Jabotinsky the War and the Jew

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THE WAR AND THE JEWTHIS book will compel the attention otthe war-ridden world. Its analysis of theJewish problem tears down the shams andignorance which have been built uparound it. The solution of the Jewishproblem is vital not only to the Jewishpeople but to the health of the world.Jabotinsky's proposals for the new worldafter the war are not only the demands ofa Jewish patriot- they are the essence ofbold statesmanship, and constitute achallenge to which the civilized worldmust reply.Vladimir Jabotlnsky, one of the best-known figures in the Jewish world, foughtfor the rights of the Jewish people fornearly forty years. In World War I hestruggled against enormous odds for thecreation of the Jewish Legion which ulti-mately participated in Allenby's Palestinecampaign. A brilliant orator, soldier, poetand writer, he devoted his life to the re-


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THEAND THE JEW

BYVLADIMIR JABOTINSKY

WITHA Foreword by PIERRE VAN PAASSEN

ANDA Conclusion by COL. JOHN HENRY PATTERSON, D.S.O.

NEW YORKTHE DIAL PRESSBURTON C. HOFFMAN


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COPYRIGHT 1942 BYJEANNE JABOTINSKY

All rights reserved no part of this book maybe reproducedin any form without permission in writing from the pub-lisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote briefpassages in connection with a review written for inclusion

in magazine or newspaper.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICABY RVTTLE, SHAW & WETHERILL, INC., PHILA,, PA.


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CONTENTSAS i REMEMBER HIM by Pierre van Paassen 7

Parti IS IT A WAR AIM?I. INTRODUCTORY 25II. NOT ON THE MAP 3m. THE MONSTER'S FOOD 42iv. THE ANTISEMITISM OF MEN 53

Part II THE ANTISEMITISM OF THINGSV. THE HUNTING-GROUND 65VI. THE ANTISEMITISM OF MEN AND THINGS 69VII. THE POLISH GHETTO 80VIII. FREEDOM FOR BOTH 96IX. THE WAR AND THE JEW 1O2

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T>/ QNTENTS* **' *

r : fart III THE STATE EXODUSX. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EQUAL RIGHTS 111XL EVACUATING A RUIN 12JXII. EVIAN 134XIII. TWO STATE PROJECTS OUTSIDE PALESTINE 146XIV. THE FATA MORGANA LAND 1 58

Part IV THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FORPALESTINE

XV. THE WHITE PAPER POLICY 169XVI. THE INEFFECTUAL BRIBE 18lXVII. THE MAX NORDAU PLAN 190XVIIL THE ARAB ANGLE UNDRAMATIZED 21 1xix, SENATUS POPULUSQUE JUDAEORUM 223XX. THE JEWISHWAR DEMANDS 234

CONCLUSION by Col. John Hemy Patterson, D.S.O. 251


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AS I REMEMBER HIMBy PIERRE VAN PAASSEN

Ecce HomoJa, icli weiss woher ich stamrneUngesattigt glcich der FlammcGliihe und verzeh' icli mich,Licht wird alles, was icli fasse,Kohle alles was ich lasse:Flamme bin ich sicherlich

Nietzsche

HE WAS saying that even as the Roman Empireceased to exist not, to be sure., in the fifth cen-tury of the Common Era, as the date-loaded school his-tory books would have it, but right in the first year ofthe first century, even so France, Germany and Britainmust des mamtenant be considered as very far ad-vanced on the road to disintegration. ... It is some-times pathetic, he went on, to hear politicians, states-men and editorialists warn the nations that a greatdanger has come to threaten them all since Germanybroke from her moorings and started on the rampageonce more, as if the danger were but a thing of yes-terday, coincidental in genesis for instance with Hit-ler's rise to power or with the shackling of the Reichin the chains of Versailles. I do by no means wish tominimize the threat of Nazism, he said, looking up,

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8 AS I REMEMBER HIMbut I also believe that the hour of decision for ourcivilization struck long ago.With the rise of Hitler the crisis in human affairsgrew infinitely more acute. It was really the agony thatset in. But you must go back nearly a century to findthe more or less exact moment when the process ofdissolution itself began. The first alarming symptomperhaps was the Franco-Prussian War. What followedthereafter: the financial panics, the ever-recurrent busi-ness depressions, the wars, the revolutionary upheavals,all that was consecutive: ineluctable and logical se-quence in the operation of the law of cause andeffect. ...With the immediate, rapidly changing scene before

our eyes and the ground whereon we stand tremblingunder our feet, he resumed after a short silence, ourattention is riveted on the petty affairs of the day, onour personal, group or national interests and we are aptto lose sight of the fact that civilizations, like all livingthings, are born and die, sometimes never even reachtheir

maturity.It is a

cycle everlastingly being devel-oped and consummated. Like living organisms, civili-zations eliminate their wornout and dead particles bydegrees, and assimilate others derived from their sur-roundings which renew their flesh and blood until theday when their powers of adaptation relax and finallystop altogether. Then comes death because they nolonger nourish life. But the dying process, the agonymay be quite long. It may take as long as the life-spanof one or even more generations. . . .And then, suddenly, dropping his chin on his breast


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AS I REMEMBER HIM 9and speaking in a voice of plaintive sadness in whichthere crept a note both of disillusion and bitterness,Jabotinsky sighed: It is the tragedy of the men of mygeneration to have lived in a dying era. To me person-ally this knowledge has the last few years deepenedmy ever-present sense of exile/'

