Chapter VI

Nothing is more illuminating of the contrasted power-land psychology prevailing in Russia and America than the attitude taken up by both nations in regard to the difficult and insistent problem of the Jews. Since the beginning of Christianity, the Jews have been both powerless and landless; whether in their dispersal they have aimed at reattaining power or at reattaining land is a question that at first sight seems almost impossible to answer. A certain amount of knowledge of Jewish social conditions is necessary before we can even begin to find the reply. The great Dispersal, following upon the fall of Jerusalem, led the rabbis who thereby became in fact as well as in theory, the heads of the people, to concentrate the attention of their fellow-religionists on one point; a thorough understanding and detailed obedience to the Law. The compilation of the Talmud, that strange heterogeneous commentary, was the immediate result. As regards the possession of land, all hopes that the Jew might have in that respect were relegated to the distant future, when the Holy Land, by some miracle, would be restored to him. The teaching of the rabbis was, that to maintain his status as a Jew, every member of the community must, above all, observe the law in the minutest particulars; beyond this, he could hold any political creed he liked. Jehovah would restore Zion to him in due time without his making an effort to attain it.

The later development of Judaism has in the main followed out this principle. Zionism as a political faith has never been highly popular amongst better-class Jews, and may be said to appeal mostly to those who are least patient of the moral and intellectual despotism forged by the rabbi-class throughout the Middle Ages to maintain their order. Zionism often goes hand in hand with dangerously unorthodox political and religious theory. It appeals more to the Chassid mystic, than to the orthodox rationalist. The Jews who survived the Dispersal and the early persecutions of the Romans, tended continually to become more and more members of large city populations, handcraftsmen, traders, or bankers, on the eve of the Middle Ages. During that period, the process of making the Jews a parasitic, financial class, was accelerated. The one trade that the Middle Ages left to them was that of jeweller or money-lender. Progressive persecution, the need to keep all wealth in movable form, the eternal migration from one country to another, more and more concentrated the mind of the race on movable capital as a source of power. Except for a few Ghettos, contemptuously permitted, the Jew had no land.

The history of the Jews in Russia properly begins with Catherine’s partition of Poland and the consequent establishment of the Pale of Settlement in 1791. From that time on it has been a tale of uninterrupted oppression and persecution. This oppression and persecution was carried to fantastic lengths not only by the Czars themselves but still more by their subjects. Pogroms were openly applied to the unfortunate Jews by successive governments under Alexander III and Nicholas II. It is now generally admitted that these attacks were carried out by the armed population, with the open connivance and aid of police officers. The military authorities in many cases unsuccessfully protested against the inflammatory pamphlets, underground propaganda, and other methods employed by the police and the Ministry of the Interior to bring these massacres about. Pogroms were, therefore, though encouraged from above, unmistakably mob-movements and as such, in the overcrowded Jewish Pale, highly popular. They corresponded to something essential in the character of the Russian people themselves--an intense hatred and suspicion of the Jew, combined with a desire to seek a scapegoat for intolerable conditions of taxation and oppression.[1]

This suspicion arose undoubtedly through fear of the power the Jewish race might possess if allowed to live and flourish in impunity. The talk of “ritual murder” which motivated many pogroms was but a symptom of this underlying belief common to the illiterate Russian masses that the Jew had some hypnotic magic ability that set him apart from other men. The fact that the Jews were highly literate, that they frequently adopted the profession of doctors, money-lenders, or something analogous--requiring brain work--struck the Russian peasant as peculiar. His favourite receptacle of mystic power was the orthodox Church, and above the Church the Czar, whom the Church alone could sanctify. The Jew rejected the Church; in consequence, the Czar had confined him in the Pale, and by successive edicts, forbidden him even to attend the universities and obtain an education. The reason must be that the Jew had some power greater than the Czar, the church, and even God. He must be in fact, an ally of Satan. The pogrom followed as a matter of course, and the most intense nationalism became allied with the most rabid anti-Semitism.

