evidence of this antagonistic attitude in your pamphlet. You point out,
and with fine indignation, _the great danger that springs from the
prevalence of Jews in finance and industry, and from the preponderance
of Jews in rebellion and revolution_. You reveal, and with great fervor,
_the connection between the Collectivism of the immensely rich
international Finance_—the Democracy of cash values, as you call it—_and
the international Collectivism of Karl Marx and Trotsky_—the Democracy
of and by decoy-cries.... And all this evil and misery, the economic as
well as the political, you trace back to one source, to one “_fons et
origo malorum_”—the Jews.
Now other Jews may vilify and crucify you for these outspoken views of
yours; I myself shall abstain from joining the chorus of condemnation! I
shall try to understand your opinions and your feelings, and having once
understood them—as I think I have—I can defend you from the unjust
attacks of my often too impetuous Race. But first of all, I have to say
this: _There is scarcely an event in modern Europe that cannot be traced
back to the Jews. Take the Great War that appears to have come to an
end, ask yourself what were its causes and its reasons: you will find
them in nationalism. You will at once answer that nationalism has
nothing to do with the Jews, who, as you have just proved to us, are the
inventors of the international idea._ But no less than Bolshevist
Ecstasy and Financial Tyranny can National Bigotry (if I may call it so)
_be finally followed back to a Jewish source_—are not they the inventors
of the Chosen People Myth, and is not this obsession part and parcel of
the political credo of every modern nation, _however small and
insignificant it may be_? And then think of the history of nationalism.
It started in our time and as a reaction against Napoleon; Napoleon was
the antagonist of the French Revolution; the French Revolution was the
consequence of the German Reformation; the German Reformation was based
upon a crude Christianity; this kind of Christianity was invented,
preached and propagated by the Jews; THEREFORE the Jews have made this
war!... Please do not think this a joke; it only seems a joke, and
behind it there lurks a gigantic truth, and it is this, _that all
latter-day ideas and movements have originally sprung from a Jewish
source_, for the simple reason, that the Semitic idea has finally
conquered and entirely subdued this _only apparently irreligious
universe of ours_.
... There is no doubt that the Jews regularly go one better or worse
than the Gentile in whatever they do, there is no further doubt that
_their influence today justifies a very careful scrutiny, and cannot
possibly be viewed without serious alarm_. The great question, however,
is whether the Jews are conscious or unconscious malefactors; I myself
am firmly convinced that they are unconscious ones, but please do not
think that I wish to exonerate them on that account.... A conscious
evildoer has my respect, for he knows at least what is good; an
unconscious one—well, he needs the charity of Christ—a charity which is
not mine—to be forgiven for not knowing what he is doing. But there is
in my firm conviction not the slightest doubt that these revolutionary
Jews do not know what they are doing; that they are more unconscious
sinners than voluntary evildoers.
I am glad to see that this is not an original observation of mine, but
that you yourself have a very strong foreboding about the Jews being the
victims of their own theories and principles. On page 39 of your
pamphlet you write: “It may be that the Jews have always been
instrumental in bringing about the events that they most heartily
disapprove of; that maybe is the curse of the Wandering Jew.” If I had
not the honor, as well as the pleasure, of knowing you personally, if I
were not strongly aware of your passionate desire for light and your
intense loathing of unfairness, this sentence, and this sentence alone,
which tells the truth, will absolve you in my eyes from the odious
charge of being a vulgar anti-Semite.
No, you are not a vulgar, you are a very enlightened, critic of our
Race. _For there is an anti-Semitism, I hope and trust, which does the
Jews more justice than any blind philo-Semitism_, than does that merely
sentimental “Let-them-all-come Liberalism” which in itself is nothing
but the Semitic Ideology over again. _And thus you can be just to the
Jews, without being “romantic” about them._
You have noticed with alarm that the _Jewish elements provide the
driving forces for both Communism and capitalism_, for the material as
well as the spiritual ruin of this world. But then you have at the same
time the profound suspicion that the reason of all this extraordinary
behavior may be the intense Idealism of the Jew. In this you are
perfectly right. The Jew, if caught by an idea, never thinks any more in
watertight compartments, as do the Teuton and Anglo-Saxon peoples, whose
right cerebral hemisphere never seems to know what its left twin brother
is doing; he, the Jew, like the Russian, at once begins to practice what
he preaches, he draws the logical conclusion from his tenets, he
invariably acts upon his accepted principles. It is from this quality,
no doubt, that springs his mysterious force—that force which you no
doubt condemn, but which you had to admire even in the Bolshevists. And
we must admire it, whether we are Jews or whether we are Christians, for
have not these modern Jews remained true to type, is there no parallel
for them in history, do they not go to the bitter end even in our
day?...
