To the Editor:
Milton Himmelfarb’s “In the Community” [May] makes a needed observation in the item “Blessings.” . . .
It has long puzzled me why secular Jewish organizations should be found bringing court actions to bar any kind of prayer or Bible reading in schools. Anyone taking the trouble to look around has seen that religious observance and practice by Jews is quite limited, except among the Orthodox. Attendance at Temple services is sparse. Saturday in Jewish neighborhoods, again excepting the Orthodox, is the big shopping day. Stores are open and crowds mill back and forth. The bill of particulars can be extended indefinitely.
Why, then, with this record, do those secular Jewish organizations, not particularly noted for the advocacy of religious observance and practice, take such a prominent part in fighting any religiosity in the public schools? It is unseemly and unbecoming, unless they can be said to practice what they preach. Or, to put it in another and blunter way: What is it to them?
Sol Perrin
New York City
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To the Editor:
May I point out two inaccuracies in Milton Himmelfarb’s . . . comparison of . . . the situation of Jews in Algeria with those in Hapsburg lands in general and in Prague in particular?
Mr. Himmelfarb states that the Jews of Prague were part of the Jewry of the German Kulturkreis, “whose fathers or grandfathers had spoken Yiddish.” I was born in Bohemia and spent the first 15 years of my adult life in Prague. I can assure you that those fathers and grandfathers, like their sons and grandsons, spoke German or Czech, not Yiddish. The majority of Jews in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia spoke German, the language favored by the Austrian government; a minority spoke Czech.
One of the objectives of the emancipation of the Jews, a process which started under Joseph II in the closing decades of the 18th century, was to strengthen the German-speaking segment of those areas.
The other statement to which I must take exception is that “the peasants in the country and the workers and servants in the city spoke Czech.” The fact is that in the interior of Bohemia most of the population, including merchants, bureaucrats, and intelligentsia, spoke Czech; in the marginal sections (the “Sudeten area”) most of the population, including peasants, workers, and servants, spoke German.
Prague, situated in the interior, had a predominantly Czech population in which all socio-economic groups were fairly represented. The German minorities in the Czech cities, including Prague, belonged predominantly to the upper classes, which fact may account for the misconception—spread by German nationalists—that the Czechs were a nation of servants and workers.
With all due respect, I feel that Mr. Himmelfarb, for his comparison with Algeria, should have chosen an area . . . more familiar [to him] than Bohemia and Prague.
Paul Hartman
New York City
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To the Editor:
. . . Milton Himmelfarb ponders why American Jews failed to react ideologically on the question of relaxing security restrictions on Arabs in Israel. He offers two conjectures . . . but fails to entertain a third possibility: that American Jews were for the most part convinced that critical security considerations, connected with Israel’s very existence, are involved here. . . .We can admire and respect Martin Buber’s pure and undiluted idealism, but we are not prepared to open the path to possible national suicide. . . . Israel [is] a country whose neighbors still consider themselves at war with her.
What is significant here is the trend. . . . In Israel the tendency is very obviously in the direction of gradual diminution of controls and restrictions, whether civic or economic, as rapidly as conditions permit. There are enough loyal opposition elements in this democracy to see to it that the process continues.
Carl Alpert
Haifa, Israel
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Mr. Himmelfarb writes:
Franz Kafka was born not quite eighty years ago, in 1883. My friend Paul Freedman reminds me that only thirty-six years earlier, the Moravian Jews had chosen Samson Raphael Hirsch to be their chief rabbi for his mastery of German, among other reasons. Which is to say that in the mid-19th century the Jews of the Czech lands could still not take German for granted. Even in Germany itself, the novelty of Hirsch’s Nineteen Letters of Ben Uzziel had been that Orthodoxy was being defended by a German Jew who thought in German rather than Yiddish. Kafka’s father’s father, therefore, probably spoke Yiddish as a child.
Since I mentioned a Czech elite, I could hardly have assumed that the Czechs were a barely literate plebs.
In 1941 T. G. Masaryk and the Jews, a very pro-Czech book, was published here. A chapter by Josef Penizek, about the last decades of Hapsburg rule in Bohemia and Moravia, says: “The Jew was hated as a German and a political enemy. Tension was particularly strong in the rural districts, where at election time Jews invariably voted for the German candidate for Parliament.” Masaryk’s memoirs record that in 1914, as he was preparing to go into exile to work for independence, he “pleaded” with “reasonable” Jews to “exercise some self-control” and be “more reserved” about their pro-Germanism, because “I was afraid that anti-Jewish riots would affect adversely my work abroad.”
Mr. Hartman should read Frank Meissner’s remarkable “German Jews of Prague,” in the December 1960 Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society. I quote one striking detail: “The palatial home of the Deutsches Haus would have gone into bankruptcy had it not been for the money of the German Jews and their guests. . . . This center of ‘German culture’ was a constant thorn in the eyes of the Czechs, who tended to identify everything German with the Jews. And it was an insult to the non-Jewish ‘chauvinist barbarians’ from the Sudetenland to have such an institution run by Jews. When Hitler’s hordes occupied Prague in March, 1939, the Deutsches Haus was . . . one of their first seizures.”
There is no need to look somewhere else for an analogy with Algiers. Prague will do.
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Correction
We neglected to mention that Jean Daniel’s article, “The Jewish Future in Algeria,” in our September number, was translated from the French by Polly Kraft.
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The exchange in our September “Letters” section between Michael A. Musmanno and James Grossman erroneously gave 1920 instead of 1927 as the year of the Goddard test; and in one place 1927 was given instead of 1920 as the year of the crime.
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