Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Liberty, 24 December 1938, with
"The Future of the Jews"
I MET a Jewish friend of mine the other day, and he asked me, "What is going to happen to the Jews?"
I told him I had rather he had asked me a different question: "What is going to happen to mankind?"
"But my people—" he began.
"That," said I, "is exactly what is the matter with them."
When I was a schoolboy in a London suburb I never heard of the
"Jewish Question." I realized later that I had Jewish and
semi-Jewish schoolfellows, but not at the time. They were all one
to me. The Jews, I thought, were people in the Bible, and that was that. I think it was my friend Walter Low who first suggested
that I was behaving badly to a persecuted race. Walter, like
myself, was a university crammer and a journalist, competing on
precisely equal terms with myself. One elder brother of his was
editor of the St. James's Gazette and another was the
Times correspondent in Washington and both were
subsequently knighted. Later a daughter of Walter's was to marry
Litvinov, who is now the Russian Foreign Minister. Nevertheless,
Walter held on to the idea that he was treated as an outcast; and
presently along came Zangwill in a state of racial championship,
exacerbating this idea that I was responsible for the Egyptian
and Babylonian captivities, the destruction of Jerusalem, the
ghettos, auto-da-fés—and generally what was I going to do
about it?
My disposition was all for letting bygones be bygones.
When the war came in 1914, some of us were trying to impose upon it the idea that it was a War to End War, that if we could make ourselves heard sufficiently we might emerge from that convulsion with some sort of World Pax, a clean-up of the old order, and a fresh start for the economic life of mankind as a whole. No doubt we were very ridiculous to hope for anything of the sort, and through the twenty years of fatuity that have followed the Armistice the gifted young have kept up a chorus of happy derision: "War to End War—Ya-ha!" In the last year or so that chorus has died down—almost as if the gifted young had noticed something. But throughout those tragic and almost fruitless four years of war Zangwill and the Jewish spokesmen were most elaborately and energetically demonstrating that they cared not a rap for the troubles and dangers of any people but their own. They kept their eyes steadfastly upon the restoration of the Jews—and, what was worse in the long run, they kept the Gentiles acutely aware of this.
The Zionist movement was a resounding advertisement to all the world of the inassimilable spirit of the more audible Jews. In England, where there has been no social, political, or economic discrimination against the Jews for several generations, there is a growing irritation at the killing and wounding of British soldiers and Arabs in pitched battles fought because of this Zionist idea. It seems to our common people an irrelevance, before the formidable issues they have to face on their own account. They are beginning to feel that if they are to be history-ridden to the extent of restoring a Jewish state that was extinguished nearly two thousand vears ago, they might just as well go back another thousand years and sacrifice their sons to restore the Canaanites and Philistines.
It is very unwillingly that I make this mild recognition of a certain national egotism the Jews as a people display, because I am acutely sensible of the misery and suffering to which great numbers of them are being subjected in many parts of the world. But it is fundamental to the Jewish Question that they do remain a peculiar people in the French- and English-speaking communities largely by their own free choice, because they are history-ridden and because they are haunted by a persuasion that they are a chosen people with distinctive privileges over their Gentile fellow creatures.
I know that the situation is hardening against them. In the days of my boyhood it was possible for an Englishman or a Frenchman or an American to answer the Jewish Question with one word: "Assimilate." We would declare we had no objection. Wasn't our civilization good enough for any one? As Joseph Choate said to me on my first visit to America in 1906, in regard to the flood of immigration, "Let 'em all come." Why keep up this separateness?
But we can say that no longer. Life has very suddenly and swiftly taken on a grimmer face to every one, but more immediately toward the Jew. The doors to assimilation are being slammed upon him. He is being driven out of countries where he had seemed to be secure. He is no longer free to escape to the countries which tolerate his kind. He is threatened very plainly with a systematic attempt to exterminate him—and to exterminate him brutally and cruelly.
Now, this intensification of the Jewish problem is not, I repeat, a thing in itself. It is a part of a swift and terrifying change which is coming over human affairs, and I do not believe it can be dealt with by itself or in any way except as a portion of the general human problem. The time has come for all sane men to sink their special differences in a universal effort.
The wisdom of our species was not enough to make the Great War of 1914-18 a "war to end war" or to achieve any solution of the economic difficulties that were pressing upon us. For two decades the Foreign Offices, the more they have changed the more they have remained the same thing. After 1918-19 they resumed the dear old game of conflicting sovereign Powers with gusto. The financial and business worlds could think of nothing better than to snatch back economic life from the modified public control under which it had fallen. There was a certain cant of reconstruction and rationalization, which was presently dropped.
