The "Antisemitism of Men"
A chapter from The War and the Jew, 1940
There are two distinct forces at work within the general phenomenon
called Antisemitism: the one is a subjective repulsion, strong enough and
permanent enough to become anything from a hobby to a religion; the other is
an objective state of things which tend to ostracize the Jew almost
independently of whether his neighbours like or dislike him. We shall call the
first category "the Antisemitism of Men," and the second "the Antisemitism of
Things."
For a study of the former, the best field of observation is Germany; of
the latter, Poland. In the present chapter we shall deal with Germany.
At the moment of writing, there are supposed to be some 200,000 Jews
in Germany of the Versailles frontiers, 100,000 in Austria, 100,000 in Bohemia
and Moravia, 130,000 in Slovakia and 2,000,000 in the parts of Poland
occupied by the Nazis. ∗ These figures are largely guesswork rather than
reliable estimates; moreover, they are bound to be considerably affected by the
transfers of population effected by the Nazi government – some already carried
out, and others planned for the near future. Finally some may "hope" that a
considerable proportion of all these Jews will die out before the war is over, so
that the problem facing the managers of the future reconstruction will be
appreciably facilitated. Nevertheless, it is sure even so to present a formidable
problem.
∗ The number of Jews under Nazi domination has greatly increased since then. It comprises not only
the entire Jewish population of Poland (3,250.000 in 1939 but also the Jews of the Baltic States
(250,000), the Balkan countries (100,000), the Lowlands (60,000), Occupied France (approximately
50,000), and Occupied Russia (perhaps 2,000,000 – the Majority of Russian Jews). All in all, some
7,000,000 – the bulk of European Jewry – are now under the yoke of Nazi oppression.
The author assumes as an axiom that the war cannot end without the
liquidation of the Nazi regime. Its collapse will be followed by the restoration
of sovereignty of all or most of the annexed territories, and by the
establishment everywhere of constitutions as liberal and democratic as possible
in accordance with the best Allied or American advice. And finally, the
creation of something like a new and very much improved edition of the
League may be expected. It would be futile now to attempt any guess at the
details, even at the broader and more essential details, of that future; but the
final political outlook may be described as essentially bright, and the writer
very firmly believes in its reality.
Furthermore, he believes that all these oppressed peoples, restored to
security and sanity, will honestly try to devote themselves to sober
reconstruction. He believes that they will cherish a suppression of war; he
hopes that they will, for at least a generation, discard all thought of armed
revanche; he expects them to give much more active support to the new League
of Nations, or the European Federation, or whatever else it may be called, that
was ever enjoyed by the old Geneva League. True, one point is not quite clear
yet, even to a trustful believer, and that is, how the nations will settle all those
prickly questions of ethnically mixed provinces in such a way as to satisfy all
and to stamp out irredentism; but so fervent is his desire to believe that he
prefers not to think of the prickles. Everything, in short, will somehow get
adjusted in time, with a great deal of labour, but without any further disasters.
Some people may find this optimism absurd: but this the author denies; his
most sanguine expectations are soberly and moderately realistic. Credo, quia
NON absurdum.
There is, however, one aspect of such optimism which even the most
sanguine should discard utterly and ruthlessly: namely, the belief that the
cancer of Antisemitism can be cured by such means as liberal constitutions and
League supervision. No doubt, all the suitable provisions will be duly included
in these constitutions, and in the League's new Covenant, ensuring the
inviolability of equal rights for all. But the enforcement of these constitutions
will have to be left, in every country, in the hands of national governments; and
democratic electoral methods will ensure that those governments will be as
representative of the true attitude of the masses as possible. It is therefore on
the attitude of the masses that the actual operation of any clauses relating to
equal rights will depend, so far as the Jews' rights are concerned. It is otherwise
in the case of other minorities: they live for the most part in close territorial
clusters, in districts or even cantons, and they can to some extent look after
themselves. The Jews live scattered throughout predominantly Gentile towns
and villages: at every step, in the street or in public or private life, they are
exposed to the impact of the good or ill will of the local majority. To pretend
that under these conditions any essential results can be ensured by law is
childish. NON credo quia absurdum.