It was in New York, on the evening of one of thosesultry, sweltering days in midsummer of 1940 that wewalked for the last time and sat on the green in Cen-tral Park till the city grew hushed with the comingof dawn.He looked pale and worn, the Rosh Betar, afterweeks and weeks on end of writing and conferencesand discussions with journalists and politicians anddisciples, always planning, always thinking of somenew venture, some new approach to the old problemof Jewish national emancipation. I had to tear himaway, literally, from the clutches of some devotedchassidim who were gathered in the humble apart-inent which he

occupied duringthe last few months

of his life near the Park.Once outside, however, in the open air, his caresand worries seemed to leave him. He was as cheerful

as I had seldom seen him. His step was brisk andlight and he laughed heartily at the pranks of somecolored children who were playing with a dog on thegreensward.That night after dinner he talked uninterruptedly,not in a vainglorious display of his almost encyclo-pedic knowledge and quiet wisdom or because he was


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1O AS I REMEMBER HIMof a garrulous nature. He merely felt released fromhis most pressing cares for the moment. The breadthof his spirit took a wider sway in the freedom of thetrees and meadows.And of what did he not talk? Of the need not to

confuse the historical moment with the trend of his-tory, the phase with the permanent Weltgefiihl; ofthe campaign on the Jordan where the valley burnedlike a fiery furnace when he led his men of the Jew-ish legion to victory against the Turks; of the neo-pagan movement in the days of the Borgias and ofthe Italian Renaissance as proto-typical of the present-day Hauser school in Germany; of his last-minute,futile intervention with Malcolm MacDonald, theson of Ramsay, a ridiculously pedantic fellow withthe mind of a flunkey to save the life of a youngZionist activist in that Crusader's dungeon in Accowhere he himself spent weary months of incarcera-tion and where Ronald Storrs and T. E. Lawrencecame to shake hands with him through the bars ofhis cell; of the atmosphere in the Dutch public schoolswhich he thought so pleasant, that it was almostinevitable that a love of learning should flourish inthat country; of Martin Buber's book on the Mythosof the Jews; of his last interview with Joseph Beck, theForeign Minister of Poland; of the University ofGhent as the center of the struggle for cultural auton-omy in Flanders; of his son Eri, then in the Pales-tinian gaol for the faith's sake; of the Calvinist doc-trine of predestination and the contrasting doctrineof man's free will: of the tendency of all socialistic


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AS I REMEMBER HIM 1 1revolutions to degenerate into etatism and tyranny;then of course of the need to raise a Jewish armyforthwith, not only for the defence of Palestine butas an instrument to speed up the redemption of EretzIsrael and the founding of a Jewish State in the presentcataclysmic circumstances when history does not movewith the measured tread of a grandfather's clock, butadvances with the seven league boots of a giant andwith revolutionary shocks. . . .For that: Eretz Israel and the Jewish State in Pales-tine, that was his cause, his all in all, the sacred pas-sion which entirely possessed and visibly consumedhim. In Jabotinsky the love of Zion was both anunquenchable, ecstatic fire and also the still and steadyflame of grace which the sages called Hitlahabut andof which the Baalshem once said that it sanctifiesevery action in life with a holy significance.The healing of Israel through a normalization ofits national and international status as a people, witha history, traditions, a way of life and a religion ofits own, and therefore its need to live and workwithin walls of its own, that is: in its own land,master of its own destiny, not forced and twisted intothe moulds of this or that alien civilization, but apply-ing its genius for justice to working out its own solu-tion of man's relationship with his brother as in thepast it found for all mankind the way of man's rela-tionship with God, and so as an independent factor,in a personal-national sense, and in accord with itsown character and talents and ethos a contributor tothe sum total of civilization: that was Jabotinsky's


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12 * AS I REMEMBER HIMvision of Israel's place and r61e and function in thene\v7 humanity.In order to bring this vision to reality by trans-lating it into new covenants and into a new structureof, international relationships, to lead Israel at leastpart of the way along the long and weary road to theideal, he poured out his whole heart, all his strengthand his whole life. Jabotinsky lived Zionism. And itwas the cause, too, that made of his life one of won-drous unity and singleness of purpose.Vladimir Jabotinsky came from that intellectual

milieu in Russian Jewry which had fully absorbedRussian civilization. When he first began to write hisfeuilletons and poetry in the Russian language, he washailed by the critics of Petersburg and Moscow.Maxim Gorki devoted an essay to the realism andstyle of the young Jewish author. The great Tolstoyhimself welcomed in Jabotinsky a new writer ofpromise at last The road to glory seemed open to thebudding poet.Then, without a word of warning, Jabotinskystopped writing. His name disappeared from thecolumns of the literary journals and the journals ofopinion to which he had but recently become acontributor.What had happened, what had brought about thissudden change of direction? It was the wave ofpogroms that swept through his native land followingRussia's defeat in the war with Japan in 1905, whichhad thrown the young writer completely off his track.


