of
these old men. Modern America, with its opportunities for all, has torn
them from the religious atmosphere and sent them uptown to become the
lawyers, the artists and the actors.
The Jewish comedian of the vaudeville theater who nightly sets the
audience shrieking at his Yiddish idioms is in nine cases out of ten the
son of a scholar, and though the glamour of Broadway success claims him
and he no longer lives home, in his heart of hearts he is a Jew and
never forgets the old people. He will tell many stories of his parents
to his Gentile friends, imitating and exaggerating their many
characteristics, but he is mighty sore when he hears a Gentile do the
same thing. But, after all, the comic Jew of the modern stage is but an
imaginary sketch.
There is absolutely nothing humorous in these old men of Judea. Even in
the sordid surroundings where you find them engaged in prayer or study,
their attitude is one of quiet dignity—a dignity enhanced by their
extreme old age.
In a little dark den behind a poultry store I was sketching some of the
old men at study. One old fellow one hundred and four years old was
explaining to a young fellow of sixty a passage in the Talmud about
which the latter was in doubt. Both men were without coats. The younger
man had left his push-cart at the door, entirely forgetting the
perishable goods thereon and quite oblivious to the fact that hundreds
of dirty children were surrounding his cart and fooling with his wares.
Other old men were in the school, and the background to their somber
faces was the shop with its ghastly poultry suspended by the necks. One
of the old Talmudic students would now and again leave his ponderous
Bible to serve in the shop, returning, after wrapping a fowl in a
newspaper, to the verse he had been propounding. There was absolutely
nothing humorous in all this, but I would love to have had some of my
non-Jewish friends see how little thought of money and business the real
Jew has.
Sometimes when I have felt full of shame at the behavior in public
places of men and women with Jewish faces but with no Judaism in their
hearts, I have wished that the simple, studious lives of the old men of
the East Side could be the standard by which our race is judged, and
that the Talmudic saying so aptly put into verse by Rabbi Myers was
better known:
“Which is the path, both right and wise,
That for himself a man should find?
That which himself much dignifies,
And brings him honor from mankind.”
——
Issue of May 7, 1921.
“_It can hardly be an accident that antagonism directed against
the Jews is to be found pretty much everywhere in the world
where Jews and non-Jews are associated. And as the Jews are the
common element of the situation it would seem probable, on the
face of it, that the cause will be found in them rather than in
the widely varying groups which feel this antagonism._”
—_Jesse H. Holmes, in The American Hebrew_
LXXIX.
Candid Address to Jews on the Jewish Problem
This is a candid address to the Jews of the United States. Without
subterfuge, without flattery, wholly without fear of all that they may
threaten or can do, this attempt is made to set before them the Jewish
Question as _their_ question, theirs to acknowledge, theirs to consider,
theirs to solve.
It is not a question of THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT at all. This paper has
merely become the vehicle of unwelcome facts which have finally thrust
themselves up for final disposal in this country.
Damning this paper, compelling cheap city politicians to interfere with
its sale, indulging a ribald humor concerning it, will not affect the
facts at all. What THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT says is true or it is
untrue. If true, it ought to be considered. If untrue, it ought to be
disproved. The present policy of Jewish leaders is to do neither, but to
indulge in antics which go a long way toward illustrating what this
paper has said.
What THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT says is true, and tens of thousands of
Jews know it is true.
No representative Jew has ever approached us with a denial of the truth
of what has been stated in this paper. Neither has any unrepresentative
Jew.
The chief objection made against the publication of the facts is always
stated in this form: “What you say is true. Certain Jews are guilty of
the things you charge. But why do you say ‘Jew’? Why do you not say Al
Wood, Morris Gest, Louis Marshall, Samuel Untermyer, ‘Wolf’ Lamar,
Edward Lauterbach, Felix Warburg—why not let it go with these men’s
names, why say ‘Jew’? When you say ‘Jew,’ it sounds as if you blamed all
the Jews.”
This objection has been seriously and courteously made by a number of
Jews who have conferred with THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT on this series of
articles, and has been as seriously and courteously considered.
What is the answer? First, that these men _are_ Jews. Second, that being
Jews these men constitute a problem for the Jews themselves. Third, it
is time for some one to call attention to the necessity of cleaning up
on that problem. There has been too much mincing of words. There has
been too much concealment of names and relationship. The method which
Jews were taking in this country with regard to concealment was heading
them swiftly toward the same conditions which have menaced their race in
Europe, and THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT would count no labor lost that
would rouse the Jews to a sense of the responsibility which rests on
them to solve the Jewish Question in this country, possibly the only
country where it can be solved.
Let us be frank: if this paper had mentioned only the names of
individual Jews, never mentioning their race, and had exposed them as
isolated persons, it would have made no difference in the general Jewish
reaction, the cry would still have been that “the Jews were being
attacked”; whereas the other people of the country would have been just
as much in the dark regarding the close bonds which unite all the groups
of evil influences in this country. The purpose of this series of
articles is to let in the light—to show the Jews generally that the
stench had become too great, and to show the rest of the people where
the stench arose.
The list of charges for the Jews of the United States to consider as
affecting the distinguished members of their race is very serious. And
the charges are true.
It is true that there is a distinct “Jewish idea” in business and
professional life which has eaten away the traditional principles of
honor on which Anglo-Saxon life was erected. Every Jew knows that, every
non-Jew knows it. Here and there a Jew in business or professional life
makes a breakaway from trickery, deception, dishonesty, and exploitation
of the gullible public, and achieves success with honor, but that Jew
also knows that the majority of his brethren in the same line practice
different methods.
It is true that behind the amazing degeneracy of the modern stage and
motion picture is a solid wall of Jewish ownership and control. This
ownership and control must bear the responsibility for the rapid and
dangerous deterioration which has come since such ownership and control
was achieved.
It is true that behind all the shoddy and make-believe and adulteration
in the staples of life is the Jewish idea of profits, “making the ephah
small and the shekel great,” and that the initiators of American
business into these shady practices were Jewish. It is idle to retort
that apt pupils have been found among non-Jews; the point is that before
Jewish influence began to be felt in American business, sound quality
and a fair price were the rule. It is the Jews’ ceaseless boast that
wherever they go they change business, but not for the better.
It is true that beneath all the network of trivializing influences in
literature, art, politics, economics, fashion and sport, is Jewish
influence controlled by Jewish groups. Their Orientalism has served as a
subtle poison to dry up the sound serum of Anglo-Saxon morality on which
this country thrived in its formative years. Is it necessary to specify?
In every movement toward a lower standard, a looser relationship,
especially toward the overthrow of the old Christian safeguards, do not
Jewish names predominate?
These charges and many more have all been made in detail with evidence
submitted, and need not be repeated here. The present purpose is simply
to get the problem squarely before the Jews of the United States.
These charges are true, they cannot be disproved, Jewish leaders have
not attempted to disprove them. Thousands of Jews have said that they
are true.
Then where is the obstacle to a settlement?
This question is best answered by three typical replies made by Jews
during the course of the present series.