This aspect of the matter will be the better appreciates if the reader
recalls that the principle of equal rights to the Jews, even in East-Central
Europe, is nothing new. On the contrary, in almost every one of these states the
legal recognition of this principle is just as old as the state itself. Only Austria-
Hungary was older than its Jewish equality law, which was inscribed on her
statute book in 1867. When the German Empire was created in 1871 its
imperial constitution established equality for all, irrespective of creed or origin.
When the treaty of Berlin (1878) definitely delimited the frontiers of
Roumania, Serbia and Bulgaria, it was guaranteed by the same treaty that in all
these countries all citizens would enjoy equal rights. When the peace treaties of
1919 created Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic States, special minority
clauses were solemnly inserted to ensure equality, and the League of Nations
was to supervise and guarantee their execution. To tell once again how all these
Provisions proved ineffective would be tedious; the only fact that may not be
widely known is the pre-war Roumania, which never took the equality clause
seriously, and openly treated her Jews as "foreigners," never had any trouble on
that account with any of the signatories of the Treaty of Berlin – one of whom
was Great Britain and another France.
Strangely enough, the formidable past history of German antisemitism
seems to be rapidly sinking into oblivion. In the democratic countries a myth is
being created to the effect that the evil has originated with the advent person
called Adolf Hitler, who was born in 1888, so that if he can be removed it will
disappear. But the truth is that Hitler has just as much to do with the origin of
this evil as Napoleon had with the invention of gunpowder. Napoleon did not
invent gunpowder; he only made magnificent use of it; and when he was gone,
others arose who surpassed him.
Germany – and in this respect Austria was one with her long before the
Anschluss – has ever been the paramount workshop of modern antisemitism.
There and not elsewhere was the discovery made, and the principle proclaimed,
that the objection to the Jew is not religious but racial, and he must therefore be
persecuted even if baptized. There and not elsewhere was antisemitism
sublimated to the rank of a scientific philosophy. In no other nation was Jewhatred
as a mode of thought openly adopted by so many really prominent men,
some of them even of the first eminence in the various walks of spiritual
leadership: Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Dühring, Treitschke, Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, to achieve success in antisemitism, had to settle in Germany. In
Germany, too, not elsewhere, was the practical aspect of antisemitism
modernized and perfected: what had been a mere tendency to desultory streetrioting
was by German initiative promoted to a political system. Stoecker and
Ahlward founded the movement in Berlin, bringing into the Reichstag, about
1893, the first bunch of deputies to be solemnly (and quite democratically)
elected as the Antisemitische Partei; and in Vienna, two years later, Lueger
triumphantly conquered the Vienna Town Hall on platform whose main, or
rather only "plank" was hatred of the Jew, was elected burgomaster amidst
scenes of the wildest mass-enthusiasm, and kept his seat for decades. Such
things had been happening for three-quarters of a century before the Nazi Party
was ever thought of.
It is nonsense to pretend that the Germans are manifesting antisemitism
only by order, so that when the order is annulled by the liquidation of Nazism
they will forget all about it. Germans abroad, who run no risk if they choose to
disobey orders from Berlin, have amply and repeatedly shown that Nazism can
win them by its own powers of fascination, and not through their fear of the
Gestapo. The clearest proof of this was the Saar plebiscite of 1935, held under
ideally democratic conditions, with British police ensuring the fullest freedom
of propaganda, of conscience and of franchise: out of 525,000 valid votes,
477,000 were cast for incorporation in Nazi Germany. Perhaps even more
significant are the impressive proportions of the Germans in Italy, Latvia and
Estonia who have accepted the call to return to Germany: all but
autochthonous, the descendants of conquerors and settlers of centuries ago,
they left their often comfortable homes and respectable social positions for the
pleasure of breathing the Nazi atmosphere. To top it all, there is record of the
frank and vociferous delight displayed by all classes of the Vienna mob, in the
first weeks after the Anschluss, when "Jewish ladies in fur coats" were ordered
to scrub pavements and ganz Wien flocked to watch and yell with joy. And
mothers lifted their babies over their neighbours' heads so that they should not
miss the lovely sight. "By order?" Of course there must be an order to unleash
the innermost brute: but the main point is the presence of the brute underneath;
and what a multitudinous brute!
Antisemitism is traditionally and organically endemic in Germany; not
in Germany alone by any means, but in no other country more than in
Germany. Here again, being neither a sociologist nor a student of psychology,
the author will not attempt to explain the phenomenon: but only a fool or a liar
would deny it.
The collapse of Nazism can bring no essential remedy to this endemic
disease. One must, of course, be realist enough to allow for the so-called swing
of the pendulum: when Hitler goes, there may be some kind of popular scurry
to atone for the antisemitic orgy, partly for opportunist reasons, but partly also,
no doubt, out of genuine disgust at the sub-human, beastly forms which the
persecution has assumed. Moreover, there will be these equality-clauses in the
peace treaty and the new constitution. And further, there is not the slightest
doubt that many Jews who were forced to leave Germany after 1933 will then
be most eager to return, and ready to forgive and forget: some because of
discouraging experiences while in exile, some out of genuine attachment to the
German land and civilization. That much we all admit. But all superficial
optimists should be warned that the result of this backwash will be – almost
immediately, perhaps within a few weeks only of the new édit de Nantes which
will have opened the new era – a venomous recrudescence of the incurable evil.
One shudders to think how venomous it would be. Apart from racial
idiosyncrasies, sheer material interest will constitute a formidable charge of
high explosive. The value of Jewish property in Germany which, in one form
or another, had passed into German hands, is in the vicinity of 25 billion marks.
At a conservative estimate, since 1933 in Germany and since 1938 in Austria,
over 300,000 Jewish breadwinners of all kinds have been affected by the Nazi
regime; most of them (and the proportion is constantly increasing) have been
altogether deprived of their employment or profession, while a dwindling
minority is still clinging to some sort of job. All that they have lost has been
grabbed by the "Aryans." That "all" includes myriads of commercial and
industrial positions, from director to typist or shop-assistant, thousands of
professional jobs from panel doctor to journalist, while a comparatively
important percentage of civil servants, from school teacher up to judge and
chief constable, were Jews. These were posts filled by the middle class, the
intelligentsia, the haute bourgeoisie – that is, by the most conspicuous, most
vocal and most sensitive strata of modern society. To the members of these
classes the return of Jews would mean a vast influx of extremely dangerous
competitors, in many cases far better qualified than the usurpers, and they
would be faced, as a rule, with the alternative: "reconquer or starve." In all
cases they would be morally entitled to the redress of an admitted grievance, an
intolerable injustice.
The kind of welcome which would await them may be imagined, I do
not presume to foretell how soon it would rise to the pitch of direct persecution,
or how the inevitable de facto denial of "equal rights" would be disguised to
suit the constitution and the peace treaty; but it should be remembered that
under a democratic constitution parliaments and governments are bound to be
powerfully influenced, firstly, by the endemic idiosyncrasy of which I have
spoken, and secondly, by the menace of competition, more desperate than ever
before. Nor should anyone be misled by the pleasant recollection that in the
good old days of Bismarck and Wilhelm the Last, the principles of
antisemitism were put into practice without any ugly and disorderly brutality,
but with due restraint and moderation; so that the new after-war régime, under
which all brutality will be strictly prohibited by protocol, may in the end prove
"not so bad," or at all events, not so bad for the Jews, who, after all, must not
forget that they cannot be choosers…. The recollection is irrelevant: in the
interval the brute has been unleashed and has tasted blood.
To make the outlook yet clearer, one may ask the reader – supposing
him to be a Gentile – to forget that beggars cannot be choosers, and to imagine
that a similar prospect is offered not to us, but to him and to other Englishmen:
the prospect of living at the mercy of a ninety-nine to one majority trained for
generations to abhor the English, under the sole protection of paper paragraphs
and the supervision of Geneva, or the substitute for Geneva; and to work for
the Allied victory with unfaltering zeal, though all it promises him is – just this
prospect.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario