Discussing the Jews
The Jew in a Gentile World: An Anthology of Writings about Jews by Non-Jews.
by Arnold A. Rogow,
with an Introduction by C. P. SNOW and an Epilogue by Harold D. Lasswell. Macmillan. 385 pp. $5.95.
In an article published many years ago, I venturesomely suggested the gathering together of what I called (with intended irony) a “Treasury of Anti-Semitism,” which might prove therapeutic for those who had never read such literature. And when I first saw the ad for The Jew in a Gentile World quoting the charitable sentiment of H. L. Mencken in 1920: “The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world,” I thought for a moment that someone had acted upon my suggestion. The book actually before us turns out to be different, however, from the one I had in mind.
The bias of my “Treasury” should have been humanistic; Mr. Rogow’s interests are primarily social scientific (he teaches politics at Stanford). I had envisaged sections from Juvenal, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Richard Wagner, Jacob Burckhardt, Henry Adams: significantly, the only one of these authors who finds a place in Mr. Rogow’s scheme is Henry Adams. The purpose of my projected collection was, as I have indicated, therapeutic: an immunization accomplished by the administering of homeopathic doses of poison so as to render the subject finally impervious to the most massive doses of the same poison.
The disease I was concerned with combating in this way was that form of self-hatred to which Jewish intellectuals who make an idolatry of some immaculately conceived pure art or scholarship or science seem to be especially prone when they discover, inevitably, that anti-Semitism is a feeling which has infected not only idiots, morons, and those low on the social and intellectual scale, but also “some of the most powerful intellectuals and artists, the ones most sensitive to injustice, those most satiric of prejudice”—to quote from my article.
Mr. Rogow’s approach in his book is not by way of the feelings but by way of the abstract understanding; he is interested not in “the gentile world” as internalized within the mind of the individual Jew but in the relation of the Jew (presumed to be some monolithic psychological entity) to a world roughly split up between allies and enemies. His laudable purpose is to ameliorate Gentile-Jewish group relations in this world which is plagued by hostilities enough of other kinds.
Mr. Rogow’s method is judiciously to intermix utterances of anti-Semites, philo-Semites, and what may be called “neutralists.” In at least one instance—that of John Jay Chapman—he presents the case of a philo-Semite who in a period of some thirty years went all the way over to the other side. Occasionally—as in the cases of General Grant, Peter Stuyvesant, and Apion—the editor has had to depart from his own rule, and include Jewish writers (Josephus et al.) as the only source of our knowledge of the views of certain opponents (such as Apion) or in order to provide a necessary context for the non-Jewish document.
The contents are distributed over five historical divisions—two for the ancient world, one for the Middle Ages, and one each for modern Europe and America. The American section is disproportionately large, not because we have been blessed with more anti- or philo-Semitism but because the editor’s attention has been more engaged by American manifestations. The unintentional result of this imbalance makes for a contribution to an “American Studies” program, with a number of small-fry represented only because they are Americans, while in other cultures and earlier times some of the undoubted “giants” are omitted. Mr. Rogow’s division of history into ancient, medieval, and modern would indicate that he takes no stock in the organismic view of civilizations developed by such writers as Spengler and Toynbee, and perhaps for this reason he omits both of them from his table of contents though they have had much to say that is controversial and suited to his subject.
Whether the jarring juxtapositions in this volume of pro and con will provoke us to thoughtful self-analysis—as Harold Las-well hopes in the Epilogue—or to melancholy or rage, will probably depend on the reader and his mood. Usually books in this field are anti-Semitic tracts like Céline’s Bagatelles pour un massacre or L’Ecole des cadavres—or else they are exercises in apologetics—like an excellent volume I have before me as I write: Témoignages sur Israel dans la litterature française published in Paris in 1938 by Rabbi Jacob Kaplan. We do not ordinarily expect to find cheek by jowl passages from Mein Kampf with others from the writings of Thomas Jefferson or John Adams, who is quoted here as having said: “. . . in spite of Bolingbroke and Voltaire I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing nations.”
Within forty pages of these words appear Hitler’s potent paranoiacally brewed mixtures of categories: “If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men. . . . I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jews I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
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It seems illusory to suppose that the anti-Semite and the philo-Semite are talking about the same object. The more I myself look into such literature the more I think that anti-Semitism, in its pure and virulent form, must be related to the most elemental passions of mankind. The thousand and one efforts and dodges which have been used to rationalize it (the intellectual ingenuity of a Werner Sombart, for instance, which is almost “Jewish” by his own criteria, though it does not succeed in disguising completely his own romantic and irrationalist roots) are simply efforts to create an illusion of objectivity.
Anti-Semitism may be compared to the aberrant sexual passions which, as we know from Proust’s Charlus and from André Gide, are also capable of being rationalized with impressive flights of rhetoric. The hypothesis of an affinity between anti-Semitism and the sexual passions seems to me to find some support in a curious passage from Mein Kampf which is reprinted here: “The relation of the Jews to prostitution and, even more, to the white-slave traffic, could be studied in Vienna as perhaps in no other city of Western Europe. . . . When thus for the first time I recognized the Jew as the cold-hearted, shameless, and calculating director of this revolting vice traffic in the scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back. . . . but then a flame flared up within me. I no longer avoided discussion of the Jewish question; no, now I sought it.”
Of course, one must not underestimate the influence of tradition upon the expression of anti-Semitic feelings. Or should I say traditions? Obviously, there is more than one. Mark Twain points out that anti-Semitism antedates Christianity, and to judge from the pagan Hitlerites and the atheistic Communists it is something quite capable also of surviving Christianity. But this does not argue, as some including Twain would apparently have it do, that there is something objectively about the Jew which provokes the response—something, that is to say, other than vulnerability, exposure, weakness. To reduce anti-Semitism, I am convinced, only one thing is necessary, and that is to reduce the vulnerability of Jews to it. That course should confer a general benefit, by removing temptation from the path of all men.
Probably no better plan has suggested itself than the one half-jokingly, half-seriously put forward by Mark Twain in his Harper’s essay “Concerning the Jews” in 1899: “If I may make a suggestion without seeming to be trying to teach my grandmother how to suck eggs, I will offer it. In our days we have learned the value of combination. We apply it everywhere—in railway systems, in trusts, in trade-unions, in Salvation Armies, in minor politics, in major politics, in European Concerts. . . . We know the weakness of individual sticks, and the strength of the concentrated fagot. . . . You do not seem to be organized, except for your charities. There you are omnipotent; there you compel your due of recognition—you do not have to beg for it. It shows what you can do when you band together for a definite purpose.” The history of the sixty-three years since these words were written is that of the experimental application of their moral wherever Jews have been free to act, and few today, I think, would contest the efficacy.
I have already indicated some regrettable omissions in Mr. Rogow’s book. It is inevitable, to be sure, that different readers will have their own nominations to make. Yet it is hard for me to understand the omission of George Washington’s letter to the Congregation of Newport, or the choice of Lydia Maria Child’s whimsical account of her visit to the Crosby Street Synagogue in New York in preference to Walt Whitman’s description of his visit to the same edifice. And ought Mr. Rogow not, in his modern European section, have made room for Voltaire and Rousseau if not for Charles Péguy and Emile Zola? The reasons he gives for choosing selections from Marlowe’s Jew of Malta rather than from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice seem to me arbitrary. It is not, after all, the melodramatic villain Barabas but the “human” Shylock demanding his pound of flesh whose image has been imprinted as indelibly upon the imagination of mankind as that of the crucifixion.
One must also question some of Mr. Rogow’s editorial comments. He tells us, for example, that “Hitler became an anti-Semite in the aftermath of the First World War” when the very selection from Mein Kampf which follows indicates clearly that Hitler was a confirmed anti-Semite long before leaving Vienna in 1913. On page 113 we are told that “there are thousands of Jews in the Soviet Union.” But the census of 1959 indicates that there are more than two and a quarter million Jews living in the Soviet Union and that almost 500,000 of these gave Yiddish as their mother tongue.
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In spite of these defects, the book will yield a great deal of interesting reading or re-reading. Macaulay’s great Liberal 19th-century rhetoric, pleading for Jewish Emancipation, is still intermittently persuasive to the feelings, though after more than a century much of the famous speech has worn thin and its prevailing tone intellectually sounds today quite hollow. More effective and moving, more concrete and still fresh, are the 18th-century words of the American Ezra Stiles (a President of Yale University) recording in his diary shorthand the death of a Jewish friend: “On 28th of May died that amiable, benevolent, most hospitable and very respectable Gentleman, Mr. Aaron Lopez Merchant. . . . He did Business with the greatest Ease & Clearness—always carried about with him a Sweetness of Behav. a calm Urbanity, an agreeable & unaffected Politeness of manners. Without a single Enemy & the most Universally beloved by an extensive Acquaintance of any man I ever knew. His Beneficence to his Fam connections, to his Nation & to all the World is almost without a Parallel. He was my intimate Friend and Acquaintance! . . . The amiable & excellent Characters of a Lopez, of a Manasseh Ben Israel, of a Socrates & a Gangenelli, would almost persuade us to hope that their excellency was infused by Heaven, and that the virtuous and good of all Nations & Religions, notwithstand their Delusions, may be bro’t together in Paradise. . . .”
How this sweetness contrasts with the bitterness of some other texts in the book!
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