line-up of some of the "American business men" who hold up our
commercial prestige overseas. They are mostly Jews. They have a keen
sense of the value of the American name, and when in a foreign port you
stroll up to the office which bears the sign, "American Importing
Company," or "American Commercial Company," or other similarly
non-committal names, hoping to find a countryman, an American, you
usually find a Jew whose sojourn in America appears to have been all too
brief. This may throw a sidelight on the regard in which "American
business methods" are held in some parts of the world. When 30 or 40
different races of people can carry on business under the name
"American," and do it legally, too, it is not surprising that Americans
do not recognize some of the descriptions of American methods which
appear in the foreign press. The Germans long ago complained that the
rest of the world was judging them by the German-speaking Jewish
commercial traveler.
Instances of Jewish prosperity in the United States are commonplace, but
prosperity, the just reward of foresight and application, is not to be
confounded with control. The prosperity of the Jews can be had by anyone
who is willing to pay the price which the Jews pay for it--a very, very
high price, as a rule, all things considered--but it would be impossible
for any Gentile coalition under similar circumstances to attain the
control which the Jews have won, for the reason that there is lacking in
the Gentile a certain quality of working-togetherness, a certain
conspiracy of objective, and the adhesiveness of intense raciality,
which characterizes the Jew. It is nothing to a Gentile that another man
is a Gentile; it is next to everything to a Jew that the man at his door
is another Jew. So, if instances of Jewish prosperity were needed, the
case of the Temple Emmanu-el, New York, might be cited, which in 1846
could scarcely raise $1,520 for its budget, but in 1868, following the
Civil War, raised $708,755 from the rental of 231 pews. And the rise of
the Jewish clothing monopoly as one of the results of the same Civil War
might be cited as an instance of prosperity plus national and
international control.
Indeed, it might be said that the Jew has succeeded in everything he has
attempted in the United States, except farming. The explanation usually
made in Jewish publications is that ordinary farming is far too simple
to engage the Jew's intellect and therefore he is not enough interested
in it to succeed, but that in dairy and cattle farming where the "brain"
is more necessary he has made a success. Numerous attempts have been
made in various parts of the United States to start Jewish farming
colonies, but their story is a series of failures. Some have blamed the
failures on the Jew's lack of knowledge of scientific farming, others on
his distaste for manual labor, others on the lack of the speculative
element in agriculture. In any case, he stands higher in the
non-productive employments than in this basically productive one. Some
students of the question state that the Jew never was a man of the land,
but always a trader, for which assertion one of the proofs offered is
the Jews' selection of Palestine as their country, that strip of land
which formed a gateway between East and West and over which the overland
traffic of the world passed.
[Issue of June 5, 1920.]
"The Jewish Question still exists. It would be useless to deny it . . .
. The Jewish Question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers.
Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their
migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not
persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution . . . . The
unfortunate Jews are now carrying anti-Semitism into England; they have
already introduced it into America."
--Theodore Herzl, "A Jewish State," p. 4.
IV.
The Jewish Question--Fact or Fancy?
The chief difficulty in writing about the Jewish Question is the
supersensitiveness of Jews and non-Jews concerning the whole matter.
There is a vague feeling that even to openly use the word "Jew," or to
expose it nakedly to print, is somehow improper. Polite evasions like
"Hebrew" and "Semite," both of which are subject to the criticism of
inaccuracy, are timidly essayed, and people pick their way gingerly as
if the whole subject were forbidden, until some courageous Jewish
thinker comes straight out with the good old word "Jew," and then the
constraint is relieved and the air cleared. The word "Jew" is not an
epithet; it is a name, ancient and honorable, with significance for
every period of human history, past, present and to come.