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AS I REMEMBER HIM 13Not unlike Theodor Herzl, scarcely a decade earlier,Jabotinsky had suddenly beheld for himself and hadmeasured, as in some dread apocalyptic revelation, thefull magnitude of the Jewish tragedy. He had becomeconvinced of the permanent insecurity of the Jewsin the Galut because he had seen the frustration andthe futility of all their striving and that all their con-tortions and wrenching in all sorts of humiliatingattitudes, physical and mental, in order to conformto another's way of life not only gravely damagedtheir own spirit and destroyed their human dignity,but that in the end the process would lead to theextinction of Jewish national culture and of Jewishlife itself to the grievous detriment of civilizationitself which would be the sufferer by the loss of theJudaic contribution.He saw the homelessness of the Jewish people asthe mortal disease to which Israel must ultimatelysuccumb, for his people's condition without land andwithout a state was not unlike that of a human beingwho has all his limbs and organs intact but whosebone structure is devoid of marrow and who is there-fore, though his outward appearance may be normal,as flabby, hollow and unreal as a putty doll.

This was the realization that had dawned on theyoung writer, causing him to be struck with an im-mense lassitude and with a sense of betrayal of hisown people if he should continue his devotion toRussian letters.He was to sum up the anguish of his soul and ofthe soul of Israel later in life, before the Royal Com-


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14 AS I REMEMBER HIMmission sitting in the House of Lords in February1937 with the words: Three generations of Jewishthinkers and Zionists amongst whom there were manygreat minds . , . have given much thought to analys-ing the Jewish position and have come to the con-clusion that the cause of Jewish suffering is the veryfact of the Diaspora, the bedrock fact that the Jewsare everywhere in the minority. , . .

It is not the anti-Semitism of men; it is, above all,the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobiaof the body social or the body economic under whichthe Jews suffer. Of course there are ups and downs;but there are also moments, there are whole periodsin history when 'this xenophobia of Life itself takes ondimensions which no people can stand, and that iswhat we are facing now. . . .Yet Jabotinsky did not become a Jewish nationalistmerely because he had gained an insight at an earlyage into the overwhelming tragedy of the Jewishpeople in the Galut He was a nationalist because hewas an artist, a man of the world, a thinker of practicalunderstanding and high critical judgment in inter-national political affairs, a man of the European spiritand of a world outlook and in the love of his Father-land and people: a man of action. His nationalism wasa protest and in diametric opposition to the deperson-alization which is the goal and object of international-ism. He knew that only by and in asserting one's ownparticular and peculiar nature, talents and characterone can best serve the general interest and that thisapplies to nations as well as to individuals.


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AS I REMEMBER HIM 15Nothing Jewish was alien to him except the cringing

spirit of Schultzjudentum, the abject defence mecha-nism of assimilationism, and the eternal apologeticsfor the existence of the Jewish people. To those whomZangwill once called the grand dukes of Judaism, theself-appointed leaders and stadlonim, his name wasanathema. The professional compromise makers inJewish life, who lock up their ideals in the cupboardunder a layer of mothballs when there is a challengeor the prospect of battle, dreaded him as King Ahabdreaded Elisha, the adversary.Nor did the movement which he led know him asa light taskmaster, as a dreamer who contented him-self with visionary speculations and Zukunftmusik oras one who, like Eli, did not even look askance at themisdeeds of commission and omission of his sons.Jabotinsky's word could sear like a whiplash. He wasa leader who imposed an iron discipline, who did nothesitate to ask for great sacrifices, the supreme sacrificenot excluded. But if Jabotinsky asked a great deal itwas because he himself gave even more.

Like the trtfe prophet he castigated because he loved.Because he wanted to see his people great and free,he denounced its faults. He tolerated no betrayal ofvalues, national or spiritual. He always came back tothe central truth: You Jews, you are a nation, a nationare you for the renewal of Jewish life is only possiblewhen proceeding from this central thought. It is thepositivism of Prophetism which seeks the restorationof the central thought. And therefore all creative


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l6 AS I REMEMBER HIMreforms proceed from prophetic action which neveradvances the slogan of a return to the past, but alwaysseeks a break-through to the central truth in thefuture.

Jabotinsk/s prophetism was social in character.What mattered personal salvation? His own life wasbut a flame that burned and consumed in order thatthe nation might be saved and led into new paths oflife.Although frequently impatient in debate and in

negotiations with his own, when opponents by tor-tuous argument sought to divert attention or concen-tration from the one essential, Jabotinsky neverwearied in his advocacy of Jewish rights with the Man-datory Power and the governments who had sub-scribed to the sentiments and ideas of the BalfourDeclaration. I have appealed/' he told me once, totheir honor and to their sensibility, to their self-interests and to their own national cause, even to theirinnermost anti-Semitism wherever that existed. I haveleft nothing untried and I am ready to begin all overagain tomorrow. For they must hear me. They musttake heed. They must allow us to live/' . . .

If it is objected, as it frequently was, that Jabotinskywas one-sided and repetitious, I would say that it isof spiritual and moral profit to us to have certainideals put before us with intensity and one-sidedness.All-roundness and comprehensiveness cannot be ex-pressed with equal intensity. And balance preventsenthusiasm.


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AS I REMEMBER HIM IJIn the course of my long years of wandering to and

fro on the earth, his path crossed mine again andagain: in Antwerp, in Warsaw, in London, Berlin,New York, Paris and Vilna never, alas, in his ownJewish Fatherland whence a nervous British bureauc-racy, instinctively fearing the Spirit that makethalive, kept him permanently barred. But wheneverand wherever, on his speaking and organizing tours,the chance presented itself, he would snatch an houror so to sit still and discuss the plans and thoughtsand dreams that always occupied his restless mind.

