Patriotism of the American Jew

Front matter

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Preface

IN this contribution I have endeavored to give some estimate of the part played by the Jew in the development of our history and of the title he has established to all the rights of our citizenship. The references to remoter history form a necessary background, being essential in my opinion to an understanding of the danger involved in any departure from the American attitude, which has been not merely beneficial to ourselves but also to Europe.

With us race prejudice against the Jew had been steadily disappearing and gave promise of becoming outgrown. But it has recently been revived by concerted propaganda undertaken both here and in Europe, the evil results of which are already apparent. Before a settled race prejudice, constitutional guarantees are likely to shrink into mere paper rights, and its influence to be seen in the enactment and administration of law. Resistance to the formation of unjust and hostile opinion against a race becomes a public duty.

I have chiefly concerned myself with the accusation that the Jew can be true to no country and is lacking in the capacity for patriotism. I have thought the best way of dealing with this and similar charges was to point to what individual Jews had done and from that to derive the char-

8 PREFACE

acteristics applicable to the race as a whole. This process while more tedious is also more rational than to have recourse to the imagination and produce from it some race trait by which all its members are to be judged. When a fault is shown by a Jew it is because he is a Jew; in the case of other men the race is not mentioned. For example, if a Jew is charged with treason the indictment is made to lie against the whole race; but in the case of Benedict Arnold he is not imputed to the English race, and certainly not as a representative. Not the least of the wrongs inflicted upon the Jew is that he is judged as one of a mass and not as an individual.

Much research has been necessary and I have been fortunate in my helpers. I especially acknowledge obligation to Mr. Eliot Lord for discriminating and painstaking service in the collection of material, verification of statements, and sifting of authorities. I have been fortunate enough to have the proof read by so distinguished a scholar as Professor George F. Moore, of Harvard, and his suggestions upon ecclesiastical and the remoter race history and the protocols have been of great value. I also heartily thank President Charles W. Eliot for his liberal and independent foreword. g^^^^^ ^_ j^^^all

Foreword

THE publication of Governor McCall's book on the Patriotism of the American Jew is remarkably timely. A wave of anti-Semitic feeling has lately passed over the American people, due partly to the striking success of well-educated Jews in the professions and in large business ever since they attained to full American citizenship, and partly to the recent immigration of many Eastern European Jews into the United States. This not unnatural feeling has been stimulated by an active propaganda through the Press, proceeding from ignorant and narrow-minded Christians — a propaganda which has been amply supplied with money for printing and publishing purposes.

Governor McCall prefaces his conclusive demonstration of the patriotism of the American Jew by some account of the immense services of the Jewish race to mankind. The careful reader of his earlier chapters will learn how the Jews maintained monotheism against idolatry; how their own "Lord of Hosts" guided them in their frequent wanderings and fought with them in battle against their enemies, and how their one Lord was the chief of the first republic ever created on this earth — the Republic of the Judges. He will see that the Hebrews, centuries before

10 FOREWORD

the Christian era, created for themsdves and transmitted to other races a superb literature in both prose and poetry, and later contributed to the preservation and transmission to modern times of the literatures of other nations, such as those of Greece, Rome, Arabia, and England.

From the earliest times to the latest the Hebrew race has been to a remarkable extent a literate people, passing down from father to son and from generation to generation the art of reading and writing, the love of letters, and a strong belief in education. On down the centuries the synagogue has been a school for both children and adults, and the rabbis have been teachers of morality, social order, and domestic honor and love.

The Hebrews have always been a migratory people, their migrations being induced alike by wars, famine, and persecution. At last a few million Jews have migrated to the United States of America, and there for the first time have found a country in which they hope and intend to stay. Although the American Jews are interested in the new migration from other countries into Palestine and are prepared to support it liberally with money and engineering skill, it is hard to find an American Jew who proposes to migrate for life from the United States to Palestine.

It is the main purpose of Governor McCall's

FOREWORD 11

book to demonstrate beyond a question that the American Jew loves America, is grateful for his American refuge, and has been rendering great service to the United States ever since the Constitution was adopted — services military, naval, industrial, and financial — ^bearing voluntarily a part in public labors and burdens larger in proportion to their numbers than the immigrants of English, Scotch, Irish, Dutch, or Scandanavian stock have borne. These are facts that the Christian races inhabiting the United States today should carefully bear in mind, when they are urged to keep Jews out of the country, or to limit the opportunities of those already here.

The moral teachings which have come down through the Jewish race have never been outgrown; and it is not probable that they ever will be. They cover the tenets on which alone human society can be securely founded — honor thy father and thy mother; thou shalt not kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness against thy neighbor, or covet anything that is thy neighbor's. Here are the principles which guide mankind to sound family life, and to respect for the life, property, and rights of the neighbor. Jesus of Nazareth gave a wider interpretation to the word neighbor and placed more emphasis on love in the two great commandments of the Mosaic Law, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine

12 FOREWORD

heart (Deuteronomy VI, 5), and thy neighbor as thyself" (Leviticus XIX, 18) ; but he expressly declared that "on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets/' Moreover, Jesus was himself a Jew by birth, training, and experience, a kind of Jewish Prophet but more radical or revolutionary than the Scribes and Pharisees could endure.

There can be no doubt that the American Jews are trustworthy in regard to the theory of political liberty; but it may well be that some of the less educated among them will depart in some measure from the English-American method of developing civil liberty; because for many generations they have had no experience of any sort of liberty — religious, civil, social, or industrial. They promise, however, to be apt learners of the English- American practice of advancing gradually through discussion and compromise towards safe freedom.

It is a great satisfaction to all people who understand what invaluable contributions to religious liberty have been made by the people and government of the United States to see that the anti-Semitic prejudice which is now manifesting itself in many parts of the world is not based on dislike of the Hebrew religion, but of some of the Jewish racial qualities.

It is also satisfactory to all well-wishers for

FOREWORt) 13

the human race that intermarriage between members of races that are not kindred is generally condemned by medical, sanitary, and eugenic authorities; so that the right policy in nations which include many different races is not fusion, or blending, or amalgamation, but separate parallel development of each race, acting in concord with the other races, but each preserving through many generations its own bodily and mental advantages and historical characteristics. Here modern science is only corroborating the ancient Hebrew precept, "Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind; thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed" (Leviticus XIX, 19). I hope that Governor McCall's book will be widely read by thinking people in the United States, and particularly by those who are in the habit of trying to take an active part in the formation of a wise public opinion.

Charlds W. Eliot

Contents

CHAPTER

I Dangers op Race Prejudice . . .

II The Protocols: Political Forgeries

Chapter I ^

At the business of fomenting antagonism against a race, America is new and, therefore, awkward. And the beginning that has been de- Hberately made here is of the crudest character.

There is strength in our many-sided American citizenship which makes it possible for our civiHzation to reflect the best quahties of so many races. Such a result, however, can only be brought about by co-operation. The division that would come from arousing race antagonisms would serve to convert what should be a source of strength into a source of weakness. It is the statement of a very obvious thing to say that the intrusion of race issues into our social structure and political life will have the inevitable result of giving us less equal government. It will expose races to possible persecution and increase the difficulty with which our friendly relations with foreign governments may be maintained. It will gravely endanger the very stability of the Nation.

Racial antagonisms are likely enough to show themselves, even without stimulation, in conditions which are rich in material for their formation. There is danger enough that they will spring up spontaneously and without special incitement on the part of anyone. The tendency to have our population divide itself into great cliques needs to be resisted, not encouraged, and when men deliberately set themselves to the task of arousing race hatred, the undertaking is by no means difficult in proportion to its wickedness. With so much combustible material lying about us there may easily be kindled a conflagration which it will be very hard to control.

The noble theory of political equality, lying at the base of our institutions, gives us no immunity from those outrages upon law which have so often sprung out of the prejudices of race. We have sad enough proof of that in our own history, but we shall be thrice warned if we shall consider not only what has happened here but what has happened among other nations.

One, therefore, who essays to stir up race hatred in this country must be deaf to the teachings of history or he must set before himself a most exalted purpose to justify the peril to which he is exposing society.

Of all the races of the world the one that has been the victim of the most outrageous and long continued persecution is the Jewish race. There is no fouler blot upon what we call civilization than the treatment that has been visited upon the Jews. After centuries of persecution the members of the race have been permitted in most countries during the last two or three generations to enjoy the common rights of mankind, and in our land they have, greatly to their own advantage and the advantage of the rest of us, been fully invested with the rights of citizenship. It would seem incredible in the light of experience that anybody should seek to revive the race feud against the Jew, and that such an attempt should be made in America of all countries. Surely no man who hopes to look upon a world which is the abode of civilization can desire to see again a condition which constituted a glaring reproach upon all humanity. And no unwarped American could contemplate without shame our taking part in a movement that might bring to naught that emancipation which our country so honorably led in conferring.

Nevertheless, an effort emanating from a responsible source, has been undertaken among us to stir up race hatred against the Jews. Such a movement should not be permitted through inaction to gather strength. The time to oppose it is at the outset. It may be begun in ignorance, but, if its evil meaning is made clear, it can only be continued in open disregard of consequences the most deplorable.

After the city of Jerusalem fell, despite one of the most desperate defenses recorded in history, the Roman conqueror forbade the Jews ever again to enter the city. Since that time they have been without a country which as a race they could call a home. They fled to North Africa, to Spain, and even to Rome itself. They climbed the Alps with the Roman legions into Germany and Gaul. They crossed the channel into England before the Saxon invader came to that country. They penetrated into the deserts of Arabia. There was no known country in the world in which the sons of Abraham did not seek a refuge.

But while the fall of Jerusalem marked formally the ending of their state, their real dispersion dates from an earlier time. It began in the sixth century before the Christian era. After the conquests of Alexander, it attained larger proportions, proceeding from Babylonia and Egypt as well as Palestine. In the time of Christ, Philo estimates the Jewish population of Egypt at a million, and the Jews in Babylonia and the other provinces of the Kingdom were more numerous than those of Palestine. Many were carried off into slavery by Pompey; many perished in the war of 66-72 A. D'., or were carried off by the victors; many more suffered the same fate under Hadrian.

But whatever the period to which it may be assigned, it was as effective a world-wide dispersion of a race as if its members had been sown by the hand of the Creator over every land. Ordinarily a race thus scattered would in time have lost its identity and would not have appeared as a distinctive race in subsequent history. It would have been absorbed by the established races with which it came in contact; and the blending might have measurably affected the character of the different race stocks. In that way only it might have exerted influence upon subsequent civilization. Undoubtedly, the history of a race distinguished by the achievements of the Jews would have survived, if only on account of its deathless literature, of which its literary glories were only surpassed by its ethical and religious values. But there would have lingered no Jewish Problem to vex subsequent times.

Why, then, was the race not thus absorbed? More than one answer may be given and more than one of them may possess an element of truth. The foremost reason, probably, is found in the indomitable vitality of its religious faith — a faith that not only survived persecution but was made stronger on account of it. The Jews carried with them everywhere their devotion to the worship of Jehovah. With the exercise of this worship there had come to them from Moses as a part of the law a multitude of observances in the preparation of food and in the practical ordering of their lives. Perhaps the most powerful influence was seen in the synagogue through which the whole people was educated in its religion as revealed in its scriptures and in the unwritten law religious, moral and ceremonial. Thus, under conditions then existing in the world, so long as they adhered to their religion, with all that it implied they maintained their community life and were to an extent isolated from the populations among which they lived.

They became involved in difficulties with their neighbors not merely because of theological differences, but also by their peculiar habits of living. These habits, if we accept as true an opinion commonly received concerning them, reflected a degree of science in advance of the times, and resulted in improved health conditions among them; but this result strangely contributed to their persecution. The so-called "black death" and other filth plagues, which would now and then exact from great cities a cruel retribution on account of lack of cleanliness and other violations of the laws of health, fell more lightly upon the quarters where the Hebrews lived; and the people in their ignorance, with suspicion bred of prejudice, would point to the relative immunity of the Jews as proof that they were poisoning wells or exercising some other malign influence in order to destroy the balance of society, whereupon massacre would be wreaked upon the members of the race. Thus the chief cause of the persecution of the race probably grew out of religious differences, heightened by differing physical conditions resulting from the observance of religious health rules.

After the power of the Jews had been broken in Palestine a new sect appeared which at first was even more despised. Its members were cast into prison, fed to wild beasts, and subjected to nameless tortures. But it spontaneously grew in strength until it soon became the overshadowing power in all Europe. When the Roman Empire was broken into many fragments, each imperfectly performing the functions of government, and a wave of barbarism threatened to sweep away all that was left of civilization, it was this new church which furnished a refuge from the tempest. It came to be the ruler over kings and made more easy to be endured the conditions of the peoples over whom they held sway. It formed the mighty bridge across which were borne so many of the memorials of the ancient world. Strange to say, it has been the same church, the Christian church, which has been responsible for the worst persecution of the Jews.

But it should be said at the outset that the attitude of the entire Christian Church in all its branches, Catholic as well as Protestant, is radically different today. Anti-Jewish agitation seems to have little or no support in the pulpit of any church. The words of one of the greatest preachers of modern times so strikingly reveals the change from the attitude of the Fourteenth Century that a liberal quotation of them is justified. Henry Ward Beecher, speaking of the Jews, in one of the most powerful of his sermons said in his Plymouth pulpit :

"These heroic people stand preeminent as the unrecognized benefactors of the human race. If any people ever lived whose faults might be condoned in consideration of their invaluable services to religion and to civilization, it is the Hebrews. If any people ever had a full measure of every form and degree of injustice meted out to them, it is the Hebrews.

"Let us look at the contributions which have been made to the world's stock in civilization by the Hebrews. It may surprise some to be told that commonwealth, as we understand it in republican governments, is unquestionably of the desert, and that our institutions sprang from the laws of Moses's mind; but it is true. The commonwealth of the Israelites contained in it the seeds of all subsequent commonwealths.

"An appeal to the people on all great questions of polity; the educating all the people to have a public sentiment about their own affairs; the attempt to conduct a government, whether by prophet, by priest, or by king, for the benefit of the people themselves, these fundamental elements belonged, and I think belonged first, to the Hebrew commonwealth.

"Closely allied to the organization of government, and indeed precedent to it, as the very condition of successful and continuous government, is the household. Now, the family emerged from barbaric forms earlier among the Hebrews than among any other people and passed into that condition which has enabled it to perpetuate itself. In no other nation were children ever reared with more care. In intelligence, in home life, in purity, in exaltation of sentiment, and in extraordinary care in the teaching of children, there are not to be found in the palmiest communities of the best Christian households those that surpass the best families of Jews at this time. We have borrowed their example, and are rearing our children after the pattern and inspiration of the Jewish household, as it has existed from the days of Moses onward.

"I cannot fail to point out, too, how in that Oriental land and in that early day, the virtue of industry, of personal independence, of work, was understood and enforced. During the time that Plato declared that in his Ideal Republic there should be no mechanics, during that long intermediate period when to be a working man was to be shut out from all hope and honor and elevation in society, from four thousand years ago, down to this day, work has been honorable in the Jewish household, and that motto, that proverb stands, which stood at that early period: 'He who brings his child up without a trade brings him up to be a thief/ On that principle the children of the richest Jews, of Jews in the highest station, were taught how to maintain themselves by their own hands and by their own industry. The making of work honorable is one of the boons which God has given to the human race through this remarkable people.

"Then we are to take notice how in the Jewish nation, from the very earliest day, woman took that position to which she has been coming for two thousand years since through the inspirations of Christianity. Whatever a woman could do well and was called of God by inspiration to do, that she was permitted to do; and she stood honored by what she was. That invaluable contribution to humanity we derived from the early example of this great people.

"The Jewish religion bred a race of men who put into the building of themselves the attributes of truth, of justice, of humanity, of morality, of gentleness and of humility. It reared men who in their own time had no equals, and with whom there was nothing to compare. The Greeks built better temples than the Hebrews, but though Hebrew genius had never carved a marble it did better — it carved men.

"The Jew may have been deficient in the perception of the beautiful as it was developed in matter; but his soul was all aflame with a conception of the beautiful as it was developed in the mind.

" *As the hart panteth After the water brooks, So panteth my soul After thee, O, God !'

"In the whole literature of the globe, you cannot find another such aspiration, and this is but one of ten thousand of the breathings of the Jewish mind, of its yearning after the divine.

"No people ever taught the world such a lesson of endurance, of indestructible manhood, under every conceivable aggression and wrong, as the Jews have. It has been the very genius of the Hebrew people to work for the welfare of mankind by working for their own welfare. They fought the battle of liberty in fighting for their owm right to live. If ever a race was heroic, this race has been."

CHAPTER II The Protocols : Political Forgeries

The so-called "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" have recently been brought forward among us as a basis for anti- Jewish agitation. And this has been done after they have been fully discredited in Europe, where scholars of independence and character had no difficulty in penetrating into their fraudulent character.

Although the protocols have been many times effectually exploded, what they contain and the manner of their production shed such light upon the character of anti- Jewish agitation that more than a cursory reference to them is demanded. The Jews have not merely been attacked because they were Jews but sometimes they have been assailed in order to promote some political or social purpose which did not primarily concern them; and the attack upon the Jews based on the protocols had primarily a political purpose. It may be said that the protocols pretend to be the confession by "Hebrew Elders" of the malign purposes of their race toward civilization. What through centuries has been in effect charged times without number by the enemies of the Jewish race, it was very convenient to have put in the form of a confession by somebody who, whether he had an existence or not, should at least be credited with a title which would imply authority to be the spokesman of the Jews. The Jewish race, it is confessed by these mythical Elders, in effect cherishes the purpose of producing revolution, overturning government, destroying Christianity and civilization, and in general of propagating the diseases of which all the world is now so mortally sick — and, in some inscrutable fashion, out of it all, to secure the dominion of the world for the Jew.

This is surely a very ambitious program thus to be formally acknowledged by these Elders and so obligingly delivered over to the enemies of the Jew, with the result of fomenting agitation against the race. We are asked to believe that the Jews now inhabiting the earth seek to sacrifice themselves and subordinate their own interests entirely to the interests of the Jews of the future, whose power and glory they are thus attempting to secure. Also, these mysterious Elders would appear to be somewhat given to credulity to believe that the billion and a half of non- Jewish people who would still survive would placidly yield authority to the few million of Jews for whom triumph had been secured in the manner proposed. There are other considerations in abundance which should have suggested caution in accepting these "protocols." It should certainly have imposed caution that they were brought forward for sensational disclosure not by a friend but by an enemy of Zion; and this enemy who produced them one who gave different and contradictory versions of how he procured them.

Competent scholarship made prompt exposure of the fact that some of the contents were pilfered bodily from older documents which were of unquestionable anti- Jewish origin. There is not one circumstance which sustains their authenticity. Professor C. H. Wright, Librarian of the London Library, writes:

"We are left wondering why this kind of nauseating out-pouring of a perverted religiosity should be foisted on the British public in an anonymous shape without a clue to its real origin and full context."

It is disclosed that the revelation is entirely an excerpt from a book by a Russian reactionary and partisan bf autocracy published, not this year, nor last year, but many years ago. That there existed or ever had been in this author's possession any authenticated dependable documents was not even claimed. The writer affected merely to quote from manuscripts entrusted to him by an anonymous acquaintance — concocted from what this Russian propagandist himself describes in his Moscow publication as "incomplete notes of lectures," delivered by an unnamed kcturer, on unknown dates, "iki Paris about 1901."

"An intimate knowledge of Russian literature and intellectual life for the past twenty years convinces me that these protocols are worthless," is the dismissing comment of the London Librarian.

These protocols, freshly revamped, fashioned to serve the vicious primitive purpose of hate, can mislead no one who in fairness gives them even casual scrutiny. They are clumsy and stupid forgeries fabricated without cunning. Indeed, the man who produced them, styling himself Sergius Nilus, of the Department of Foreign Relations, Moscow — offers them as a postscript to explosive chapters of abuse that he is bent upon perpetrating against the Anglo-Saxon race. Even the London publishers who, commercially, had great stake in the canard's distribution, appear to have found any pretence of authenticity impracticable. In a featured "Preface" they confess that there is doubt of trustworthiness, revealing that the anonymous author of the book is unable to provide any certificate of genuineness whatever. The "Preface" makes this confession, which is more direct than that of the "Hebrew Elders" :

"We have said that this document flashes a blaze of light, and so it does, but whether the document is genuine or not, whether the blaze of light is true or false, can only be judged by internal evidence and probabilities. We may say at once that Nilus advances nothing in the nature of real evidence to prove the document and that his account of how it came into his hands consists of assertion only, without evidence to support it."

Ample appraisal of both the author's manner and matter can be found in the fact that even the rapacious maw of Russia's Anti-Semitic Encyclopedia will not take a syllable of it. "Jumble of embittered nonsense," is stamped upon it by a scholar as distinguished as Aylmer Maude, known the world over as the translator of Count Tolstoi into English. There has just been brought to light a French book published more than a half century ago against Napoleon the Third. Parallel passages taken from this book and from the protocols show such an exact correspondence in substance and phrasing as to prove that the forger of the protocols was a literary pirate of a high order.

The English speaking nations have until recent times been remarkably free from that political and ecclesiastical anti-semitism which has too often shown itself upon the continent of Europe and indeed has seemed entrenched there; but two years ago there was an outbreak of this anti-semitism in England and the United States. There was the same starting point in both countries. The basis of agitation was found in Eng- Hsh translations from the Russian of the protocols with portions of the introduction and epilogue of the Russian editor, Sergius Nilus, and comments and applications by the anonymous translators who discreetly withheld their names. The translation published in America was independent of that brought out in England and was of a later edition of the original. A German translation had appeared a short time before and a French one almost simultaneously with the English versions, and there were publications in other European languages at about the same time. Very soon after the appearance of the "Jewish Peril" with its translation and interpretation of the protocols, the London Morning Post, the leading organ of the Tory party in England, inaugurated a series of sensational articles upon this "Peril." The action of the Post was anticipated by a few weeks in America, a weekly journal here having already seized upon the protocols. In the virulence of its attacks upon the Jews as a race and indiscriminately upon individual members of it, the American publication was by no means second to the Tory organ of Great Britain.