Part 7

The documents did not create the Jewish Question. If there were nothing but the documents, Mr. Hard would not have written nor would the Metropolitan Magazine have printed the article here discussed.

What Mr. Hard has done is to bring confirmation in a most unexpected place that the Question exists and is pressing for discussion. Someone felt the pressure when "The Great Jewish Conspiracy" was ordered and written.

[Issue of June 26, 1920.]

"What are you prating about? As long as we do not have the Press of the whole world in our hands, everything you may do is vain. We must control or influence the papers of the whole world in order to blind and deceive the people."

--Baron Montefiore.

VII.

Arthur Brisbane Leaps to the Help of Jewry

Once more the current of this series on the Modern Jewish Question is interrupted to give notice of the appearance of the Question in another quarter, the appearance this time consisting of a more than two-column "Today" editorial in the Hearst papers of Sunday, June 20, from the pen of Arthur Brisbane. It would be too much to say that Mr. Brisbane is the most influential writer in the country, but perhaps he is among the dozen most widely read. It is, therefore, a confirmation of the statement that the Question is assuming importance in this country, that a writer of Mr. Brisbane's prominence should openly discuss it.

Of course, Mr. Brisbane has not studied the Question. He would probably admit in private conversation--though such an admission would hardly be in harmony with the tone of certainty he publicly adopts--that he really knows nothing about it. He knows, however, as a good newspaper man, how to handle it when the exigencies of the newspaper day throw it up to him for offhand treatment. Every editorial writer knows how to do that. There is something good in every race, or there have been some notable individuals in it, or it has played a picturesque part in history--that is enough for a very readable editorial upon any class of people who may happen to be represented in the community. The Question, whatever it may be, need not be studied at all; a certain group of people may be salved for a few paragraphs, and the job need never be tackled again. Every newspaper man knows that.

And yet, having lived in New York for a long time, having had financial dealings of a large and obligating nature with certain interests in this country, having seen no doubt more or less of the inner workings of the great trust and banking groups, and being constantly surrounded by assistants and advisors who are members of the Jewish race, Mr. Brisbane must have had his thoughts. It is, however, no part of a newspaper man's business to expose his thoughts about the racial groups of his community, any more than it is a showman's business to express his opinion of the patrons of his show. The kinds of offense a newspaper will give, and the occasions on which it will feel justified in giving it, are very limited.

So, assuming that Mr. Brisbane had to write at all, it could have been told beforehand what he would write. The only wonder is that he felt he had to write. Did he really feel that the Jews are being "persecuted" when an attempt is made to uncover the extent and causes of their control in the United States and elsewhere? Did he feel, with good editorial shrewdness, that here was an opportunity to win the attention and regard of the most influential group in New York and the nation? Or--and this seems within the probabilities--was he inclined simply to pass it over, until secretarial suggestions reached him for a Sunday editorial, or until some of the bondholders made their wishes known? This is not at all to impugn Mr. Brisbane's motives, but merely to indicate on what slender strings such an editorial may depend.

But what is more important--does Mr. Brisbane consider that, having disposed of the Sunday editorial, he is through with the Question, or that the Question itself is solved? That is the worst of daily editorializing; having come safely and inoffensively through with one editorial, the matter is at an end as far as that particular writer is concerned--that is, as a usual thing.

It is to be hoped that Mr. Brisbane is not through. He ought not to leave a big question without contributing something to it, and in his Sunday editorial he did not contribute anything. He even made mistakes which he ought to correct by further study. "What about the Phoenicians?" he asks. He should have looked that up while his mind was opened receptively toward the subject, and he would not have made so miserable a blunder as to connect them so closely with the Jews. He would never find a Jew doing that. It is permissible, however, in Jewish propaganda intended for Gentile consumption. The Phoenicians themselves certainly never thought they were connected in any way with the Jews, and the Jews were equally without light on the subject. If in nothing else, they differed in their attitude toward the sea. The Phoenicians not only built boats but manned them; the Jew would rather risk his investment in a boat than himself. In everything else the differences between the two peoples were deep and distinct. Mr. Brisbane should have turned up the Jewish Encyclopedia at that point in his dictation. It is to be hoped he will resume his study and when he has found something that is not printed in "simply written" Jewish books will give the world the benefit of it. It is hardly like the question of the rotundity of the earth; this Question is not settled and it will be discussed.