In such moments his words, cast in a wondrousclarity and precision of speech, were revelationary ofcoming things and events. It was as if a light suddenlywent up over the dying and decaying phenomena ofthe present. But he never played with flighty impres-sions, nor was he just a strong intellect and nothingmore. In his talk there frequently crept a note ofnostalgia to betray the melancholy behind the braveand realistic words: nostalgia for the highest fulfil-ment of his ideal, melancholy over the perversenessof a soulless contemporary environmentEven so, no man eschewed sentimentality morethan Jabotinsky did; he was diffident and cautious, tothe point of shyness, in every expression of feeling,objective to the point of coldness almost. And yet hecould also enter the house of mourning and sit withthose who weep, that they might feel less lonely inthe evening of sadness.When I sat opposite Jabotinsky one afternoon in the


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l8 AS I REMEMBER HIMsmall office, on the second floor of the Rue Vineusein Passy, where he published the Russian languageperiodical devoted to Jewish affairs called: Rasviet/'the conversation drifted to the subject of Bergson'sgenius. In the course of that short hour he said witha smile: Genius really means to be able to see andfeel what will come to pass ten years hence/* Thatwas in the early part of 1931. A quarter of an hourlater, quite oblivious of his own earlier definition andtotally unrelated with that part of the conversation,he sat calmly describing to me the conquest of Europeby a resurgent nationalist Germany, the refusal of thenations to stand together in the face of a commondanger and the virtual extermination of the EuropeanJewish communities.How fantastic that sounded then An editor of anational magazine to whom I sent a synopsis of theinterview with Jabotinsky cabled back: Tell thatJeremiah that his calamities can never come to pass;the world is too civilized

I once asked him in a mood of confidence why heshould be so everlastingly kind in receiving me whenit was convenient or not, me, a journalist whose voiceassuredly did not carry very far in the world of menand events. I surely cannot do a great deal/' I said,to spread your views and ideas. My heart is yours,but my talents are extremely limited. . . .

Jabotinsky waved his hand impatiently: It isn'tthat/' he said; it isn't that at all. I like to look atyou while we speak, because your eyes and not minewill see a regenerated Jewish people taking up its


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AS I REMEMBER HIM 19national role in the community of peoples, in a trulyfree Palestine. It is for the reflection of that glory thatI look in your eyes. And that reflection is there becauseyou believe . . .When he said that I thought back of my UncleKees, a Dutch landscape painter who, while strollingwith me along a rural road in Brabant thirty years ago,made another prediction to me, this: You, Pierre,you will see the day when the whole European kettleexplodes and the debris comes tumbling down to burythis bourgeois world/'Even as that prediction is being fulfilled before oureyes today, so may Jabotinsky's blessed vision alsocome to passThe fulfilment of his dearest wish: to withdrawfrom the tumult and the shouting in the marketplace

into the stillness of the sanctuary in order to engagein dialogue with the God in his heart, was nevervouchsafed him. He thought of it frequently and dur-ing the last months of his life he laid the basis andthe outline for an ambitious work on the philosophyof Jewish nationalism. But that part of life which hecalled the other world/' the world of action andendeavor ever and again claimed his whole attentionand energy. His sense of duty did not allow him tosay no.

Like Moses at the Burning Bush he had once heardthe call to service for his people. His entire life wasspent in obedience to that divine call, through theyears, never flinching, through pain and humiliation,through disillusion and doubt, through misrepresenta-


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20 AS I REMEMBER HIMtion and the hatred of the false prophets, against thevery course of his personal interests, sacrificing career,glory and honor and happiness ... for the sake ofthe ideal.The greatness of Jabotinsky's spirit is revealed in

his acknowledgment of a realm of values, which mustassert themselves, which come to man with theirineluctible demands of loyalty and obedience, valueswhich manifest themselves in a selfless human ideal-ism and which are themselves the content of cultureand the meaning of life.

What a tremendous thing it is when a man cansayright in the teeth of opposition and in defianceof the will of the world's mighty, diametrically atvariance with his own profit and interest here I stand,in the Name of God. You may jeer at me as a fanaticalfool You may smile at me with your official pity.You may lock me up as a dangerous revolutionary.You may taunt me with being a militarist and a terror-ist and even take my life nevertheless, here I stand inthe Name of God

I have not willed this task. ... I have not soughtit ... I have more than once turned aside fromthe call and pushed away from me as senseless theundertaking of speaking of God's greatness and of Hisright over man. . . . Tremblingly I have turned myear when the voice came to me calling me to speakfor my people. I felt myself too weak, too poor, toosinful to plead the cause of Israel. . . .


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AS I REMEMBER HIM 21Nevertheless, here I stand in the world, in theName of GodYou who build your empires on the tears of the

poor, you who grow rich from the poverty of theoppressed, you who sow dissension and hate betweenbrothers in order that your might will endure, you whodeclare your own power sacrosanct against you I liftmy voice, against you and your pretensions I call torevolt, the holy revolt of Love. . . .

I will not rest before my people has been calledawake in the name of freedom I will not rest untilyou let my people go Even if I must go into battlewith you and I must die: then yet will I preach andcry my cry of revolt: Men of Israel, fight yourselffree Cast off the chains that bind you the fire ofGod burns and His flames are the flames of free-dom . . .What an unutterably tremendous thing it is whena man can honestly say: Here I stand, in the Nameof God, I can do no other

In doubt, in pain, in death, yet through and throughillumined with courage, standing in the Name of God

Thus stood the Prophets of oldThus stood Vladimir JabotinskyBronxville, N. Y., May, 1942.


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PARTIIS IT A WAR AIM?


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CHAP TER I .INTRODUCTORY

ON THE outbreak of the present war the authorof this book signed an appeal to the Jews whichcontained the following statements:A brutal enemy threatens Poland, the heart of the

Jewish world-dispersion for nearly a thousand years,where over three million Jews dwell in loyalty to thePolish land and nation.

France, all the world's fatherland of liberty, facesthe same menace.

''England has decided to make that fight her own;and we Jews shall, besides, never forget that for twentyyears, until recently, England had been our partner inZion.The Jewish nation's place is therefore on all the

fronts where these countries fight for those very founda-tions of society whose Magna Charta is our Bible.Five months have passed since that was published,

but it seems that there is no intention of treating theJewish people as an Allied nation, nor the Jewishpeople's need as one of the causes for which the Alliesare fighting. With rare unanimity, all sections of the Jewish

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26 IS IT A WAR AIM?national movement have asked for the formation ofJewish military units for active service on all fronts.There was nothing unprecedented in these demands:a Judaean infantry regiment (jSth-^ist RoyalFusiliers) was formed in 191 y, and did good servicein Allenby's Palestine campaign, and even before thatthere had been a Jewish transport unit, the Zion MuleCorps, in Gallipot. Now the offer was for service notonly in the East but wherever required. The onlyconditional demand was that Jews should be allowedto fight as Jews; that it should be recorded in theannals of this war that the Jews were one of thepeoples fighting for the common good cause.

All these demands have so far been rejected. Atthe same time, a Polish army is being raised; Czecho-slovak troops are recruited; and Jewish emigrants orrefugees from both Poland and Czechoslovakia arebeing, in some cases advised, in some cases driven, toenlist in these formations, regardless of the fact thatthe brotherly treatment of Jewish recruits in some ofthem cannot always be guaranteed. A double humili-ation is thus being inflicted: it is recognized that adestroyed nation is still a nation, and that its scatteredmembers in exile should be given a chance to fightfor their nation's reinstatement but the Jew has noplace on this waiting list of admitted claimants; hemust give his devotion, his enthusiasm, his very lifeto the restoration of communities which have neverpretended to love him, while fully aware that hisown community is not to be included.There is an obvious and deliberate policy behind


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INTRODUCTORY 2Jthis refusal to revive the Jewish Legion. Once a nationhad received recognition as a partner in the fight, itcould not be prevented, in due course, from present-ing and pressing its demands. In the councils ofAllied statesmanship, the desire is lacking that theJews should become entitled, now or later, to presentand press any demands of their own, no longer aspetitioners but as equal partners.The bitterness which this attitude arouses in Jewishminds can be measured only by the horror of the

Jewish misery throughout East-Central Europe. Inthat zone of chronic yet acute antisemitism the Jewshave, so far, paid in actual human suffering infinitelymore than the Czechs, considerably more even thanthe Poles. But in the majority of British Press organstheir plight is hardly ever mentioned: their eagernessto serve, the justice of their cause, and even theiragony are simply not on the map/'

British statesmen commonly discuss their war-aimswithout any reference to the Jewish problem. Thisattitude is even more unwise from the general stand-point than it is hurtful from the Jewish. It overlooksthe fact that the abscess of Nazidom has been fedabove all, on Jew-hatred, and would never have at-tained to such maturity but for that ailment; and anoperation that failed to remove the roots of anti-semitism would be no cure.On the infrequent occasions when Allied statesmen

are reminded that a Jewish problem exists, theyvaguely hint at equal rights for all in a future Europedemocratized by the Allies' impending victory. Only


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28 IS IT A WAR AIM?one of them, Sir Archibald Sinclair, has had thecourage, so far, publicly to warn the Jews that evenafter that victory no such equality could be effectivelyguaranteed; and what he said in public others mustrealize in private. They are no doubt genuinely deter-mined to enforce the recognition of Jewish equalityin treaties and constitutions; but real equality for theJews in that Zone of Distress unless a great exodusrelieves the situation is doomed to remain a mirage;sullen hatred, boycott and starvation, with the threatof violence always in the offing, will be the rule asbefore; as the Allied statesmen surely realize.The worst feature of the situation is the tendency,when the problem cannot be altogether ignored, atall events to minimize its importance; to make apretence of believing that there is no actual Jewishtragedy; that it is simply a matter of just some tire-some skin-deep wounds which can be repaired with acouple of stitches. Whereas the truth is that thetragedy has reached a formidable intensity of painand doom which is without precedent in all humanhistory; that to end it a colossal world-effort is needed,an effort equally without precedent; and that thiseffort will have to be made.

In July 1938, Mr. Roosevelt made an endeavour toensure international co-operation in the problem ofinitiating the great exodus; but as this means forcinga solution of the Palestine question, his effort theEvian Conference was cunningly frustrated, and hisplan reduced to a futile patchwork.

Palestine today is regarded as out of bounds even


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INTRODUCTORY 29for fugitives perishing in what is worse than No Man'sLandin the frozen No Man's Waters of the Danubeestuaryfor Jews marooned on disused iron oil-tankers, with newborn babies among them; and as forthe future of Palestine, it is the policy of the 1939White Paper the death sentence of Zionist hopesthat now holds the field.

So, if we summarize our outlook, it is this: Noadmission to the national homeland; nothing but thestatus quo ante in the chief centres of distress; noteven the right to fight as Jews, nor the honour ofacknowledgment as an ally in a cause for which wehave paid and are paying more in blood and tearsthan any other race on earth. The Jewish people isthe one and only people to whpm Allied victory isto bring no positive guarantees of welfare; nothing butthe negative satisfaction of the Nazis' downfall. Thereis a short-sighted statesmanship that believes this tobe quite enough: the Jews fear and hate the Nazis;they have no choice but to side with the Allies; whythen trouble to offer them prospects of betterment?This is a poor wisdom. A thoughtful organizer ofvictory will want those who support his cause to pulltheir maximum weight. Supporters are of doubtfulvalue when their sole incentive is hatred of the enemy,without a spark of constructive hope; when the onlynational anthem to suit their case would be a hymnto the lesser Evil

All the wholesome forces of the Jewish public inthe Allied and neutral countries should join in adetermined effort to smash the influences which are


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30 IS IT A WAR AIM?tending to obliterate the existence and the importanceof a Jewish war-front. If that effort be strong andresolute enough, it will be victorious. They need haveno patriotic scruples; the more rigorous the assault,the better for all concerned. Theirs is a struggle forthe right to fight together and hope together; astruggle to overcome those who are obstructing thefull scope of the supreme effort.

In this war the Jewish people should count as oneof the Allied nations. Long before they are throughwith it the Allies will have to make room for ourtroops on their many fronts, for our leaders amongtheir governments, for the redress of Jewish wrongsand the erection of Jewish statehood among theirwar aims.


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CHAPTER IINOT ON THE MAP

IN THIS war (so it seems at the time of writing ) fit is not desired that the Jews should be on themap : neither as active allies, nor as fellow-sufferers,nor as the subject-matter of any special Allied de-mands or war aims.Arthur Szyk, the gifted miniaturist who recently

exhibited in London his brilliant and terrible drawingsof tortured Poles and Jews under the German invader,has also a genius for finding the mot juste. To describethe attitude of the majority of the Allied statesmenand the greater part of the Allied Press to this Jew-ish aspect of the war, he uses the word pornography.They treat us/' he says, as a pornographical sub-

ject. Pornography covers a most important depart-ment of life and nature; nobody denies it, but youcannot discuss it in polite society it is not done/'There is a sort of shamefaced conspiracy, almostentirely dominating Parliament, the Press,* t and the

* There are a few exceptions, the Manchester Guardian amongthem.t The author is referring, of course, to Great Britain. Public

opinion in the United States, however, has not exhibited greaterresponsiveness in this respect.

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32 IS IT A WAR AIM?public platform, to obliterate the Jewish war-issue bysilence. The term conspiracy is not necessarilyintended to suggest that there has been any explicitcollusion on the subject between speakers and writers,or that all the newspapers have received a hint to thateffect from some authoritative quarter. A conspiracyof this kind may be spontaneous and instinctive: thenit is all the more deplorable in its callous unfairness.

So far this is written early in 1940 of all thepeoples attacked by Germany the one which has paidthe greatest price of all in human suffering has beenthe Jewish people. No careful observer is likely toquestion this statement. True, the Czechs have lost

let us hope only temporarily their independence,and the Poles have lost more than that: but in termsof actual human misery, hunger, torture and death,the Jews head the list, even in Poland. There areindications that the number of Jewish civilians whohave died in Poland since the invasion is already in ex-cess of the combined casualty list of both armies, Ger-man and Polish. All this is not said to minimize thegreatness of the Polish people's losses; they are surelygreater than those which any other nation exceptingone has ever suffered in modern times outside of thetrench or the battlefield. That one exception is theJewish people: the Jews still head the list, and arehardly ever mentioned as fellow-sufferers.

For many months past it has been one of thewriter's recreations to collect, from the Jewish Tele-graphic Agency's Daily Bulletin, those items which


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NOT ON THE MAP 33he did not see reproduced in any of the leadingBritish newspapers, at any rate not in the LondonPress. Here, are a few samples:

Every Nazi in Lodz is free to engage any Jew hemeets in the street to do his own private work with-out pay. No branch of trade and no profession is anylonger open to the Jews in Lodz. Even Jewish cab-drivers and porters have now been forbidden to carryon with their work.Ten Jews were executed by the Nazis in the town-

ship of Nove Miasto, in the Warsaw district. The Jewswere chosen at random and shot dead without anyreason being given.

In the township of Grojec, in the Warsaw district,the Jews were forced to set fire to their chief synagoguelast Saturday. A number of Jews of the same townshipwere shot dead by the Nazis while returning homefrom forced labour.Hundreds of Jews, including many women and

children, were killed in the town of Bendzin, nearKatowice, when the Nazis set fire to Zachodnia Street,which is inhabited exclusively by Jews. Any Jew tryingto escape was shot dead. Altogether several hundredmen, women and children died in the flames, or wereshot dead by the Nazis. All the synagogues in Bendzinhave also been burnt down.

Wholesale executions of Jews by Nazis in many townsin the province of Lodz are openly admitted in officialreports of Nazi police officers, extracts of which havebeen published in the Schlesische Zeitung of Breslau.