When the régime of the Czars collapsed in the Revolution of 1917, and the Bolsheviks came into power, it was noted by many that among these Bolsheviks were several that were Jews. That Lenin himself was a Jew--adopted by a family of provincial nobles to take the place of a son lost in infancy--became one of the legends soon spread by enemies of the new régime. There was however no evidence of this, and the Jewish members of the new political party into whose hands Russia fell, were not less hostile to Judaism in the orthodox sense than to any other religion. And this naturally so, for the rabbis had again and again insisted that only God Himself had the power and the ability to deliver His people, and restore their sway. The later development of the Bolshevik revolution has shown once again that the Russian people have an instinctive hostility to everything Jewish in tone. The Jewish members of the Soviet Council have been progressively eliminated, or passed over; so that in Russia to-day the influence of Jewish ideas is less than it ever was. Even Marx, whose theories gave Lenin his impetus, is considered to-day less important than Lenin; and there is growing an increased cult for Darwin and Ford rather than Marx within the bosom of the Bolshevik party. The Bolshevik movement has been in its essence, the development of an heretical religious faith, based on the creed of Western naturalism and utilitarianism of the Darwin-Herbert Spencer type. As such it is equally hostile to orthodox Christianity or to orthodox Judaism.

2

The attitude of the American colonies towards the Jewish emigrants who came to them was the very reverse of this. From the first settlements of Jews in Newport, Charleston, Savannah, New York, these exiles were allowed to take positions of honor and affluence. There has never been a Ghetto in American life, and the only Ghettos that exist have been created fairly recently by housing conditions and by the overcrowding of some of the great Eastern cities. The Jews were among the most prominent supporters of the American Revolution itself; and there is irony as well as illumination in the fact that the one man who may be said with truth to have founded the Federal Union, Alexander Hamilton, was possibly half a Jew.[2] The fact that America supplied a land of promise to the Jew, from the days when Cromwell first tried toleration down to the present, has been tacitly admitted by the increasing tide of Jewish emigration that has gone on from 1660 down to the present day. The one thing that has possibly restrained it has been the fact that the Jews are no longer fitted for an agricultural life, but are apt to become members of those large-town mobs which Jefferson and the other founders of the Republic so profoundly hated, and which now represent so large a proportion of American society. A few attempts were made by the colonies at the beginning to keep the franchise from the Jews; but apart from that fact, there has been no organised opposition to Jewish influence on the part of any class of the community down to the close of the Great War.

The result is that the Jews, indifferent to land, have concentrated more and more on the element which the early American neglected: the element of power. The uprise of the Jewish power in America took place during the great change from agricultural to industrial life that coincided with the Civil War and which developed into the famous “gilded age” of the seventies. During that period the Jewish community in the New World split into two classes. The upper class became those who, through the power conferred on them by wealth, grew more and more closely allied to the dominant financier class, and became thereby more and more closely American, abandoning the two qualities that had made them specifically Jewish: the intense particularism of their creed which had made them consider themselves a race set apart by God, and the not less intense determination to remain a separate nation though exiled and scattered among other nations. The lower class, increasing at a great rate after 1880, when Alexander III began his long reign of oppression in Russia, brought with them to America nothing but an ingrown determination to stay what they were: and it is only among them that anywhere in America to-day one can find that “mystic quality” that in the words of Waldo Frank, makes the Jew what he is, and which once lost, destroys his Judaism.

The Reform Movement in Judaism, as a double attack on the intolerant particularism of the Jewish faith as the one faith blessed by God, and on the sentiment of Jewish nationalism alike, owes its success entirely to the support given by American rabbis in 1885. The greater part of the wealth of the American Jewish community has gone to the support of Reform Judaism. That this form of the Jewish faith is merely a transition stage, and unsatisfying after all to the human desire to live within the ordered limits of an absolute faith, which the Jews have felt perhaps more profoundly than any other people, is shown by the drift of many intelligent and unworldly-minded adherents of reformed Jews out of their faith into Christian Science, theosophy, or any one of the dozens of fantastic cults that flourish in America. The only thing that Reform Judaism has given the American Jew is a feeling that his forefathers were on the wrong track, not that he is on the right one. When his faith becomes merely a local peculiarity, to be tolerated as any other local peculiarity is tolerated, and no longer _the_ faith, sole, absolute, and eternal; when his citizenship becomes not a question of kingship in Zion but of possessing a vote and paying taxes to the latest corrupt political gang that happens to be governing America, then the Jew is alike homeless and rudderless, an atom in the modern chaos. He has no longer unified personality nor spiritual power of any kind. He is only a cog in an immense machine that does not move in any direction, but which simply goes around and around, grinding human lives and hopes to dust in the process.

The paradox of American Judaism is that America, by liberating the Jew, has completely destroyed him. The paradox of Russian Judaism is that Russia by oppressing the Jew, has only intensified his original character. Zionism appeals to the Russian Jew mainly, and it is largely through the support of Russian Jewish colonisation that Zionism is now being tried out in Palestine. The Russian Jew in poverty has kept his legends, his folk poetry, his contact with a mystic patrimony given him by Moses. Moreover, the Russian revolution, with its consequent liberation of the Jew from the old constraint, has enriched Russian literature with a new strain of Jewish genius, reflected alike in such works as Ansky’s “Dybbuk” and Babel’s “Horse Army.” The American Jew on the other hand, to the degree that he becomes more wealthy and powerful, becomes less intellectual, and usually pretends to despise his own people. One finds dozens of Americans who quite obviously are racially of the Semitic type, and who socially and religiously are at but one remove from the faith of the Ghetto, ready to assert their anti-Semitism. And even among those who still retain some vestiges of respect for the attitude of their forefathers, one finds an increasing disposition to mingle in the ranks of Gentile society, and to handle facetiously the topic of their own race and religion, as if it represented only a passing craze of the remote past, which they have fortunately outgrown. As regards imagination, they tend increasingly to respect the shibboleths of American business life.

3

The attitude of the average American, the “one hundred per center” of the middle west and the industrial east, who is and must remain the backbone of America culturally and socially, towards the Jewish phenomenon, has considerably varied during the most recent years. To this average individual nothing has mattered since the Civil War, so long as the country remained prosperous. So long as his land bore “bumper crops,” capable of being sold at high prices, so long as the “melting pot,” by laying the stress on the Jew’s adaptability, went on functioning properly, and transforming mediæval mystics and fanatics into modern business men, all was well; no thinking about the future was necessary. It is natural to the American temperament--a “free soil” temperament long before Lincoln’s day--having linked up land and liberty as it has done, not to wish to worry about the future, not to do any more thinking than is absolutely necessary. Thinking is indeed dangerous. It may lead to a suspicion that the Revolution was a mistake and that the Constitution was only a new form of tyranny. America’s awakening in this respect to a whole world of intimate problems that she must settle, came for the most part, only after President Wilson told his people that they must enter the World War. And then America suddenly realised that the Jews had a great deal of power as well as a great deal of cleverness, and were likely to use both for ends that were far from being “one hundred per cent” American.

The resultant wave of anti-Semitism that swept the United States was something practically unique in American history. There had been before outbreaks of anti-Jewish feeling, notably in some of the Southern States, but nothing of this nationwide character. From mob-outrages engineered by the revived Ku Klux Klan to the declaration of lofty Harvard University that it proposed to limit the number of Jewish students, the campaign of hatred swept the country for a few months, and then dissolved in a gale of laughter. It represented nothing fundamental to the American character and temperament. It undoubtedly arose from a feeling of suspicion that the cunning Jew might intellectually be opposed to the American Constitution, which is considered as the sacrosanct basis of American faith, much as the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” was considered the sacrosanct basis of Egyptian faith. Moreover, the Jew might secretly be in sympathy with some of the dangerous anarchistic or other radical doctrines that had recently come into such prominence, thanks to America’s deep-rooted and insuperable objection to the war. The coming and passing of this momentary wave of anti-Semitic sentiment coincided curiously in date and duration with the period during which Russia, having cast off her old values and not yet settled in her new ones, elevated many Jews, who happened to be members of the victorious Communist party, to power.

4

The case is quite different when we come to the Catholics. Successive Russian sovereigns from Catherine the Great who offered asylum to the expelled Jesuits, down to the present day have shown partiality to the Catholic faith; and to this day the Bolsheviks, in their war on religion, have left the Catholic church largely undisturbed, hoping perhaps to gain recruits to atheism out of the conflict between the rival sects of Catholic and Orthodox.[3] This toleration of Catholicism was formerly partly due to the fact that in Poland and Livonia, the Czar ruled over thousands of Catholics; partly to the law that forbade anyone born in the Orthodox faith to become a convert, on penalty of exile and loss of estate. But in America a passionately intolerant anti-Catholic feeling has existed since, at least, the New England Colonies opposed James II and his nominee, Andros, and has known numerous revivals since the “Native American” movement began opposing the extension of the franchise to the Irish immigrant back in the thirties. Economically and socially it has persisted, and even spread from New England to the south and west. This anti-Catholic feeling provides the basic strength of the recent post-war revival of the Ku Klux Klan. And during the period while this book was being written, its strength was again successfully tested in an important presidential contest.

The fundamental American feeling about Catholicism is that it forms, politically an _imperium in imperio_; that by its insistence on parochial schools, instead of the usual public schools, by its establishment of convents, monasteries, church-owned foundations, everywhere, it becomes an extra-political power, secret in its methods, ready to invade the United States from within and seize the better part of her domain. This belief (whether it has any foundation in fact or not is not material to this inquiry) has been largely strengthened by the extraordinary solidarity of the Catholic communities in the industrial regions, composed as they are, mainly of toiling foreigners; and by the redoubtable power of ecclesiasticisms further southward, in Mexico. Whether this feeling about the Catholic church is destined to disappear--now that Mexico has an anti-clerical government, and even the Vatican itself has taken on a Republican tone--is, for the moment, uncertain; but there is no possibility of writing an intelligent history of America without reference to its existence. A profound distrust of Catholicism as a secret body subversive of Americanism has again and again shown itself to be a mainspring of American middle-class action. It explains a very great deal that is highly popular in America, from the flourishing condition of freemasonry and other semi-secret societies, down to the zeal for closing the saloons, which were favourite meeting places for that purely Irish and Catholic creation, the ward politicians. Now and again, as in the “Native American” movement above mentioned, the later “Know-Nothing” movement, the cry “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” the revived Ku Klux Klan, the opposition to Governor Smith, it shows itself openly in the field of political life.

The complete reason for the toleration of Catholicism under Czar and Bolshevik alike, in Russia, in the very heart of a community that in numbers at least has been openly the chief rampart of Eastern Orthodoxy for centuries, and for the mistrust of the same faith shown in America, despite the fact that America can boast of a large percentage of Catholics, can only be discovered by examining more fully the underlying attitude of the Russian and the American to all religion. It suffices to say here that, to the American, Republicanism, that is to say the liberty gained by local prosperity and by complete ownership of one’s own property, is more important than any other form of religion; while under successive Russian governments, Autocracy, rooted in communal feeling, and in unworldly faith, has since the time of Peter the Great at least, directed religion towards the ends it proposed for itself. It is the considered opinion of most intelligent observers that the Bolshevik government, in this respect, has acted precisely as the governments that preceded it. It has warped religion to its own ends; or, rather, it has created an altogether new religion out of a few phrases of Marx and the life and example of Lenin. It is a mummified body--Lenin from his mausoleum in the Red Square--that rules Russia to-day. After all, did he not wear a peasant’s cap, and did he not order electric light to be extended to every village, besides giving the common workman bread, peace, and liberty? The cult of Lenin as a new saint, or rather as a new Messiah, has some curious sides. But the most curious side of all is to note how little distinguishes this figure from the celebrated figure of Christ wandering as “a serf throughout the Russian land, blessing it,” that so much inspired the early Slavophils. Meantime the Central Presidium of the Soviet--the new Autocrats of Russia--having achieved this version of Orthodoxy, uses its power to persecute successfully the followers of every former religion.