[Illustration: _SAMUEL STRAUSS (born in Des Moines, Ia., in 1870), was
publisher of the Des Moines Leader from 1895 to 1904, and became
publisher of the New York Globe in 1904. Since 1912 he has been
associated with the management of the New York Times. Mr. Strauss has
taken an active and effective interest in many worthy movements for
Jewish betterment. He is a member of the Graduate Advisory Menorah
Committee and of the Menorah College of Lecturers. His impressive and
stimulating talks have given him marked popularity with the Menorah
Societies._]
WE are at present witnessing an instance of the truth that a great
crisis is always a test for genuineness. Since August 1st a number of
things seemingly vital have come tumbling to the ground as mere
inflated delusions or comparative trifles formerly viewed out of all
perspective. Men are beginning to realize that they have been
deceiving themselves, and the immediate effect is disappointment.
What profit will be derived from it all is as yet merely a matter for
speculation. Not yet have men been able to think of the conflict in
other than negative terms, to see in it other than despair, crippled
industry, a fall from civilization, all that belongs on the debit side
of the ledger. But there is also a credit side: and to realize that
the effects of war are positive as well as negative is by no means to
condone war, but only to accept it as a fact.
History teaches us to expect that the positive result of this struggle
will be in the nature of a physic--a dissolving away of delusions, and
simultaneously a bringing into relief of some essential facts. This
clearing of the ground will not wait until the war is over; it has
already begun, though men are yet but half-conscious of it, and then
only in the guise of profitless disillusionment. This state of mind is
understandable enough. The spectacle of thousands going out by
trainload to settle differences through slaughter has been a terrible
shock. Individuals, having progressed beyond that stage, had assumed
that collectively, too, men must share the same aversion to so
illogical a method as murder for the solution of differences. This
assumption has had root in a justifiable belief in the world's
attainment to a higher plane of civilization. The quality of to-day's
culture may not be so fine as that of Judæa, of Greece, or Rome, or of
the Renaissance, but surely in no period of history has its extent
been so great. Never had the entire world been nearer denationalization,
never had the economic interdependence of nations been more complete.
Jingoism has seemed obsolete, cosmopolitanism had seemed the ideal, as
the horizon of an increasing number of individuals broadened out, and
prejudice gave way before enlightenment. But now this assumption is
suddenly discovered to be mere delusion, and at once much scorn is
heaped upon "our alleged civilization." How much justification there
is for disappointment over the failure of culture to influence action
is difficult to determine. There is much confusion of thought on this
point. To conclude that because nations go to war, individuals have
therefore made practically no advance from the original state of
barbarism is absurd. What should be clear is the danger of
generalizations from the individual to groups of the individual--two
psychologically different entities. It may be that even as communities
we have progressed more than we believe, as some future reaction to
this war may indicate, but what is brought to the surface now is the
old fact that the progress of groups of men is at snail's pace,
however men may forge ahead as individuals.
This refreshed realization is by no means of negative value. It is
rather a positive benefit, and should be fixed in the minds of all men
who are striving collectively for various ends. For political parties,
socialists, suffragists, all and sundry reformers, this realization
should be the starting point from which to readjust programs when the
cataclysm is over.
For the Jewish people this realization is peculiarly significant.
Though the outlines of the general situation the world over are as yet
indistinct, some problems of the Jews have already been brought out
into sharp relief. Like the rest of mankind, the Jew has had his eyes
cruelly opened, and the clear boundary between truth and delusion
which this war has made should be stamped upon his memory, to remain
vivid after negative feelings of wrongs and disappointments have been
forgotten.
_The Delusion of Assimilation_
IN the past hundred years, the Jew has had more reason than at any
time since the dispersal to consider himself assimilated in all save
the Slav countries. Not that anti-Semitism had disappeared; but it had
seemed to be, and indeed is, so much less important when viewed
against the background of the Jew's positive advance to light and
freedom. Explained more recently as a survival of many prejudices
which do not die overnight, including the old religious differences,
physical and mental antipathies, economic jealousies--the force of
anti-Semitism was not only weakened by the increasing breadth of
vision, the cosmopolitanism on which the world has plumed itself, but
dwarfed by the achievement of the Jew himself. He has come out of his
Ghetto; softened by a more liberal attitude on the part of his
individual neighbor, he has largely laid aside his resentment and his
hostility. There was a feeling that adaptation and assimilation had
advanced so far that the Jew, by his own progress and with the consent
of his neighbor, had become a citizen of his community, differentiated
from the rest, if at all, only by what he chose to keep of his
religious belief. Those who have most zealously argued for
assimilation as the sole solution of the Jewish problem have had
little need of late to push their gospel further; the process seemed
to be taking excellent care of itself. But after all, it was not real.
A drastic crisis like the present one was required to brand it as
delusion. The attitude of the occasional individual was construed as
the attitude of the entire community. This has been a double-edged
delusion. The Jew has not judged himself as a community in relation to
his neighbor, and he has misjudged his individual neighbor as a
community in relation to himself.
It takes two sides always to make up the full truth, but from both
sides, from the Jew and from his neighbor, there is circumstantial
evidence in the events of the past five months that gives abundant
support to this conclusion.
In this time of crisis the world has thrown aside its pretense, honest
and well-intentioned pretense though it may have been, and revealed
its underlying feeling toward the Jewish people. Suddenly, without any
absolute change in their status, the Jews are singled out and set
apart. Special inducements are held out for their support. The Czar,
though this was reported upon dubious authority, addresses his
"beloved Jews;" a non-commissioned Jewish officer is recommended for
the Order of St. George; Dreyfus is decorated in France, his son made
Lieutenant; Austria issues a special appeal to the Jews of Poland; an
English Jew voices England's hope of their loyalty; in Germany
anti-Semitic newspapers suddenly announce their discontinuance.
_The Test of Jewish Patriotism_
IT is not a new story. Doubt of the Jew's place in time of war has
been continuous. Through the centuries there has been report that he
has dodged his war tax wherever he could, that he bought soldiers to
fill his place in the ranks, that as financier he offered his gold
without scruple to the bitterest foes of his own fatherland. How much
of this is based on blind prejudice is beside the point. What is
important is the effect that this doubting attitude has had on the
Jew's normal impulse to render patriotic service. The Jew to-day who
feels most keenly the cause of Germany, or of France, or of England in
this war, who most unreservedly throws in his lot with his
compatriots, glorying in a privilege long withheld, moved to an
intense fervor of patriotism, cannot but be disheartened at the
spectacle of his neighbors as in one way or another they give evidence
of their lack of faith in him.
Why this feeling of distrust? How has it been engendered, what are
its roots? Again the answer is to be found both with the Jew himself
and with his neighbor.
As far as the present situation is concerned, the Gentile world has
had lying dormant in its subconscious mind the notion that the Jew was
inferior, and by its own action it has kept this subconscious notion
alive. For while the world has admitted the Jew to its political life,
while it has modified much its religious and its economic prejudices
and jealousies, it has not broken down every barrier. Without fully
realizing its attitude, it has still held the Jew to be different and
of lower quality. The Jew's neighbors have had an honest sort of
delusion about their attitude toward the Semite; because they had
discovered the individual Jew, and taken him, as it were, into the
arms of their community life, they have fancied that all prejudice,
even toward the Jew as a class, had become obsolete. Here again there
is evidence of the fact that feeling toward Jews as individuals has
been mistaken for feeling toward the Jews as a race group.
This delusion has its base in something more fundamental, to which may
be accredited perhaps the distrust against which the Jews have been
battling for centuries. It is not the stranger who inspires continued
suspicion, for he soon ceases to be a stranger, but it is the wanderer
and the gypsy. There is imbedded in human nature a distrust of
shifting things and a respect for what is long established in any one
place, and it is in the wandering class that the Jew is placed in
spite of all talk of assimilation. He has had no point of departure
and hence no place of arrival. The French have crossed over the
Channel and become Englishmen; one would hardly know that the Romans
still live on in the Tyrol; but the Jew has always remained Jew, for
he has no established place from which to come and whither to return.
_"A People Without A Home"_
NOT only have the Jews been looked upon by others as a people without
a home; subconsciously they have always regarded themselves as such.
To-day a gigantic fund is proposed for the relief of the Jews affected
by the present war, by the very ones who have argued most persistently
for adaptation and assimilation. Yet this is a relief fund not for
Belgian Jews, nor French Jews, nor German Jews, but for all Jews
irrespective of the side on which they fight. The Jews are not
thinking of themselves in terms of citizens or subjects of this or
that country, but only as members of the Jewish race, who have no
unity save as members of that race. It is the surest indication that
beneath all self-delusion the Jews have subconsciously realized
themselves as a homeless people, men without a country. Is it strange
that the rest of the world should regard the Jew as alien when he
cannot but hold himself as such?
It would seem that this argument leads along a straight path towards
Zionism as its conclusion. But practical Zionism, like all other
programs of reconstruction, must await a time which will admit of
reconstruction, and that is not the present. It may be that when this
war is concluded, world conditions will have so completely changed
that Zionism and its geographic program will no longer be the answer
to the problem of Jewry. All that is certain of it now is its
uncertainty. But the spirit of which Zionism is the expression, and
which has made of it more than a mere experiment in colonization,
still remains, emphasized by the self-realization to which the Jews
have been brought in the present conflict.
_The Persistence of the Jewish Faith_
IN every crisis, even in those which have swept whole nations from
existence, the Jew has always found himself with one inalienable
possession--his faith. There is something mystifying about the
persistence through so many vicissitudes of a religion which commands
respect from neighbors who see in it a powerful inspiration, while the
Jew himself, especially the Jew more fortunately placed in the general
community, endeavors so often to cast it off as outworn and
impracticable. It is the Jew himself who has misled the rest of the
world into a delusion. He has seemed to consider himself, and the
faith with which he is bound up, inferior. In his endeavor to take on
the color of his environment, he has sought to lay aside all that was
old, and of this the religion of his fathers was a part. But a faith
as strong and as far-reaching as Judaism cannot be dropped out of the
life into which it has been ingrained, and hence the Jew has been hard
put to cover it up, to hide it, or to attempt its modification to fit
the fashion in religions. The inevitable reaction on the non-Jewish
part of the community has been a feeling of mystification, and,
following on that, suspicion and distrust.
It is this which has undermined confidence in the Jews as a
people--their negation of that which is their valuable heritage. For
Judaism is not merely tradition, a thing to be reverenced as a relic;
it is a thing to be put to everyday use. This practical and vitalized
Judaism is the real salvation for which the Jews have been groping,
all the while under the delusion that it was anywhere but near at
hand. Such a rejuvenated faith would mean an end of that homelessness
which is accountable for much of the Jew's displacement in the world's
life. And though the remedy has been intimate to him these many years
he has failed to make positive use of it. It is true that the Zionists
have been striving for a geographical base for Judaism. But a
geographical base is never more than an outward expression of a
people's unity; it is an excellent starting point, but as an end in
itself it is nothing. The Jews had a geographical base for their
start; thereby they were enabled to build up a unified result, the
Jewish spirit. It is this which, if recognized as a positive fact,
will take from the Jew his feeling of homelessness, and from his
neighbor the notion that the Jew is a member of a tribe forever
unestablished and purposeless. It is around a spiritual core that the
Jews as a people must build, around that central force which has thus
far held them intact.
_The Spiritual Service of the Jew_
AND never has there been a time, it would seem, when not only the Jews
themselves but the world at large were so ready for this
reconstruction. If in the very near future, as seems probable, the
Jews are again to play a prominent rôle in history, it will be more
largely through the pressure exerted by the world outside than through
their own initiative. Men are coming more and more to need what the
Jewish people, under certain conditions, are peculiarly qualified to
bestow. The period of materialism now undoubtedly coming to a close
has brought with it a heavy burden of discontent, and there has been a
turning from tangible comforts, a reaching out for spiritual
consolation. Under the rule of enlightenment religion has gone away,
and the world begins to feel its lack. One may not prophesy that
religion is soon to return, but the suggestion of its coming is in the
air. What the Jew will then be able to furnish may now be an open
question, but the great fact of his religion is undeniable. It should
be remembered that only in things spiritual has the Jew been able to
render world service; in material progress he has been able to do
little more than march with the rank and file. Should the Jew again
lead in the world, it must be in a time when the things of the spirit
are paramount in men's desires. With the hope that such a time is near
at hand, the Jew should retrim his lamp, in the faith that it may help
to illuminate much that had fallen into darkness.
[Illustration: Signature: Samuel Strauss]