There is extreme sensitiveness about the public discussion of the Jewish
Question on the part of Gentiles. They would prefer to keep it in the
hazy borderlands of their thought, shrouded in silence. Their heritage
of tolerance has something to do with their attitude, but perhaps their
instinctive sense of the difficulty involved has more to do with it. The
principal public Gentile pronouncements upon the Jewish Question are in
the manner of the truckling politician or the pleasant after-dinner
speaker; the great Jewish names in philosophy, medicine, literature,
music and finance are named over, the energy, ability and thrift of the
race are dwelt upon, and everyone goes home feeling that a difficult
place has been rather neatly negotiated. But nothing is changed thereby.
The Jew is not changed. The Gentile is not changed. The Jew still
remains the enigma of the world.
Gentile sensitiveness on this point is best expressed by the desire for
silence--"Why discuss it at all?" is the attitude. Such an attitude is
itself a proof that there is a problem which we would evade if we could.
"Why discuss it at all?"--the keen thinker clearly sees in the
implications of such a question, the existence of a problem whose
discussion or suppression will not always be within the choice of
easy-going minds.
Is there a Jewish Question in Russia? Unquestionably, in its most
virulent form. Is it necessary to meet that Question in Russia?
Undoubtedly, meet it from every angle along which light and healing may
come.
Well, the percentage of the Jewish population of Russia is just one per
cent more than it is in the United States. The majority of the Jews
themselves are not less well-behaved in Russia than they are here; they
lived under restrictions which do not exist here; yet in Russia their
genius has enabled them to attain a degree of power which has completely
baffled the Russian mind. Whether you go to Rumania, Russia, Austria or
Germany, or anywhere else that the Jewish Question has come to the
forefront as a vital issue, you will discover that the principal cause
is the outworking of the Jewish genius to achieve the power of control.
Here in the United States it is the fact of this remarkable minority--a
sparse Jewish ingredient of three per cent in a nation of
110,000,000--attaining in 50 years a degree of control that would be
impossible to a ten times larger group of any other race, that creates
the Jewish Question here. Three per cent of any other people would
scarcely occasion comment, because we could not meet with a
representative of them wherever we went in high places--in the innermost
secrecy of the councils of the Big Four at Versailles; in the supreme
court; in the councils of the White House; in the vast dispositions of
world finance--wherever there is power to get or use. Yet we meet the
Jew everywhere in the upper circles, literally everywhere there is
power. He has the brains, the initiative, the penetrative vision which
almost automatically project him to the top, and as a consequence he is
more marked than any other race.
And that is where the Jewish Question begins. It begins in very simple
terms--How does the Jew so habitually and so resistlessly gravitate to
the highest places? What puts him there? Why is he put there? What does
he do there? What does the fact of his being there mean to the world?
That is the Jewish Question in its origin. From these points it goes on
to others, and whether the trend becomes pro-Jewish or anti-Semitic
depends on the amount of prejudice brought to the inquiry, and whether
it becomes pro-Humanity depends on the amount of insight and
intelligence.
The use of the word Humanity in connection with the word Jew usually
throws a side-meaning which may not be intended. In this connection it
is usually understood that the humanity ought to be shown toward the
Jew. There is just as great an obligation upon the Jew to show his
humanity toward the whole race. The Jew has been too long accustomed to
think of himself as exclusively the claimant on the humanitarianism of
society; society has a large claim against him that he cease his
exclusiveness, that he cease exploiting the world, that he cease making
Jewish groups the end and all of his gains, and that he begin to
fulfill, in a sense his exclusiveness has never yet enabled him to
fulfill, the ancient prophecy that through him all the nations of the
earth should be blessed.
The Jew cannot go on forever filling the role of suppliant for the
world's humanitarianism; he must himself show that quality to a society
which seriously suspects his higher and more powerful groups of
exploiting it with a pitiless rapacity which in its wide-flung and long
drawn-out distress may be described as an economic pogrom against a
rather helpless humanity. For it is true that society is as helpless
before the well-organized extortions of certain financial groups, as
huddled groups of Russian Jews were helpless against the anti-Semitic
mob. And as in Russia, so in America, it is the poor Jew who suffers for
the delinquencies of the rich exploiter of his race.