Mr. Brisbane is in a position to pursue some investigations of his own on this subject. He has a large staff, and it is presumed that some of its members are Gentiles of unbiased minds; he has a world-wide organization; since his own modification of speech and views following upon his adventure in the money-making world, he has a "look-in" upon certain groups of men and certain tendencies of power--why does he not take the Question as a world problem and go after the facts and the solution?

It is a task worthy of any newspaper organization. It will assist America to make the contribution which she must make if this Question is ever to be turned from the bugbear it has been through all the centuries. All the talk on earth about "loving our fellow men" will not serve in lieu of an investigation, because it is asking men to love those who are rapidly and insidiously gaining the mastery of them. "What's wrong with the Jew?" is the first question, and then, "What's wrong with the Gentile to make it possible?"

As in the case of every Gentile writer who appears as the Jew's good-natured defender, Mr. Brisbane is compelled to state a number of facts which comprise a part of the very Question whose existence is denied.

"Every other successful name you see in a great city is a Jewish name," says Mr. Brisbane. In his own city the ratio is even higher than that.

"Jews numbering less than one per cent of the earth's population possess by conquest, enterprise, industry and intelligence 50 per cent of the world's commercial success," says Mr. Brisbane.

Does it mean anything to Mr. Brisbane? Has he ever thought how it will all turn out? Is he willing to absolve that "success" from every quality which humanity has a right to challenge? Is he entirely satisfied with the way that "success" is used where it is supreme? Would he be willing to undertake to prove that it is due to those commendable qualities he has named and nothing less commendable? Speaking of the Jew-financed Harriman railroad campaign, is Mr. Brisbane ready to write his endorsement upon that? Did he ever hear of Jewish money backing railroads that were built for railroad purposes and nothing else?

It would be very easy to suggest to Mr. Brisbane, as editor, a series of articles which would be most enlightening, both to himself and his readers, if he would only put unbiased men at work gathering the facts for them.

One of the articles might be entitled "The Jews at the Peace Conference." His men should be instructed to learn who were the most prominent figures at the Peace Conference; who came and went most constantly and most busily; who were given freest access to the most important persons and chambers; which race provided the bulk of the private secretaries to the important personages there; which race provided most of the sentinels through whom engagements had to be made with men of note; which race went furthest in the endeavor to turn the whole proceeding into a festival rout by dances and lavish entertainment; which civilians of prominence oftenest dined the leading conferees in private session.

If Mr. Brisbane, with the genius for reporting which his organization deservedly has, will turn his men loose on that assignment, and then print what they bring him, he will have a story that will make a mark even in his remarkable career as an editor.

He might even run a second story on the Peace Conference, entitled, "Which Program Won at the Peace Conference?" He might instruct his men to inquire as to the business which brought the Jews in such quality and quantity to Paris, and how it was put through. Particularly should they inquire whether any jot or tittle of the Jews' world program was refused or modified by the Peace Conference. It should also be carefully inquired whether, after getting what they went after, they did not ask for still more and get that, too, even though it constituted a discrimination against the rest of the world. Mr. Brisbane would doubtless be surprised to learn that of all the programs submitted to that Conference, not excepting the great program on which humanity hung so many pathetic hopes, the only program to go through was the Jews' program. And yet he could learn just that if he inquired. The question is, having obtained that information, what would Mr. Brisbane do with it?

There are any number of lines of investigation Mr. Brisbane might enter, and in any one of them his knowledge of his country and of its relation to this particular Question would be greatly enlarged.

Does Mr. Brisbane know who owns Alaska? He may have been under the impression, in common with the rest of us until we learned better, that it was owned by the United States. No, it is owned by the same people who are coming rapidly to own the United States.

Is Mr. Brisbane, from the vantage point afforded by his position in national journalism, even dimly aware that there are elements in our industrial unrest which neither "capital" nor "labor" accurately define? Has he ever caught a glimpse of another power which is neither "labor" nor "capital" in the productive sense, whose purpose and interest it is to keep labor and capital as far apart as possible, now by provoking labor, now by provoking capital? In his study of the industrial situation and its perfectly baffling mystery, Mr. Brisbane must have caught a flash of something behind the backmost scene. It would be good journalistic enterprise to find out what it is.

Has Mr. Brisbane ever printed the name of the men who control the sugar supply of the United States--does he know them--would he like to know them?

Has he ever looked into the woolen situation in this country, from the change of ownership in cotton lands, and the deliberate sabotage of cotton production by banking threats, right on through to the change in the price of cloth and clothing? And has he ever noted the names of the men he found on that piece of investigation? Would he like to know how it is done, and who does it? Mr. Brisbane could find all these things and give them to the public by using his efficient staff of investigators and writers on this Question.

