The Jew and American Ideals | Page 2

everywhere
and at all times resulted in shameful crimes against humanity, and in
resistance to every progressive and humane movement, I feel that it is
my right and duty to utter my solemn remonstrance and protest.
I have just returned from a tour through several of the European
countries most seriously involved in the late war. On the one hand, I
was deeply and gratefully impressed while in Europe with the manner
in which some of the intensest hatreds engendered by the war appear to
be dying out. On the other hand, I was deeply and painfully impressed
by the fact that, in country after country, racial hatreds older than any
nation in the world were being deliberately and systematically revived
and intensified, threatening brutal and ugly crimes against humanity
exceeding in horror the worst and most inhuman violence of the Great
War which so nearly achieved the ruin of civilization. In Germany, for
example, I found no hatred of America, notwithstanding the fact that
alone among the nations lately fighting against her we were still
technically at war with her. On the contrary, there was manifest an
almost universal desire for the restoration of friendship between the
two countries. In Belgium I saw hundreds of little German children

being fed by Belgian agencies, proving that hate was being dissolved
by compassion. Even in France the fierce hatred of Germany was
obviously dying.
So much for the bright side of the European situation as I saw it.
Unfortunately, to complete the picture, it is necessary to acknowledge
the numerous evidences of a widespread revival of one of the most
despicable, brutal, and dangerous forms of racial hatred and antagonism
known to mankind--anti-Semitism. Even in England, long hitherto so
free from Jew-baiting, the land in which the Jew Disraeli became Prime
Minister, I found an extensive, active, and skillfully organized
campaign directed against Jews, as Jews. It was and is a campaign
differing hardly at all from similar campaigns against the Jews in
Russia under tsarism, in Rumania, in Poland, and, to a less extent, in
Germany under the Hohenzollern. Unless this propaganda is checked,
unless the intelligence and the conscience of England can be marshaled
against it, England will take the place of the Russia of the Romanovs as
the land of pogroms, and infamies like the horrible pogroms of
Kishinev may occur in British cities.
I found in England great nation-wide organizations, obviously financed,
devoted to the sinister purpose of creating anti-Jewish feeling and
sentiment. I found special articles in influential newspapers devoted to
the same evil purpose. I found at least one journal, obviously well
financed again, exclusively devoted to the fostering of suspicion, fear,
and hatred against the Jew. Nothing that the Black Hundreds of Russia
under the tsars said of the Jews, in order to inflame the ignorant masses
and inspire them to savage attacks upon the Jewish population, could
have been worse than much of this propaganda. It appealed to every
passion, charged the Jews as a race with every crime calculated to rouse
the frenzied anger of the non-Jewish population. And in the bookstores
I discovered a whole library of books devoted to the same end. One of
the greatest living statesmen of England, who is not a Jew, told me that
in his judgment this systematically propagated anti-Semitism is likely
to bring greater difficulty and shame to England than the Irish question,
even.

And now, returning to the United States, I find America confronted by
the same peril and shame. Here, too, I find anti-Jewish meetings being
held. To my great astonishment and regret, I find that the personal
influence and the vast fortune of the erstwhile pacifist-philanthropist
are apparently enlisted in the same cruel and vicious propaganda. The
Dearborn Independent, which is the personal organ of Mr. Henry Ford,
maintained for the promulgation of his personal political and
sociological views, has been devoting a large amount of its space to the
creation of anti-Jewish feeling and sentiment. One of the first pieces of
accumulated mail to claim my attention on my return was a pamphlet,
sent to me by some unknown correspondent, obviously a Jew hater in
view of the coarse and brutal comments written upon the margins. This
pamphlet contains a reprint of nine articles which originally appeared
in the Dearborn Independent. It is, therefore, apparently impossible for
Mr. Ford to disclaim personal and direct responsibility for the contents
of the pamphlet. If I am wrong in any of these particulars I shall be
very glad to be corrected and to apologize for the error. To find any
American engaged in such a propaganda seems to me such a pity and
such an outrage against our national ideals that I should welcome proof
that my information and inferences are all wrong and unfounded