Newspaper Page Text
Page Eight
The Southern Israelite
Friday, February 28, 1036
CAN IT HAPPEN HERE?
All this the intelligent and in
formed American Jew knows per
fectly well. He may occasionally
lose his sense of proportion and
Ree Silver Shirts under the bed but
in general it is not Silver Shirts
that bother him. What keeps him
awake at night is the thought that
a situation exiatH in America which
at some future time breed animals
worse than Silver Shirts and much
more numerous—animals as nearly
like a Nazi Brown Shirt as one spe
cies can be like another. The sit
uation may be described as follows:
in the year 1880 there were 2,600,-
000 Jews in the world, half of them
in the old Kingdom of Poland and
not more than 3,000 of them in the
United States. In 1933 there were
16,000.000 Jews in the world of
whom more than a fourth were
resident in the United States. The
Jews, in the phraseology of Doctor
Ruppin of the Hebrew University
at Jerusalem, having changed in
the eighteenth century from an Ori
ental people to an Eastern Euro
pean, have in the last few genera
tions changed from an Eastern
European people to a Western Eu
ropean and an American.
The apprehensiveness of intelli
gent Jews springs from this fact.
Realizing that Jews have been the
scapegoats of all Western history,
that tney have been made to bear
responsibility for everything from
the Black Death to the economic
ills of the Germans, these observ
ers fear that the enormous increase
in Jewish numbers in America will
lead to charges that the Jews have
monopolized the opportunities, for
economic advance and that these
charges will pave the way for Fas
cism here as they paved the way
for Hitler in Germany. Non-Jews
who prefer democratic institutions
to dictatorship share that fear.
To determine whether it is a
fear deserving of serious attention,
it is necessary to inquire, first,
what significance the extraordin
ary numerical increase in Ameri
can Jewry actually has, and, sec
ond, whether there is any factual
basis for charges of Jewish monop
olization of American economic op
portunity.
As to the increase in numbers,
a little reflection should persuade
even those Jews who, like Profes
sor Namier, think of numbers as
dangerous (“to a nation rooted in
its own soil . . . they mean strength
and security, but for us, outside
Palestine, they have always consti
tuted a danger”) that the danger
here is more apparent than real.
Numerical increase is always pure
ly relative. A 1,600-fold United
States increase since 1800 means
nothing without an examination of
the figure from which departure
is taken. And in any case it is
the trend and not the total which
is significant. There were only a
few thousand Jews in America in
1800 and the reason why there were
only a few thousand was that Jews
were not permitted to live in Eng
land at the time of the first Brit
ish settlements in America. The
reason for the enormous sixfold in
crease in world Jewry between 1800
and 1933 was the fall in the death
rate, chiefly the infant death rate,
brought about by medical, sanitary,
and economic advance—phenomena
from which all populations profited
more or less equally, though the
Jews, whose high fertility was no
ticed by Tacitus, increased more
than twice as rapidly as the world
population. That rate of increase
no longer holds. The Jewish birth
rate, like other birth rates begin
ning with the French about 1811,
has now fallen to meet the new
conditions of survival and longe
vity. Ruppin remarks that the
most striking present feature of
Jewish vital statistics is the fall
froiA an eighteenth century birth
rate of forty-five per 1,000 to a
rate of eighteen in 1932. This rate
moreover declines from East to
West in Europe, having been 24.1
in Russia in 1926 and 6.9 in Vienna
in 1929. In New York the rule
breaks down, the Jewish rate being
higher than the non-Jewish. (The
Jewish 1932 rate of 17.6 is to be
compared with the rate for non-
Jews of 16.6.) The Jewish advan
tage, however, is probably to be ex
plained by the fact that about half
the Jews living in America are
still first-generation immigrants
largely from Eastern Europe with
the high Eastern European birth
rate.
The fact of the matter is, in
other words, that an enormous in-
A SURVEY
(Part Two)
Should American Jews be
fearful of the future? Have
Jews monopolized economic op
portunities in this country? Are
they over-running the liberal
professions? I)o they control
banking? Are the Jews more
Communistic, in proportion, than
any other radical unit? Is the
New Deal a “Jew Deal”? Are
the radio, publishing and amuse
ment worlds run by Jews? Do
Americans consider the Hitler
ites justified in driving out the
German Jews? In short, do
American Jews run this coun
try?
Amazing and ludicrous as
such queries might appear, they
have been analyzed, investigated
and statistically surveyed by the
famous American publication
“Fortune,” and through special
arrangement with the editors of
“Fortune,” the Seven Arts Fea
ture Syndicate and the Southern
Israelite is publishing this sur
vey in a series of articles of
which this one is the second.
THE EDITOR.
But the
crease bas takenplace.
further facts are, first, that that
increase is attributable to a tem
porary unbalance between Jewish
birth rate and Jewish death rate
in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth
century, second, that that unbal
ance has largely corrected itself,
and, third, that the gates of immi
gration into the United States are
now closed. The three tides, first,
of Sephardic Jews from Brazil,
Holland, England, and the Spanish
Americas in the eighteenth century,
second, of German Jews in the first
half of the nineteenth, and, third,
of Polish and Russian Jews be
tween 1882 (the year of the great
Russian pogroms) and 1926 are not
likely to be followed by a fourth.