Whether Mr. Brisbane would feel free to do this, he himself best knows. There may be reasons why he would not, private reasons, prudential reasons.

However that may be, there are no reasons why he should not make a complete study of the Question--a real study, not a superficial glance at it with an eye to its "news value"--and arrive at his own considered conclusion. There would be no intolerance about that. As it is now, Mr. Brisbane is not qualified to take a stand on either side of the Question; he simply brushes it aside as troublesome, as the old planters used brush aside the anti-slavery moralists; and for that reason the recent defense of the Jew is not a defense at all. It is more like a bid for favor.

Mr. Brisbane's chief aversion, apparently, is toward what he calls race prejudice and race hatred. Of course, if any man should fear that the study of an economic situation would plunge him into these serious aberrations of mind, he should be advised to avoid that line of study. There is something wrong either with the investigation or with the investigator when prejudice and hatred are the result. It is a mighty poor excuse, however, for an intelligent man to put forward either on his own behalf or on behalf of those whose minds he has had the privilege of molding over a course of years.

Prejudice and hatred are the very conditions which a scientific study of the Jewish Question will forestall and prevent. We prejudge what we do not know, and we hate what we do not understand; the study of the Jewish Question will bring knowledge and insight, and not to the Gentile only, but also to the Jew. The Jew needs this as much, even more than the Gentile. For if the Jew can be made to see, understand, and deal with certain matters, then a large part of the Question vanishes in the solution of ideal common sense. Awaking the Gentile to the facts about the Jew is only part of the work; awaking the Jew to the facts about the Question is an indispensable part. The big initial victory to be achieved is to transform Gentiles from being mere attackers and to transform Jews from being mere defenders, both of them special pleaders for partisan views, and to turn them both into investigators. The investigation will show both Gentile and Jew at fault, and the road will then be clear for wisdom to work out a result, if there should perchance be that much wisdom left in the race.

There is a serious snare in all this plea for tolerance. Tolerance is first a tolerance of the truth. Tolerance is urged today for the sake of suppression. There can be no tolerance until there is first a full understanding of what is tolerated. Ignorance, suppression, silence, collusion--these are not tolerance. The Jew never has been really tolerated in the higher sense because he has never been understood. Mr. Brisbane does not assist the understanding of this people by reading a "simply written" book and flinging a few Jewish names about in a sea of type. He owes it to his own mind to get into the Question, whether he makes newspaper use of his discoveries or not.

As to the newspaper angle, it is impossible to report the world even superficially without coming everywhere against the fact of the Jews, and the Press gets around that fact by referring to them as Russians, Letts, Germans, and Englishmen. This mask of names is one of the most confusing elements in the whole problem. Names that actually name, statements that actually define are needed for the clarification of the world's mind.

Mr. Brisbane should study this question for the light such a study would throw on other matters with which he is concerned. It would be a help to that study if from time to time he would publish some of his findings, because such publication would put him in touch with a phase of Judaism which mere complimentary editorials could not. No doubt Mr. Brisbane has been deluged by communications which praise him for what he has written; the real eye-opener would come if he could get several bushels of the other kind. Nothing that has ever come to him could compare with what would come to him if he should publish even one of the facts he could discover by an independent investigation.

Having written about the Jews, Mr. Brisbane will probably have a readier eye henceforth for other men's pronouncements on the same subject. In his casual reading he will find more references to the Jew than he has ever noticed before. Some of them will probably appear in isolated sentences and paragraphs of his own papers. Sooner or later, every competent investigator and every honest writer strikes a trail that leads toward Jewish power in the world. THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT is only doing with system and detail what other publications have done or are doing piecemeal.

There is a real fear of the Jew upon the publicity sources of the United States--a fear which is felt and which ought to be analyzed. Unless it is a very great mistake, Mr. Brisbane himself has felt this fear, though it is quite possible he has not scrutinized it. It is not the fear of doing injustice to a race of people--all of us ought to have that honorable fear--it is the fear of doing anything at all with reference to them except unstintedly praising them. An independent investigation would convince Mr. Brisbane that a considerable modification of praise in favor of discriminate criticism is a course that is pressing upon American journalism.

[Issue of July 3, 1920.]

VIII.

Does a Definite Jewish World Program Exist?

In all the explanations of anti-Jewish feeling which modern Jewish spokesmen make, these three alleged causes are commonly given--these three and no more: religious prejudice, economic jealousy, social antipathy. Whether the Jew knows it or not, every Gentile knows that on his side of the Jewish Question no religious prejudice exists. Economic jealousy may exist, at least to this extent, that his uniform success has exposed the Jew to much scrutiny. A few Jewish spokesmen seek to turn this scrutiny by denying that the Jew is pre-eminent in finance, but this is loyalty in extremity. The finances of the world are in control of Jews; their decisions and their devices are themselves our economic law. But because a people excels us in finance is no sufficient reason for calling them to the bar of public judgement. If they are more intellectually able, more persistently industrious than we are, if they are endowed with faculties which have been denied us as an inferior or slower race, that is no reason for our requiring them to give an account of themselves. Economic jealousy may explain some of the anti-Jewish feeling; it cannot account for the presence of the Jewish Question except as the hidden causes of Jewish financial success may become a minor element of the larger problem. And as for social antipathy--there are many more undesirable Gentiles in the world than there are undesirable Jews, for the simple reason that there are more Gentiles.

None of the Jewish spokesmen today mention the political cause, or if they come within suggestive distance of it, they limit and localize it. It is not a question of the patriotism of the Jew, though this too is very widely questioned in all the countries. You hear it in England, in France, in Germany, in Poland, in Russia, in Rumania--and, with a shock, you hear it in the United States. Books have been written, reports published and scattered abroad, statistics skillfully set forth for the purpose of showing that the Jew does his part for the country in which he resides; and yet the fact remains that in spite of these most zealous and highly sponsored campaigns, the opposite assertion is stronger and lives longer. The Jews who did their duty in the armies of Liberty, and did it doubtless from true-hearted love and allegiance, have not been able to overcome the impression made upon officers and men and civilians by those who did not.

But that is not what is here meant as the political element in the Jewish Question. To understand why the Jew should think less of the nationalities of the world than do those who comprise them is not difficult. The Jew's history is one of wandering among them all. Considering living individuals only, there is no race of people now upon the planet who have lived in so many places, among so many peoples as have the Jewish masses. They have a clearer world-sense than any other people, because the world has been their path. And they think in world terms more than any nationally cloistered people could. The Jew can be absolved if he does not enter into national loyalties and prejudices with the same intensity as the natives; the Jew has been for centuries a cosmopolitan. While under a flag he may be correct in the conduct required of him as a citizen or resident, inevitably he has a view of flags which can hardly be shared by the man who has known but one flag.

The political element inheres in the fact that the Jews form a nation in the midst of the nations. Some of their spokesmen, particularly in America, deny that, but the genius of the Jew himself has always put these spokesmen's zeal to shame. And why this fact of nationhood should be so strenuously denied is not always clear. It may be that when Israel is brought to see that her mission in the world is not to be achieved by means of the Golden Calf, her very cosmopolitanism with regard to the world and her inescapable nationalistic integrity with regard to herself will together prove a great and serviceable factor in bringing about human unity, which the total Jewish tendency at the present time is doing much to prevent. It is not the fact that the Jews remain a nation in the midst of the nations; it is the use made of that inescapable status, which the world has found reprehensible. The nations have tried to reduce the Jew to unity with themselves; attempts toward the same end have been made by the Jews themselves; but destiny seems to have marked them out to continuous nationhood. Both the Jews and the World will have to accept that fact, find the good prophecy in it, and seek the channels for its fulfillment.

Theodor Herzl, one of the greatest of the Jews, was perhaps the farthest-seeing public exponent of the philosophy of Jewish existence that modern generations have known. And he was never in doubt of the existence of the Jewish nation. Indeed, he proclaimed its existence on every occasion. He said, "We are a people--One people."

He clearly saw that what he called the Jewish Question was political. In his introduction to "The Jewish State" he says, "I believe that I understand anti-Semitism, which is really a highly complex movement. I consider it from a Jewish standpoint, yet without fear or hatred. I believe that I can see what elements there are in it of vulgar sport, of common trade jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance and also of pretended self-defense. I think the Jewish Question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world-question to be discussed and controlled by the civilized nations of the world in council."

Not only did Herzl declare that the Jews formed a nation, but when questioned by Major Evans Gordon before the British Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in August, 1902, Dr. Herzl said: "I will give you my definition of a nation, and you can add the adjective 'Jewish.' A nation is, in my mind, an historical group of men of a recognizable cohesion held together by a common enemy. That is in my view a nation. Then if you add to that the word 'Jewish' you have what I understand to be the Jewish nation."

Also, in relating the action of this Jewish nation to the world, Dr. Herzl wrote--"When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of the revolutionary party; when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse."