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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 53, 10 December 1938, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
“It may be that the only thing left for us to do is to die with as much dignity and nobility as we can muster. Sometimes I think we shall end up like those Jewish communities in Poland in the Sixteenth Century, for whom there was no other way out, except to meet death steadfastly, with the words of Kiddush Hashem on their lips.”
The speaker was a Jewish business man in a mid-Western commercial city. We had been discussing the virulent anti-Semitism that has been growing beneath the surface in cities like Seattle, Des Moines, Portland, Minneapolis – the typical American city outside the mass production centers. We agreed on the extent of this anti-Semitic growth. But why it was growing, why it was closer to the surface than ever before, what to do about it – on these fundamental questions my host and I were poles apart.
As my host leaned back in his easy chair, in his more than comfortable private home, his posture of gentle resignation recalled to me an incident some years ago in a Pennsylvania town. The Coal & Iron cossacks were smashing a coal strike. I had come to a liberal businessman for help in organizing aid for the miners. In our conversation my host identified himself with the oppressed strikers; but the proposals I brought from the strike committee, he rejected: visionary, impractical, etc., etc. What then? I asked. Cheerfully philosophical, he replied: “Maybe the only thing left for us is to go down underneath the reaction. The spirit of intolerance may prove too much for us.”
The posture of neither businessman could really be taken seriously. Their expression of defeatism was merely their genteel way of refusing to go on the firing line. The fact was that, whatever happened to the strike, the Pennsylvania liberal would go on living, not quite as before – he was known as a friend of the miners, and smashing of the strike would cause timid associates to loosen their ties with him, might lose him some business – but still live comfortably. My Jewish host was expressing in very elegant language the simple fact that his life was far-removed from the workers and lower middle-class who made up the majority of the Jewish community and that his separation from them unconsciously led him to hope that somehow, some way, he would share only partially any fate that might befall them.
Fortunately, the Pennsylvania miners did not share my host’s philosophical pessimism, and fought their way through to victory, thereby preserving one of the fortresses from which the labor movement was to advance with such giant strides in 1933. Unfortunately, however, my Jewish host’s pessimism approximated the general mood of the Jewish masses.
Yes, a dangerous mood of defeatism is current in American Jewry. That defeatism must be burned out at its roots, for it is paralyzing any serious and effective participation of Jewry in the fight against anti-Semitism. But to replace that defeatism by a courageous outlook requires, first, that the roots of that defeatism be understood.
Jewish workers, intellectuals, most professionals and businessmen cannot afford the luxury of upper-class philosophical pessimism. For if we fail to find a way out, on our backs will fall the whips of the Fascist thugs who, even today, are throughout America preparing for a totalitarian regime.
Certainly one basic factor creating the sense of impotence which pervades American Jewry is the fact that, unlike all other national minorities, the Jews have no national soil under their feet anywhere. The Irish are a majority in Ireland, the Croats in Croatia, etc., but the Jews nowhere. In Palestine the 400,000 Jews are a beleaguered garrison, surrounded by some 50 million Arab-speaking Moslems of the Near East. What follows? No large section of Jewry has the conviction, intellectual or emotional, that Jewry can prevail against its enemies. A terrible fact!
Contrast the history of Jewish resistance to anti-Semitism with the history of the resistance of almost any other national minority against its oppressors, and the difference stands out in bold relief. Think of the almost numberless revolts of the Irish against Britain, a history studded with “the martyrs” – the Irish terrorists who gave vent, in this desperate and futile way, to the Irish aspirations for freedom. Think, too, of the veneration in which the Irish held “the martyrs.” Woe to the Philistine who expressed disapproval of their deeds.
But among the Jews, far more persecuted than most other minorities, such martyrs have been almost non-existent. Who can recall the predecessor of Hershel Grynszpan? And how Jews speak out to defend his deed? It remained for the liberals and the labor movement to organize his defense. The argument that it is better for the Jews to remain in the background in the defense is an argument which would never occur to the Irish, Croatian, Macedonian societies which, whenever the need arises, spring to the defense of their Grynszpans. That argument is simply another expression of the defeatism which pervades Jewry.
How to overcome the sense of isolation which underlies this defeatism? This, in essence, has been the problem of Jewry in the modern world.
