I Married a Jew
Ben will often excoriate a member of his race—and he disagrees with those who hold that the Jews represent a religion rather than a race. Ash points out, you can baptize a Jew and turn him into an outward Christian, but you cannot take away his feeling for his people, his racial appearance, or his tastes.
Ben will often call Mr. Finklelteinier or Mr. Salornor, a 'rat' if he sees lit. But if I should do the same he would not like it. He does not care for the Eddie Cantor programme; I do. He likes the Walter Winchell programme, and I don't. But if I say I don't like Walter Winchell he thinks it is because Winchell is a Jew. Ben's family beams whenever there is mention of such great Jews as Einstein, Epstein, Freud. They nod and smile as if to say, 'Ah yes, where would the world be today if it had not been for our Jewish great?' But never do you hear them speak of Jewish, scoundrels or criminals. If you merely mention that So-and-so is a Jew, they suspect you of anti-Semitism.
Often Ben voices the age-old complaint of his race: the Gentiles think they are superior to the Jews. Face to face, they are polite to the Hebrews, take their motley, hold jobs in their firms, buy from Jewish stores, eat at the tables of Jewish friends – then turn around to snicker and sneer behind their backs. This is true, I admit it to Ben, terribly true and terribly wrong, and certainly one of the major causes for the century-old friction between the two races. But then, conversely, it is also true of the Jews. They, in their turn, think they are immensely superior to the Gentiles. If they did not think so, would they still remain Jews after generations of living among Gentiles? Even Ben frequently lets slip the opinion that Jews are much smarter than Christians. And who among the Jews will deny that, while he also does business with Gentiles, eats at their tables, and calls them friend, he also goes away privately rejoicing in his superiority?
Unfortunately the Jewish publications and the church are not so private about it; they openly vaunt the superiority of their race and do not mince words when it comes to criticizing the Goy in whose land they live. And so the friction has continued through the ages, both sides firmly entrenched in self-righteousness. And so the friction will continue, now dormant, now bubbling uneasily, now flaring into riots and persecutions.
Ben is willing to concede that if it is true that Christians, in the mass, have seldom tried to understand the Jews, to read what they have written about their predicament, it is also true that the Jews have not tried to understand the Christians and to meet them halfway. The Jew seldom tries to mingle with the masses. Because of his religion and his traditions he is content to live a life apart from the community, And when persecutions come he bows his head and says it is the will of God.
Ben's family speak not without a certain pride when they allude to the curse of Israel and call themselves the martyred race. They honestly regard themselves as holy victims. They are only too willing to tell you what is wrong with the Gentiles, but neither in the family nor among other Jews have I met one who is willing to admit that some repairs might also be made in the house of Israel. Almost any intelligent Gentile will admit that our attitude toward the Jews has often been unjust and shameful, though, making the admission, we do nothing at all about it.
However, it seems to me that, since both cannot be right in this quarrel of the centuries, adjustments must be made on both sides, and so I tell Ben. We must root out our groundless and arrogant feelings of superiority. They must pluck out the fixed and mystical idea that the Jew is forever doomed to be a wanderer and accursed; instead of turning their faces to the Wailing Wall every time sparks of the ancient friction catch lire, they must make some practical and rational effort to adapt their ways more graciously to the Gentile pattern, since they prefer to live in Gentile lands.
Our hottest argument concerns the question whether there exists such a thing as a Jewish problem. Ben is ready to discuss the separate differences between Jews and Christians, but when I lump them all together as constituting the world's Jewish problem he flares up. Oh, there's a problem all right, he allows, but it concerns only the Jews, and he'd thank the Gentiles to mind their own business and keep their hands off. To which I reply, 'How can we ignore it when it concerns us as much as the Jews? How can the host ignore the quarrels of the guest in his house?' To which Ben answers with some heat; 'We are not guests; we are good citizens of the countries in which we live.'
Here the fencing really becomes fast and furious. 'What constitutes a first class citizen?' I ask. The answer, according to Plato, is one who places his country and that country's interests above his owns. Is that true of the Jew? Barely. Instinctively he desires first the welfare and advancement of his own people. So long as a country gives him a living and lets him alone, he doesn't much care what happens to it. When things go well, he stays; when things go wrong, he packs up and moves to another country. Where is the Jew who says, 'My country, right or wrong'?
'All right,' says Ben, 'but can you blame us? Outside of England and America, what country has ever made us feel we could belong?'
'You are right,' I reply, 'and I don't blame you. I should feel the same if I were Jewish, But what does this prove? That a Jew is, with few exceptions, first a Jew, and second a citizen of the country where he happens to pitch his tent. After two thousand years of living with Gentiles he still retains his identity as a Jew—as an alien, if an alien means one who has not been absorbed into the main stream. It is certainly not a different religion that has kept him alien, nor a prominent nose. There are plenty of Gentiles with prominent noses, and the difference between the Jewish church and, say, the Catholic is no greater than the difference between the Catholic and the Greek Orthodox church. No, what keeps the Jew alien is his alien culture, his alien tradition, his fierce pride in belonging to what he believes a superior race.'
'Well,' argues Ben, 'suppose my people are what you call aliens. What is to prevent them from living with others in peace, so long as they behave themselves? And most Jews do behave themselves. Shall not the lion lie down with the lamb?'
From a moral standpoint, Ben is completely right. It is sad and unjust that, the world over, the alien thing is regarded with suspicion. Because it is 'different' it cannot be as good as the familiar. It is the butt for the jibes of the narrow-minded, for the deprecation of the smug.
'But look at the matter from the political side,' I advise Ben. 'When a Swede or a Chinese settles down in a foreign land, such as the United States, the Swede makes haste to become a thorough American—at any rate he lets his children become thorough Americans; the Chinese, realizing that this is impossible, lives aloofly in Chinatown, minds his own business, and keeps out of American political affairs. The Jew, however, wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Like the Chinese, he clings to his own race, culture, and tradition; he trains his children to cling to these just as tenaciously. Then, like the Swede, he sets out to annex all the privileges of Americanism. He wants to rise to the top of the Gentile social structure, to wield power in Gentile politics of the community, state and nation. He wants to be left alone, but he also wants the country in which he lives to take good care of him. He wants to have full citizenship in that country, yet retain his citizenship in the Jewish nation.
'Certainly it is sanctimonious for society to reject him, I admit, to resent his success in business and the professions, his dabbling in polities, his strong international alliances. No one can deny that the Jew is often more brilliantly talented in these pursuits than the Gentile. Why should he be punished for his intelligence? The answer is simply that human nature resents the ascendancy of the alien. So long as the Jew wears the cloak of alien colors, so long will his predominance in any tier of the Gentile structure be resented.'
After we get this far, Bell inquires: 'You seem to be able to dissect the problem, but can you construct a solution?'
'Yes,' I answer, 'but it's only my personal opinion, and probably not worth much.'
'Well, let's have it,' he growls. And I tell him: the Jews must come off the fence and make up their minds whether they want to be primarily citizens of, say, France or England or primarily citizens of Jewry. They cannot be Jewish in their homes and French or English outside. They cannot pledge their pride and loyalty to Israel and expect Frenchmen and Englishmen to treat them exactly like other Frenchmen and Englishmen. If they decide it is more important to preserve the Hebrew culture, tradition, and pride of race, then they must accept more graciously the distinction accorded them as aliens. In that case they would encounter less friction if they adhered to their own society, community centers, clubs, and so forth. At the same time, we on our side should give them the greatest respect as remarkable and admirable aliens. We must conquer our own feelings of superiority and learn to regard and treat them as our equals, for that they certainly are.
On the other hand, if they decide that they would rather be entirely one with us and be treated as such, they must throw off a large share of their (to Gentiles) dead and outmoded culture and traditions, their false pride of race. The Hebrew religion must be divorced from the promulgation of that race consciousness which every synagogue and temple considers as important a part of Judaism as prayer; it should be mortified at least to the point where it does not belittle the great ideal of western culture and civilization: Christ.
'But,' demurs Ben, 'some of us have tried to become Gentiles at various times in history. We have changed our names, even our religion, and we have not been accepted.'
To this I can only answer: 'True, the prejudice of Gentiles against Jews in ages past has been a two-edged sword that has knifed the Jew when he has left his race as well as when he adhered to it. But I also maintain that there have been periods when almost all doors have been opened to Jews—a period in Poland, a period in Austria, and most notably, a liberal period in England which culminated its the rise of the Jew, Disraeli, to the post of Prime Minister.
'Had the Jews seized these opportunities for amalgamation, eventually all the barriers would have been broken down. But the Jews did not seize the opportunity. They chose to retain their identity and remained in intact as before. Today it is America that is offering the children of Israel the greatest opportunity in history for absorption. Intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles, business partnerships, and Jewish statesmen excite no more than passing comment. A few barriers remain, but they could be made to break like straws in this young, iconoclastic land. And still the synagogues and temples exhort their flocks to remember that they are Jews, that they have been Jews for 4000 years and, please God, will still be Jews 4000 years hence. A few cultural, intellectual Jews announce they are first Americans and then Jews, but they are voices crying in the wilderness.'
Of course we eventually come to Hitler, Ben and I. In the eyes of Ben, as in the eyes of all his people, Hitler stands for the Jewish equivalent of the Antichrist—a little, strutting monster whose sole purpose and pleasure in life is to flog, imprison, impoverish, humiliate, and plague Israel. Few history books trace the path of persecutions against the Jews as they have occurred throughout the ages. They have occurred in ancient Rome, Poland, Russia, Spain, England, and France, usually whenever Jewry becomes too numerous and too powerful, whenever it becomes, in the eyes of Gentiles, a threat, potential or actual, to Gentile supremacy. I try to tell Ben that Hitler is merely writing another page in a history that will continue so long as the status quo between Jews and Gentiles remains—a status that only the willing shoulders of both protagonists can remove.
But it is hard for Ben to take the long view. He looks upon Hitler as something malignantly unique, and it is no use trying to tell him that a hundred years hence the world will no more call Hitler a swine for expelling the Jews than it does Edward I of England, who did the same thing in the thirteenth century—an expulsion that remained in strict effect until the time of Cromwell, because a hundred years hence another country will be having its Jewish problem, unless…
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