There is therefore little reason for
apprehensiveness on the ground
merely of anti-Semitic propaganda
based upon increasing numbers.
The second and fundamental
question then presents itself. Are
there any facts to support a charge
that Jews have monopolized or are
monopolizing economic opportunity
in the United States? Before this
question can be answered it is de
sirable to see precisely why it pre
sents itself. What difference does
it make even if Jews do run away
with the system? Why shouldn’t
they monopolize any profession or
branch of industry they are intelli
gent enough to capture? A man’s
job should not be determined by
his parentage. To this proposition
and to the related proposition that
any discrimination against Jews in
the professions or in industry is
unjust there is no answer in logic
or morality. Both are unanswer
ably sound. But there is an histoi-
ical answer. Which is that a dis
proportionate Jewish participation
in the economic life of a country
has been found capable of arousing
anti-Semitic feeling.
Why this should be so—why the
success of the Jewish minority
should be so particularly resented
by other peoples—is a complicated
question which is rendered more
complicated by the fact that an
thropologists are now generally
agreed that the Jews are not a race
in any scientific sense of the term
—no more of a race, for example,
than th» Germans. They were orig
inally a cross between a longheaded,
tallish, dark Mediterranean race
(the Bedouins) and a shortheaded,
shortish, dark Alpine race. Those
who remained in the Mediterranean
basin, working around into the
Spanish peninsula, were further
modified by additional Mediterran
ean blood. Those who crossed
through Syria into Eastern Europe
and on into Germany received ad
ditions of Mongol, Alpine, and Nor
dic characteristics. The result is
the distinction of the two types fa
miliar in America—the Sephardim
or Spanish Jews on the one hand
and the Ashkenazim or German on
the other. The first, of whom Jus
tice Cardozo and Bernard Baruch
are examples, are characterized by
thin features and spare bodies
which often taken on a typically
Yankee look, while the second have
quite frequently the heavy fea
tures, swarthy compexion, curly
hair, and short body of common as
sociation. A third type is sometimes
distinguished as representative of
those Ashkenazim (a great major
ity of the group) who have lived for
centuries amon^ the Slavs of East
ern Europe. This type is physically
like the German Jew save that light
hair and eyes are common and pug
noses are more frequent than
hooked.
The three groups, moreover, are
distinct not only in appearance.
They originally differed also in lan
guage, since the first spoke Span
ish or Ladino (a fifteenth-century
Spanish), the second German, and
the third Yiddish (an alloy of He
brew and German). And they main
tain a certain aloofness among
themselves. The pride and exclu
siveness of the Spanish Jews of an
cient settlement in this country are
most sharply felt by the Ashken
azim. And the hatred of German
Jews which Elma E. Levinger at
tributes to Polish Jew immigrants
was warmly reciprocated by their
predecessors of German origin.
The word “kike” is not of Gentile
but of German-Jewish coinage.
What then is the explanation of
anti-Jewish prejudice if the Jews
are not a racial unit? The answer
would seem to be that anti-Jewish
prejudice is the classic example of
that dislike and fear of strangers
which the Greeks knew as xenoph
obia and which appears as a fam 1-
iar phenomenon among primitive
peoples and peoples reverting to
primitivism. The outstanding fac
about the Jewish people is the fact
that they have preserved, though
scattered among the nations of the
earth, their national identity. They
are unique among the peoples of
the world not because they have
bold noses—only a small percent
age of Jews have the Jewish nose
—but because they alone, of all peo
ples known to history, have retain
ed in exile and dispersion and over
a period of thousands of years
their distinction from the peoples
among whom they live. The Jew
is everywhere and everywhere the
Jew is strange. Japanese are
strangers in California but not in
Japan. Scotsmen are outlanders in
Paris but not in Edinburgh. The
Jews are outlanders everywhere
The country of the Jew, as Schop
enhauer puts it, is other Jews.
And therein is the key to the pe
culiar destiny of the Jews. The
quality which makes them strang
ers in Western history—their de
votion to their own cultural tradi
tion under conditions of almost im
possible hardship and the psycho
logical traits which that devotion
has established. Jews themselves
but not non-Jews, think of the Jew
ish religion as the chief cause of
the Jew’s universal strangeness
and the Christian religion as the
chief cause of the prejudice h , m
which he suffers. Non-Jews. , . p e
other hand, cite such complaints as
those gathered together in “Cai ho
lies, Jew's, and Protestants.” a
study undertaken at the request of
the National Conference of Jews
and Christians. These are: “Aggres
siveness, ‘sharp business practices,’
clannishness, and lack of sensitivity
to the feelings of Gentile groups,”
the preservation among the Jews
of “the ‘haggling’ habit which most
of the Western world has out
grown,” the use of shoddy or poor
materials,” the fact that “Jews are
considered by certain leading in
surance companies as a poor fire
risk,” etc.
The truth is that neither these
ancient chestnuts of racial preju
dice nor the equally ancient refer
ences to religious history explain
the Jew’s position. They are merely
(Continued on page 9)
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