Who stirred up the people during the late war in Germany? Who pretended
to have again the truth, _that_ truth about which Pontius Pilate once
shrugged his shoulders? Who pleaded for honesty and cleanliness in
Politics, _that_ honesty which brings a smile to the lips of any
experienced Pro-consul of today? Writers, who were mostly Jews: Fried,
Fernau, Latzko, Richard Grelling—the author of “J’accuse.” Who was
killed and allowed himself to be killed for these very ideas and
principles? Men and women of the Jewish Race: Haase, Levine, Luxemburg,
Landauer, Kurt Eisner, the Prime Minister of Bavaria. From Moses to
Marx, from Isaiah to Eisner, in practice and in theory, in idealism and
in materialism, in philosophy and in politics, they are today what they
have always been: passionately devoted to their aims and to their
purposes, and ready, nay, eager, to shed their last drop of blood for
the realization of their visions.
“But these visions are all wrong,” will you reply.... “Look where they
have led the world to. Think, that they have now had a fair trial of
3,000 years’ standing. How much longer are you going to recommend them
to us and to inflict them upon us? And how do you propose to get us out
of the morass into which you have launched us, if you do not change the
path upon which you have led the world so disastrously astray?”
To this question I have only one answer to give, and it is this: “You
are right.” This reproach of yours, which—I feel it for certain—is at
the bottom of your anti-Semitism, is only too well justified, and upon
this common ground I am quite willing to shake hands with you and defend
you against any accusation of promoting Race Hatred: _If you are
anti-Semite, I, the Semite, am an anti-Semite too, and a much more
fervent one than even you are.... We (Jews) have erred, my friend, we
have most grievously erred. And if there was truth in our error 3,000,
2,000, nay, 100 years ago, there is now nothing but falseness and
madness, a madness that will produce an even greater misery and an even
wider anarchy. I confess it to you, openly and sincerely, and with a
sorrow, whose depth and pain an ancient Psalmist, and only he, could
moan into this burning universe of ours.... We who have posed as the
saviours of the world, we who have even boasted of having given it “the”
Saviour, we are today nothing else but the world’s seducers, its
destroyers, its incendiaries, its executioners...._ We who have promised
to lead you to a new Heaven, we have finally succeeded in landing you
into a new Hell.... There has been no progress, least of all moral
progress.... And it is just our Morality, which has prohibited all real
progress, and—what is worse—which even stands in the way of every future
and natural reconstruction in this ruined world of ours.... I look at
this world, and I shudder at its ghastliness; I shudder all the more as
I know the spiritual authors of all this ghastliness....
But its authors themselves, unconscious in this as in all they are
doing, know nothing yet of this startling revelation. _While Europe is
aflame, while its victims scream, while its dogs howl in the
conflagration, and while its very smoke descends in darker and even
darker shades upon our Continent, the Jews, or at least a part of them
and by no means the most unworthy ones, endeavor to escape from the
burning building, and wish to retire from Europe into Asia, from the
somber scene of our disaster into the sunny corner of their Palestine.
Their eyes are closed to the miseries, their ears are deaf to the
moanings, their heart is hardened to the anarchy of Europe: they only
feel their own sorrows, they only bewail their own fate, they only sigh
under their own burdens...._ They know nothing of their duty to Europe,
which looks around in vain for help and guidance, they know nothing even
of their own great ancestor to whose heart the appeal of pity was never
made in vain: they have become too poor in love, too sick at heart, too
tired of battle, and lo! these sons of those who were once the bravest
of soldiers are now trying to retire from the trenches to the rear, are
now eager to exchange the grim music of the whistling shells with that
of the cow-bells and vintage songs in the happy plain of Sharon....
And yet we are not all Financiers, we are not all Bolshevists, we have
not all become Zionists. And yet there is hope, great hope, that this
same race which has provided the Evil will likewise succeed in supplying
its antidote, its remedy—the Good. It has always been so in the past—was
not that fatal Liberalism, which has finally led to Bolshevism—in the
very midst of that dark nineteenth century, most strenuously opposed by
two enlightened Jews—Friedrich Stahl, the founder of the Conservative
Party in Germany, and by Benjamin Disraeli, the leader of the Tory Party
in England? _And if these two eminent men had no suspicion yet that
their own race and its holy message were at the bottom of that
unfortunate upheaval, with which their age was confronted_: how eager,
how determined, how passionate will be the opposition of the Disraelis
of the future, once they have clearly recognized that they are really
fighting the tenets of their own people, and that it was their “Good,”
their “Love,” their “Ideal,” that had launched the world into this Hell
of Evil and Hatred. A new “Good” as new Love, a true Love, an
intelligent Love, a Love that calms and heals and sweetens, will then
spring up among the Great in Israel and overcome that sickly Love, that
insipid Love, that romantic Love, which has hitherto poisoned all the
Strength and all the Nobility of this world. For Hatred is never
overcome by Hatred: it is only overcome by Love, and it wants a new and
a gigantic Love to subdue that old and devilish Hatred of today. That is
our task for the future—a task which will, I am sure, not be shirked by
Israel, by that same Israel which has never shirked a task, whether it
was for good or whether it was for evil....
Yes, there is hope, my friend, for we are still here, our last word is
not yet spoken, our last deed is not yet done, our last revolution is
not yet made. _This last Revolution, the Revolution that will crown our
revolutionaries, will be the revolution against the revolutionaries._ It
is bound to come, and it is perhaps upon us now. The great day of
reckoning is near. It will pass a judgment upon our ancient faith, and
it will lay the foundation to a new religion. And when that great day
has broken, when the values of death and decay are put into the melting
pot to be changed into those of power and beauty, then you, my dear
Pitt-Rivers, the descendant of an old and distinguished Gentile family,
may be assured to find by your side, and as your faithful ally, at least
one member of that Jewish Race, which has fought with such fatal success
upon all the spiritual battlefields of Europe.
Yours against the Revolution and for Life ever flourishing,
OSCAR LEVY,
ROYAL SOCIETIES CLUB,
ST. JAMES STREET,
LONDON, S. W.,
JULY, 1920.
——
Issue of April 30, 1921.
LVII.
Jewish Idea in American Monetary Affairs
Mr. Brisbane says that Jewish bankers exercise their large measure of
control because they are abler than the other bankers. It was very good
of Mr. Brisbane to say so, and it adds to the sum of his weekly, almost
daily, worship at the Jewish shrine, but it is scarcely true. Jewish
bankers do not yet control the United States, and the principal reason
they do not is that they are not abler than the other bankers. Doubtless
they seek control; doubtless they have almost grasped it on several
occasions; but not yet.
Nevertheless they form such a formidable force, and with their
international connections constitute such a political problem, that the
mere fact of their failing to top the column of control is not so
reassuring as it sounds.
The great Jewish banking houses of the United States are foreign
importations, as perhaps everyone knows. Most of them are sufficiently
recent to be considered in their immigrant status, while the thought of
them as aliens is stimulated by their retention of over-sea connections.
It is this international quality of the Jewish banking group which
largely accounts for Jewish financial power: there is team-play,
intimate understandings, and while there is a margin of competition
among themselves (as at golf) there is also a wiping out of that margin
when it comes to a contest between Jewish and “Gentile” capital.
Four conspicuous contemporary names in Jewish-American finance are
Belmont, Schiff, Warburg and Kahn. All of them, even the most recent,
are of foreign origin.
August Belmont was the earliest and arrived in America in 1837 as the
American representative of the Rothschilds in whose offices he had been
raised. His birthplace was that great center of Jewish international
finance, Frankfort-on-the-Main. He became the founder of the Belmont
family in America, which has largely forgotten its Jewish origin.
Politics was a part of his concern in this country, and during the
critical time from 1860 to 1872 he was chairman of the National
Democratic Committee. His management of the Rothschild interests was
exceedingly profitable to that house, although the operations in which
he engaged were quite simple compared with the operations of the present
day.
Jacob Schiff is another Jewish financier who was given to the world by
Frankfort-on-the-Main. He entered the United States in 1865, after
having passed his apprenticeship in the office of his father, who was
also an agent of the Rothschilds. The name Schiff runs a long way back
without change, unlike the name of Rothschild. Originally named Bauer,
this family of financiers took a new name from the red shield which
adorned their house in the Jewish section of Frankfort and thus became
“Rot-schild.” Commonly the last syllable is pronounced as if it were
“child”; it is “schild,” shield. An epoch-making family in itself, it
has trained hundreds of agents and apprentices, of whom Jacob H. Schiff
was one. He became one of the principal channels through which
German-Jewish capital flowed into American undertakings, and his agency
in these matters gave him a place in many important departments of
American business, especially railroads, banks, insurance companies and
telegraph companies. He married Theresa Loeb, and in due time came to be
head of the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company.
Mr. Schiff, too, was interested in politics with a Jewish angle, and was
perhaps the moving force in the campaign which forced Congress and the
President to break off treaty relations with Russia, then a friendly
nation, on a strictly Jewish question which had been skillfully given an
American aspect. Mr. Schiff was of inestimable assistance to Japan in
the war against Russia, but is understood to have been disappointed by
Japan’s shrewdness in preventing too high a return being made for that
assistance.
Associated with Mr. Schiff in Kuhn, Loeb & Company is Otto Herman Kahn,
who is probably more international than were either of the two gentlemen
mentioned above and is more constantly engaged in dabbling in mysterious
matters of an international nature. This characteristic may be accounted
for, however, by his experience of many countries. He was born in
Germany and is also a product of the Frankfort-on-the-Main school of
finance, having had connection with the Frankfort Jewish house of
Speyer.
Of just how many countries Mr. Kahn has been a citizen is a question not
easy to determine here because of the doubt that was recently cast upon
his American citizenship by a protest against his being permitted to
cast his vote last year and by his failure—the announced cause being
physical indisposition—to cast his vote. If Mr. Kahn is a citizen of the
United States (a status that will be readily proclaimed upon proof that
he is), that probably increases the number of his citizenships to three.
He was a German citizen by birth, and served in the German Army. And in
1914, in August, at the time of the outbreak of the European War, when
efforts were being made, which afterward succeeded, to put Paul M.
Warburg, a member of the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, on the Federal
Reserve Board, Mr. Warburg testified that at that time Mr. Kahn was not
a citizen of the United States.
Senator Bristow—“How many of these partners are American citizens,
or are they all American citizens....”
Mr. Warburg—“They are all American citizens except Mr. Kahn.”—(P. 7,
Senate Hearings, August 1, 1914.)
Senator Bristow—“Now, the members of your firm, are they all
American citizens except Mr. Kahn?”
Mr. Warburg—“Except Mr. Kahn, yes.”
Senator Bristow—“Was Mr. Kahn ever an American citizen?”
Mr. Warburg—“No.”
Senator Bristow—“He never was?”
Mr. Warburg—“No; he is a British subject.”
Senator Bristow—“He is a British subject?”
The Chairman—“He lives in England, does he not?”
Mr. Warburg—“No. At one time he thought he would move to Europe, and
that was when the question arose of his standing for Parliament;
then he changed his mind and moved back to the United States.”
Senator Bristow—“He was at one time a candidate, or a prospective
candidate for Parliament, was he not?”
Mr. Warburg—“No; he was not; but there was talk about it; it had
been suggested, and he had it in his mind. Something had been
written about it in the papers.”—(P. 76, Senate Hearings, August 3,
1914.)
So, that if Mr. Kahn is a citizen of the United States now, which as a
matter of fact has been disputed, then he has been a citizen of three
countries, Germany and Great Britain being the other two.
Mr. Kahn, by the way, is one of those Jews whose adoption of another
form of faith brings no denunciation whatever from the Jews themselves.
A most peculiar circumstance! But doubtless not inexplicable. Mr. Kahn
is not called a “renegade Jew” nor any of the other nasty names heaped
upon Jewish converts to Christianity, because he does not deserve them.
They would not fit him. He is not renegade. And he never was regarded
for a moment by Jacob H. Schiff as anything but a Jew, else that “Prince
of Israel” would not have chosen him to remain in America and run the
business of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, at a time when it seemed undesirable
to put the junior Schiff in full charge of it.
Doubtless it was Mr. Kahn’s desire, just at the time Jacob Schiff made
his wishes known, to go to England and stand for Parliament.
But from New York he fulfills, probably as well as he could from London,
those mysterious missions which frequently take him to the Continent, at
which times he makes what are regarded as certain authoritative
decisions, though just _whose_ decisions it is not always possible to
say. In Paris particularly, and at points east thereof, Mr. Kahn has
been established in the position of spokesman of the American Financial
Hierarchy, which, of course, he is not. But he undoubtedly is the
spokesman of some group, possibly the group which so ably put through
the Jewish program at the Peace Conference, the group that impressed
Eastern Europe with the feeling that the United States of America was a
very powerful Semitic empire. Mr. Kahn’s trips abroad are usually
unheralded, but their results richly repay observation.
A fourth member of the Jewish financial group in America (which is the
form of statement which Mr. Chaim Weizmann would sanction, rather than
to say “Jewish-American financiers”) is Mr. Paul Warburg, to whose
testimony we have just alluded.
Mr. Warburg is the most recent of all. He was born in Germany in 1868;
he came to the United States in 1902; he became an American citizen in
1911. He came to the United States for the express purpose of reforming
our financial system, and it is hardly possible to understand fully the
system in operation today without reference to Paul Warburg. He is a man
of very fine mind, a money-maker, but something more—a shrewd student of
the systems by which money is made. There are two types engaged in the
mere work of money-making which is better described as “money-getting,”
without reference to production; one type grubs away under whatever
system obtains, regarding it as fixed as the solar system; another type
is sufficiently detached to see the system as an artifice which may be
mended, remodeled or supplanted altogether. Paul Warburg, scion of a
long line of German Jewish bankers, is of the latter type. He is not
content with the fact that the cash-register fills itself with money; he
wants also to know how the cash-register works, and whether it can be
worked. He is thus a student of money and of the number of ways in which
it can be manipulated.
Perhaps it will be best to let him tell his own story as far as he goes.
When he told it to the Committee on Banking and Currency of the United
States Senate in executive session, there was some dispute as to whether
the proceedings should be recorded by the stenographer. It was finally
agreed that notes should be made but should not be divulged. The
testimony was printed “in confidence” on August 5, 1914, and nominally
“made public” on August 12.
The Warburgs are one of the international families whose importance was
not realized until the war, and would not have been realized then if
their internationalism had not been so apparent. It was an interesting
spectacle to see brothers occupying important places of counsel on
either side of the great struggle.
Paul Warburg learned the rudiments of banking in his father’s bank at
Hamburg, Germany, studying the over-sea trade which is the foundation of
that city’s business. The banking house of Warburg in Hamburg dates from
1796.
“After that I went to England, where I stayed for two years, first in
the banking and discount firm of Samuel Montague & Company, and after
that I took the opportunity of staying two months in the office of a
stockbroker in order to learn that part of the business.
“After that I went to France, where I stayed in a French bank, so that—”
The Chairman—“What French bank was that?”
Mr. Warburg—“It is the Russian bank for foreign trade, which has an
agency in Paris.
“And after that I went back to Hamburg and worked there again for a
year, I think.
“Then I went round to India, China and Japan.
“And then I came to this country for the first time in 1893. I stayed
here only a short time then, and went back to Hamburg, and then became a
partner of the firm in Hamburg.”
The Chairman—“How long were you in Hamburg then in the banking
business?”
Mr. Warburg—“Until 1902.... And then I moved over here to this country
to become a partner of Kuhn, Loeb & Company.”