Meanwhile a new generation of feverish young people without anything to look forward to grew up, and science and invention continually produced potential weapons of increasing range and power. Mankind became materially one community while still entangled in the dwarfish politics of nationalism and imperialism. In every country the disillusioned young turned their faces toward violent remedies for the economic disorganization that had robbed them of hope. War rose again in uglier and more destructive guise. The Fatuous Twenties gave way to the Frightened Thirties, and foreshadow the Fighting Forties. An immense dismay spread over the world. We live in that dismay. So long as we are history-bound and stuck in our old patriotic traditions, we are going to live in that dismay. We are going to drift from war to war, and each will be worse than the last.
The need for a strenuous intellectual effort, for a vast renascence of education throughout the world, to raise the human mind and will up to a saner co-operation, is glaringly manifest. Before all things we have to modernize. At present we are about as competent to handle these problems that confront us as the chauffeur whose one idea of starting his engine was to say "Gee-up" to it. Many of us had counted on the active Jewish mentality and the network of Jewish understanding about the world for a substantial contribution to that immense mental task. Such greatly imaginative Jews as (greatest of all, in my opinion) David Lubin, Disraeli, Marx, and so forth, had given an earnest of the possibility of a self-forgetful race "sprinkling many nations," and giving itself—not altogether without recompense—to the service of mankind. We have been disappointed.
No people have caught the fever of irrational nationalism, epidemic in the world since 1918, so badly as the Jews. They have intruded into an Arab country in a mood of intense racial exhibitionism. Instead of learning the language of their adopted country, they have vamped up Hebrew. They have treated the inhabitants of Palestine practically as nonexistent people, and yet these same Arabs are a people more purely Semitic than themselves. Nationalism, like a disease germ, begets itself, and they have blown up Lawrence's invention of Arab nationalism into a flame. They have added a new and increasing embarrassment to the troubles of the strained and possibly disintegrating British Empire.
In all these things the Jews have been doing nothing that any other people might not have done in the same circumstances. They are not exceptional; they are typical. We are all being aggressive and different and difficult to each other. The Jews are not the only people who have been educated to believe themselves peculiar and chosen. The Germans, for example, have produced a very good parallel to Zionism in the Nordic theory. They too, it seems, are a chosen people. They too must keep themselves heroically pure. I believe that the current Nazi gospel is actually and traceably the Old Testament turned inside out. It is one step from the Lutheran Church to the Brown House.
When I was a boy I got a lot of the same sort of poison out of J.R. Green's History of the English People in the form of "Anglo-Saxonism." I know only too well the poisonous charm of such a phrase as Milton's "God's Englishman." Most history as it is and as it has been taught is a poisonous stimulation of the latent possibilities of suspicion, hate, vanity, and mob violence in the human make-up. The Jews are not so peculiar as they and many Gentiles suppose. But it looks as though the penalties of a cultivated racial egotism were going to hit them first and hardest. They are going to be hit much harder than they have ever been hit before.
We Gentiles, now and in the years ahead, are going to see, in the efforts and experiences of the Jews, a sort of selected and intensified anticipation of what is to follow for ourselves and our children. If Judaism is murdered and exterminated—and that is quite a probable thing now—it will be only the opening phase of an age of warfare, conquest, and extermination. The turn of nation after nation will follow. That is how things must work out at the present level of our ideologies.
It is quite possible that the Jewish story will end in forcible sterilization and death. But there is no reason why it should do so. There is no reason at all in most of this belligerence, persecution, want, and misery amidst which we choose to live. It might be stopped long before the Jews are overwhelmed. It is simply that we, as a species, lack the vigor to end this confusion. We cling to flattering lies, delusions, animosities, mean advantages. The accepted tradition of the Jews is largely nonsense. They are no more a "pure" race than the English or the Germans or the hundred-per-cent Americans. There never was a "promise"; they were never "chosen"; their distinctive observances, their Sabbath, their Passover, their queer calendar are mere traditional oddities of no present significance whatever. There is nothing to prevent their living in equal and happy intercourse with other equally civilized people, if only the world could get rid of an incubus of prejudicial mental matter. We need only a reasonable and possible elevation of the educational level of the world for the Jewish Question to vanish altogether.
The only way out from the present human catastrophe, for Jew and Gentile alike, is a world-wide conscious educational emancipation. In books, universities, colleges, schools, newspapers, plays, assemblies we want incessant, ruthless truth-telling about these old legends that divide and antagonize and waste us. We want a great massacre of stale beliefs and ancient grievances and claims, if we are to avoid great massacres of human beings. There are thousands of Jewish writers, professors, philosophers, journalists, publishers, booksellers, film magnates, capitalists of every sort, who might contribute enormously more than they do now to the release and enlightenment of mankind—if only they would forget they are Jews and remember that they are men. The future of the Jews is like the future of the Irish, Scotch, Welsh, English, Germans, and Russians—and that is, common humanity in one large and varied world order, or death.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.