This series of articles is already being met by an organized barrage by
mail and wire and voice, every single item of which carries the wail of
persecution. One would think that a heartless and horrible attack were
being made on a most pitiable and helpless people--until one looks at
the letterheads of the magnates who write, and at the financial ratings
of those who protest, and at the membership of the organizations whose
responsible heads hysterically demand retraction. And always in the
background there is the threat of boycott, a threat which has
practically sealed up the columns of every publication in America
against even the mildest discussion of the Jewish Question.
The Jewish Question in America cannot be concealed forever by threats
against publications, nor by the propagandist publication of matter
extremely and invariably favorable to everything Jewish. It is here and
it cannot be twisted into something else by the adroit use of
propaganda, nor can it be forever silenced by threats. The Jews of the
United States can best serve themselves and their fellow-Jews all over
the world by letting drop their far too ready cry of "anti-Semitism," by
adopting a franker tone than that which befits a helpless victim, and by
seeing what the Jewish Question is and how it behooves every Jew who
loves his people to help solve it.
There has been used in this series the term "International Jew." It is
susceptible of two interpretations: one, the Jew wherever he may be; the
other, the Jew who exercises international control. The real contention
of the world is with the latter and his satellites, whether Jew or
Gentile.
Now, this international type of Jew, this grasper after world-control,
this actual possessor and wielder of world-control is a very unfortunate
connection for his race to have. The most unfortunate thing about the
international Jew, from the standpoint of the ordinary Jew, is that the
international type is also a Jew. And the significance of this is that
the type does not grow anywhere else than on a Jewish stem. There is no
other racial nor national type which puts forth this kind of person. It
is not merely that there are a few Jews among international financial
controllers; it is that these world controllers are exclusively Jews.
That is the phenomenon which creates an unfortunate situation for those
Jews who are not and never shall be world-controllers, who are the plain
people of the Jewish race. If world-control were mixed, like the
control, say, of the biscuit business, then the occasional Jews we might
find in those higher financial altitudes would not constitute the
problem at all; the problem would then be limited to the existence of
world-control in the hands of a few men, of whatever race or lineage
they might be. But since world-control is an ambition which has only
been achieved by Jews, and not by any of the methods usually adopted by
would-be world conquerors, it becomes inevitable that the question
should center in that remarkable race.
This brings another difficulty: in discussing this group of
world-controllers under the name of Jews (and they are Jews), it is not
always possible to stop and distinguish the group of Jews that is meant.
The candid reader can usually determine that, but the Jew who is in a
state of mind to be injured is sometimes pained by reading as a charge
against himself what was intended for the upper group. "Then why not
discuss the upper group as financiers and not as Jews?" may be asked.
Because they are Jews. It is not to the point to insist that in any list
of rich men there are more Gentiles than Jews; we are not talking about
merely rich men who have, many of them, gained their riches by serving a
System, we are talking about those who Control--and it is perfectly
apparent that merely to be rich is not to control. The world-controlling
Jew has riches, but he also has something much more powerful than that.
The international Jew, as already defined, rules not because he is rich,
but because in a most marked degree he possesses the commercial and
masterful genius of his race, and avails himself of a racial loyalty and
solidarity the like of which exists in no other human group. In other
words, transfer today the world-control of the international Jew to the
hands of the highest commercially talented group of Gentiles, and the
whole fabric of world-control would eventually fall to pieces, because
the Gentile lacks a certain quality, be it human or divine, be it
natural or acquired, that the Jew possesses.
This, of course, the modern Jew denies. There is a new position taken by
the modernists among the Jews which constitutes a denial that the Jew
differs from any other man except in the matter of religion. "Jew" they
say is not a racial designation, but a religious designation like
"Episcopalian," "Catholic," "Presbyterian." This is the argument used in
newspaper offices in the Jews' protests against giving the Jewish
designation to those of their people who are implicated in crime--"You
don't give the religious classification of other people who are
arrested," the editor is told, "why should you do it with Jews?" The
appeal to religious tolerance always wins, and is sometimes useful in
diverting attention from other things.
Well, if the Jews are only religiously differentiated from the rest of
the world, the phenomenon grows stranger still. For the rest of the
world is interested less in the Jew's religion than in anything else
that concerns him. There is really nothing in his religion to
differentiate the Jew from the rest of mankind, as far as the moral
content of that religion is concerned, and if there were he would have
overcome that by the fact that his Jewish religion supplies the moral
structure for both of the other great religions. Moreover, it is stated
that there are among English speaking nations 2,000,000 Jews who
acknowledge their race and not their religion, while 1,000,000 are
classed as agnostic--are these any less Jews than the others? The world
does not think so. The authoritative students of human differences do
not think so. An Irishman who grows indifferent to the Church is still
an Irishman, and it would seem to be equally true that a Jew who grows
indifferent to the Synagogue is still a Jew. He at least feels that he
is, and so does the non-Jew.
A still more serious challenge would arise if this contention of the
modernists were true, for it would necessitate the explanation of these
world-controlling Jews by their religion. We should have to say, "They
excel through their religion," and then the problem would turn on the
religion whose practice should bring such power and prosperity to its
devotees. But another fact would intervene, namely, that these
world-controlling Jews are not notably religious; and still another fact
would hammer for recognition, namely, the most devout believers and most
obedient followers of the Jewish religion are the poorest among the
Jews. If you want Jewish orthodoxy, the bracing morality of the Old
Testament, you will find it, not among the successful Jews, who have
Unitarianized their religion to the same extent that the Unitarians have
Judaized their Christianity, but among the poor in the side streets who
still sacrifice the Saturday business for their Sabbath keeping.
Certainly their religion has not given them world-control; instead, they
have made their own sacrifices to keep it inviolate against modernism.
Of course, if the Jew differs from the rest of mankind only when he is
in full accord with his religion, the question becomes very simple. Any
criticism of the Jew becomes sheer religious bigotry and nothing else!
And that would be intolerable. But it would be the consensus of
thoughtful opinion that the Jew differs less in his religion than in
anything else. There is more difference between the two great branches
of Christianity, more conscious difference, than between any branch of
Christianity and Judaism.
So that, the contention of certain modernists notwithstanding, the world
will go on thinking of the Jew as a member of a race, a race whose
persistence has defeated the utmost efforts made for its extermination,
a race that has preserved itself in virility and power by the observance
of those natural laws the violation of which has mongrelized so many
nations, a race which has come up out of the past with the two great
moral values which may be reckoned on monotheism and monogamy, a race
which today is before us as the visible sign of an antiquity to which
all our spiritual wealth harks back. Nay, the Jew will go on thinking of
himself as the member of a people, a nation, a race. And all the mixture
and intermixture of thought or faith or custom cannot make it otherwise.
A Jew is a Jew and as long as he remains within his perfectly
unassailable traditions, he will remain a Jew. And he will always have
the right to feel that to be a Jew is to belong to a superior race.
These world-controlling Jews at the top of affairs, then, are there by
virtue of, among other things, certain qualities which are inherent in
their Jewish natures. Every Jew has these qualities even if not in the
supreme sense, just as every Englishman has Shakespeare's tongue but not
in Shakespeare's degree. And thus it is impracticable, if not
impossible, to consider the international Jew without laying the
foundations broadly upon Jewish character and psychology.
We may discount at once the too common libel that this greater form of
Jewish success is built upon dishonesty. It is impossible to indict the
Jewish people or any other people on a wholesale charge. No one knows
better than the Jew how widespread is the notion that Jewish methods of
business are all unscrupulous. There is no doubt a possibility of a
great deal of unscrupulousness existing without actual legal dishonesty,
but it is altogether possible that the reputation the Jewish people have
long borne in this respect may have had other sources than actual and
persistent dishonesty.
We may indicate one of these possible sources. The Jew at a trade is
naturally quicker than most other men. They say there are other races
which are as nimble at a trade as is the Jew, but the Jew does not live
much among them. In this connection one may remember the famous joke
about the Jew who went to Scotland.
Now, it is human nature for the slower man to believe that the quicker
man is too deft by far, and to become suspicious of his deftness.
Everybody suspects the "sharper" even though his sharpness be entirely
honest. The slower mind is likely to conceive that the man who sees so
many legitimate twists and turns to a trade, may also see and use a
convenient number of illegitimate twists and turns. Moreover, there is
always the ready suspicion that the one who gets "the best of the
bargain" gets it by trickery which is not above board. Slow, honest,
plain-spoken and straight-dealing people always have their doubts of the
man who gets the better of it.
The Jews, as the records for centuries show, were a keen people in
trade. They were so keen that many regarded them as crooked. And so the
Jew became disliked for business reasons, not all of which were
creditable to the intelligence or initiative of his enemies.
Take for example, the persecution which Jew merchants once suffered in
England. In older England the merchant class had many easy-going
traditions. One tradition was that a respectable tradesman would never
seek business but wait for it to come to him. Another tradition was that
to decorate one's store window with lights or colors, or to display
one's stock of goods attractively in the view of the public, was a
contemptible and underhanded method of tempting a brother tradesman's
customers away from him. Still another tradition was that it was
strictly unethical and unbusinesslike to handle more than one line of
goods. If one sold tea, it was the best reason in the world why he
should not sell teaspoons. As for advertising, the thing would have been
so brazen and bold that public opinion would have put the advertiser out
of business. The proper demeanor for a merchant was to seem reluctant to
part with his goods.
One may readily imagine what happened when the Jewish merchant bustled
into the midst of this jungle of traditions. He simply broke them all.
In those days tradition had all the force of a divinely promulgated
moral law and in consequence of his initiative the Jew was regarded as a
great offender. A man who would break those trade traditions would stop
at nothing! The Jew was anxious to sell. If he could not sell one
article to a customer, he had another on hand to offer him. The Jews'
stores became bazaars, forerunners of our modern department stores, and
the old English custom of one store for one line of goods was broken up.
The Jew went after trade, pursued it, persuaded it. He was the
originator of "a quick turnover and small profits." He originated the
installment plan. The one state of affairs he could not endure was
business at a standstill, and to start it moving he would do anything.
He was the first advertiser--in a day when even to announce in the
public prints the location of your store was to intimate to the public
that you were in financial difficulties, were about to go to the wall
and were trying the last desperate expedient to which no self-respecting
merchant would stoop.
It was as easy as child's play to connect this energy with dishonesty.
The Jew was not playing the game, at least so the staid English merchant
thought. As a matter of fact he was playing the game to get it all in
his own hands--which he has practically done.
The Jew has shown that same ability ever since. His power of analyzing
the money currents amounts to an instinct. His establishment in one
country represented another base from which the members of his race
could operate. Whether by the natural outworking of innate gifts, or the
deliberate plan of race unity and loyalty, all Jewish trading
communities had relations, and as those trading communities increased in
wealth, prestige and power, as they formed relations with governments
and great interests in the countries where they operated, they simply
put more power into the central community wherever it might be located,
now in Spain, now in Holland, now in England. Whether by intention or
not, they became more closely allied than the branches of one business
could be, because the cement of racial unity, the bond of racial
brotherhood cannot in the very nature of things exist among the Gentiles
as it exists among the Jews. Gentiles never think of themselves as
Gentiles, and never feel that they owe anything to another Gentile as
such. Thus they have been convenient agents of Jewish schemes at times
and in places when it was not expedient that the Jewish controllers
should be publicly known; but they have never been successful
competitors of the Jew in the field of world-control.