Two main solutions have been proposed by Jewish leadership during the last century. The first solution pursued was assimilationism and, when that showed its limits, there arose the proposed solution of Zionism.
In the fully-developed form in which it flourished in the Nineteenth Century, the doctrine of assimilationism is no longer fashionable. Hitler has put a rude end to it! Nevertheless, it still exists, and its present half-hidden forms are actually far more repulsive than its earlier explicit form.
The fact is that assimilationism, in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, played a progressive role. The era of democracy opened up by the French Revolution found the Jews a semi-caste, pursuing the occupations to which they had been limited by medieval society and looking upon themselves as a race-nation destined to remain separated from the general community life. Capitalism, youthful, progressive, with a world to conquer, in its upward course provided hospitable room for all talents to develop; the first, progressive period of the development of the bourgeois state therefore resulted in a process of liberalism toward the Jews. For a time and in those countries in which capitalism early freed itself of feudal ties and created a modern bourgeois state, the Jew was afforded the opportunity to become, to a considerable extent, a political equal, to live where he pleased and pursue any occupation he choose. The assimilationist movement sought to utilize these new opportunities to the fullest extent.
To do so required that the Jews divest themselves of any peculiar status as Jews. Reform Judaism, born in Germany, was the best-organized expression of this movement: “We are Germans in everything, in hopes, beliefs, language and outlook; we are merely of the Judaic religion as some Germans are Catholics, others Lutheran, etc.” Such was the outlook, throughout most of the Nineteenth Century, of Western European Jewry and with it of great influxes into America from Eastern Europe. To the assimilationist leaders of the generation of 1848, the process opened up for Jewish integration into modern capitalist state-society seemed a process which would continue ever upward.
But even in those halycon years they could not exorcise from their pleasant homes the spectre of Jewish persecution, which raged unabated in Eastern Europe, where capitalist development took place – in Russia and the Balkans, in most of the Austro-Hungarian empire – not in the democratic forms of earlier countries, but tied up with the most reactionary elements of the past. Jewish persecution in Eastern Europe was revealing, already in the Nineteenth Century, that the mere development of capitalism was not going to guarantee a continuous liberation of governmental treatment of Jewry. And in the rest of the capitalist world, too, assimilationism soon demonstrated its extreme limits. The very birthplace of assimilationism, Germany, became toward the close of the Nineteenth Century, the birthplace of modern anti-Semitism. The process of liberalization did not continue forward indefinitely. For, scarcely grown to manhood, capitalism began to decay, and with it decayed the democracy which capitalism had created in its youth.
With the first signs of decay within capitalism, the assimilationist movement began to lose its progressive character. It finally ossified into the repulsive Philistinism of the contemporary Reform Temple. No discriminating and thoughtful Jew, growing up after the generation of ’48 had opened the doors to the general community and modern culture, could look upon the further fruits of assimilationism as a way of life.
What were the latter fruits of assimilationism, once it had broken down the doors of the ghetto? An assertive and noisy patriotism, a Philistine conformism to the ruling ideas and customs – that is to say, to the ideas and customs laid down by the ruling class in Western Europe and America – and the utterly meager and pseudo-Protestant religion, if one could call it a religion, of Reform Judaism.
To say, “we are Germans (or Americans, etc.) in everything” in 1848, in the lusty manhood of capitalism, meant to be for progress, for democracy, for freedom of culture. To say, “we are Germans (or Americans, etc.) in everything” in 1914 and thereafter meant to be for the imperialist war, to make jingoistic speeches and oppose radicalism, to join the Elks and Masons and the Rotary Club – in short, to become loyal vassals of the ruling powers.
Assimilationism revealed itself as assimilation to the bourgeois state. Body and sold, the assimiliationists, with the Jewish bankers and industrialists at their head, had delivered themselves up to capitalist reactoin.
This ugly spectacle of assimilationism is not the less repellent because, in the face of the indubitable growth of anti-Semitism, assimilationism is little defended as a rounded doctrine. No longer an ideal, assimilationism is all the more a practice. It has deep roots in the Jewish bourgeoisie’s desire (and interest) to conform to the rules laid down by the buorgeoisie as a whole, and the wealthy Jews drag along in their wake a large part of the Jewish population.
Last updated on 11 September 2014