In the township of Lask, the Schlesische Zeitungstates in quoting one of these official reports: one


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34 IS IT A WAR AIM?hundred Jews were executed for offering resistance toGerman soldiers who were searching their homes forconcealed arms. The police also learned, the officialreport further states, that about a thousand Jews hadsurrounded the synagogue in Lask with the intention ofpreventing the Germans from entering it. The Jewswere therefore fired on and hundreds were killed onthe spot. The synagogue was then set on fire. TheJewish streets of the township/' the report continues,have been closed and the Jews have been forbidden tohave any dealings with the peasants of the neighbour-hood, whom they are trying to persuade to sell themmilk, potatoes and cabbage,To conclude, here is an item which will remind the

reader of Enver PashaV methods of liquidating''Armenians as described by Werfel in The Forty Daysof Mnsa Dagh:

Geneva, January i6thOn Thursday evening, November 3oth, the Naziauthorities in Chelm ordered all Jewish men betweenthe ages of fifteen and sixty to appear the next day,December ist, at 8.30 a.in. in the market square.About two thousand Jews appeared. They were sur-rounded by Nazi auxiliary police, Black Guards, and asmall detachment of soldiers armed with machine-guns. A Gestapo officer then delivered a short speechto the Jews in which he informed them that, as Jewswere responsible for the war and as all Jews were themortal enemies of Geimany, the Chelm Jews hadbeen sentenced by the Nazi authorities to be deprivedof their civil rights and to be expelled from the town.


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NOT ON THE MAP 35At half-past twelve the Jews, surrounded by Nazi

Storm-Troopers and soldiers on lorries and motorcycles,were marched off from the town along the high roadin the directioii of Hrubilszow.A few kilometres from Chelm, near a military hos-pital situated in a wood, the party was stopped andtold by the Nazis thatj because one of them hadattempted to escape, twenty would be executed, andthat for each further attempt of this kind fifty wouldbe executed. Twenty Jews were picked out at randomand marched off.The Nazi authorities in Hrubilszow issued a similar

order to the Jews of the town on Friday night. At half-past nine they were joined by the Chelm Jews.

Altogether it is estimated that there were in thisparty 1,100 Jews from Chelm and 850 Jews fromHrubilszow. Before being marched off, they werewarned that if any of them returned home they wouldbe treated as spies and executed. The Jews were chasedacross fields, woods and marshes from Hrubilszow toMieniany, Cichoburze and Dolbyczow. Every fiveminutes the Nazis ordered those who were tired andunable to continue to stand aside. These were shotdead on the spot and their bodies left lying in thefields. The Jews were not given any food or drinkduring the whole of their dreadful march, and thosewho tried to help themselves to some water from theditches were shot dead.When Dolbyczow was reached, the survivors weredivided into two groups: one numbering about 500 andthe other 400.From Dolbyczow the larger party was marched offin the direction of the frontier town of Sokal, and the


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36 IS IT A WAR AIM?smaller party of 400 to the frontier town of Belzy.The latter were the luckier ones, because only a fewof them were shot dead by the Nazis, while about 250of the larger party were shot by the Nazis beforereaching the bridge on the River Bug which dividesthe Nazi from the Soviet part of the town of Sokal.Thus a total of over 1,300 Jews from Chelni andHrubilszow were massacred by the Nazis during thefour days' forced march to the Soviet frontier.During their four days' march, the Jews were given

only one loaf of bread a day, which had to be dividedbetween thirty men. On the average, one Jew wasshot dead by the Nazis every five to ten minutes ofthe march. From time to time the Nazis were heardto exchange notes with each other as to the numberof Jews they had accounted for. One was heard tosay: I myself have already settled seventy-six, whichbrought the reply, I have killed only sixty-three.Among the Jews killed there were many fathers and

sons of the same family. The bookkeeper of the Hru-bilszow Jewish People's Bank, Isaac Lewenfuss, aged55, was completely exhausted and unable to carry onwith his march when 15 kilometres from Hrubilszow.When ordered by the Nazis to lie down, which was thesignal for his execution, his twenty-year-old son Mendeloffered to die in his place, but his offer was refused.Mendel then declared: Then shoot me together withmy father. The Nazi Storm-Troopers merely said:Oh, you are volunteering to die? Very well. Fatherand son were then shot together.In reporting this massacre about the middle of De-cember, the official German news agency stated Anattempt at a Jewish revolt in the Chelm and Hrubilszowdistricts was ruthlessly suppressed/'


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NOT ON THE MAP 37It is useless to ask how much of all this the reader

has seen in the general Press. Yet these incidents arenot the consequences of a remote earthquake, or atyphoon in the antipodes, something which after allis no concern of ours/' from the standpoint of oursacro egoismo: they are the direct results of the con-quest of Poland, the country for which the Alliessolemnly assumed responsibility. Under these condi-tions a conspiracy of silence is unforgivable.But the worst feature of this conspiracy is theinevitable suggestion that the Allies feel bashful ofacknowledging Jews as fellow-sufferers. There is, bothin England and France, a moral underworld whichis for ever trying to get at the non-defeatist campby the taunt of a Jewish war. It is perhaps a muchbigger underworld than some people imagine; it mayhave its colonies in every class of society; it may feelnot repelled but rather attracted by the Nazis' treat-ment of the Jews. ( That's the stuff to give 'em )All the more urgent, if this be true, is the duty ofdecent society to submerge and crush that underworld.But polite society also evidently shrinks from suchpornography. The result is that the Jewish fellow-sufferer is denied even the last and most elementaryprivilege of a sufferer: to have his losses registered infair and proper perspective, so that he may at leasthope, when the day comes for a general redress, resto-ration and retribution, to present his claims on equalterms with others. The only explanation of the con-spiracywhether instinctive or planned which thebewildered victim can conceive is that it is not felt


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38 IS IT A WAR AIM?to be desirable that the Jewish claim should ever bepresented.Even more disturbing is the silence as regards the

Jews in practically all statements of war aims issuedby certain British leaders. The writer will be forgivenfor not mentioning names: to do so might be unfair.He does not wish to pillory them as callous, for theyprobably regard themselves as genuine well-wishersof the unfortunate Jewish race; they would probablyrepudiate, with sincere indignation, any suspicion ofconspiracy, insisting that the demand for the resto-ration of Jewish rights was omitted in their statementsof war aims merely because such things obviously gowithout saying, etc. (Talleyrand once replied to adiplomat who used the same argument for not men-tioning some minor item in a treaty: Si cela va sansle dire, cela ira mieux en le disant If that goes with-out saying, it will go better by being said.)Two prominent men shall, however, be quoted,for they at least have not forgotten to mention theJews. Both are unimpeachably Liberal, and the inten-tions are unquestionably of the very best. The moredepressing will be the conclusions which any Jew willbe compelled to draw from their utterances.

Sir Walter Layton (in Allied War Aims) is cou-rageous enough to quote Germany's behaviour in theJewish question as one of the sins which have madeGermany an international nuisance :

It has often been argued in the past that it is noconcern of ours what system of government or political


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NOT ON THE MAP 39philosophy another country may choose to adopt.Events have proved that this is only a half truth. Inthe six years of Nazi rule . . . the persecution of theJews has created for other countries a refugee problemon a scale hitherto unknown in history.Hypercritical minds, in weighing this charge, mightremark that it is somewhat narrowly conceived: its

formulation by Sir Walter Layton suggests that, hadthe Nazis only followed the example of Pharaoh, andhad prevented the victims from escaping to othercountries/' there would have been nothing to. com-plain about. But this is not important: the main pointis that the whole charge, in the opinion of the Liberalauthor, entails no consequences worth mentioning.When he comes to stating his war aims he demandsthe restoration of a free Poland and a free Czechoslo-vakia, a free plebiscite in Austria, and steps towardsa federation of Central European States, with a com-mon citizenship which should ensure certain fun-damental rights, such as freedom of speech, the rightnot to be imprisoned without trial, and freedom tomove about and trade within the federation. Theguarantee of such rights would go a long way towardsremedying the grievances of minorities and removingracial distrust. That is all there is to be said about it.The other statement was made by Sir Archibald

Sinclair, M.P. Speaking in the House of Commonson October i2th, he said:One of the difficulties with which some people havecome to me about our present position I would like to


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40 IS IT A WAR AIM?tell the House quite frankly. They say to me, One ofour war aims is the destruction of Hitlerism; anotheris to assert the right of nations to choose their ownform of government. Are those two aims consistent? Ifthe Germans want Hitlerism, have we the right or thepower to demand its destruction? Surely the answer isthis, that we recognize the right of a nation to governitself in its own way, even to choose a dictatorship if itwants it. We may be horrified by the results. We maysee the loathsome spectres of racial and religious perse-cution rearing their ugly heads. We may witness thehorror of secret police oppression and of concentrationcamps. We have the right and the duty to condemnthese manifestations of barbarism, but it is not for usto chastise another people for its own rnisgovernmentor to go to war on behalf of Pastor Niemoller or theGerman Jews. The German people must find means ofsetting their own house in order and we must recognizetheir rights of self-government in their own country.It is only fair to point out that most of the other

spokesmen and precisely the bashful ones who avoidthe Jewish theme seem on the whole to be muchmore exacting in respect of internal arrangements inCentral Europe after the Allies* victory. It is taken forgranted that Germany, Austria, Poland and Czecho-slovakia will once again become liberal and demo-cratic States, and that there will be a reinforced Leagueof Nations to look after the treatment of minorities.But in so far as the Jews are concerned, that doesnot appreciably change the picture. The prospect isextremely arid; it seems to be a case of as you were.


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NOT ON THE MAP 41Sir Archibald Sinclair ought to be thanked for havingsaid the only thing of essential significance in a welterof oratory: namely, that the actual and permanentsupervision of internal developments in a sovereigncountry by outside organs is impracticable; that, inother words, the reality of any statute or treaty clausesas to equal rights will ultimately depend, in Germany,on the good will of the Germans; and in Poland, onthat of the Poles. Roumania and Hungary, not beingas yet at war, could not be mentioned, but the obviousinference is that in these two countries also the outsidesupervision of the Jewish position is out of question.

This affects some 5,000,000 Jews who are still livingin the zone which, for twenty years, has been themain theatre of acute yet chronic Jewish distress.Apart from political oratory, what they are reallypromised is the restoration of the status quo ante. Thegeneral public, and probably many Jews, are very farfrom realizing all the hopelessness of this prospect.It will be worth their while to examine it more nar-rowly in the chapters that follow. The reader shouldnot grudge me their length. He may think that thehorror of the status quo is so obvious that nobody islikely to propose its restoration, even in an amendedform. This is a mistake: for after the war, a great effortwill be made, both by Gentile Machiavellis and byJewish dupes, to draw this red herring across the trailof our national demands. The main battle over Jewishwar aims will be fought around the lie that the ghettocan be made comfortable.


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CHAPTER IIITHE MONSTER'S FOOD

THE purpose of this book, which was writtenin January-February 1940, is to press a claim forthe inclusion of the Jewish problem in the war aimsof the Allied nations.

Responsible people, it is true, are tending to losepatience with the claim that the war aims of theAllies should be extended until they finally includethe redress of almost every imaginable grievance. Theyobject that the proper aim of a nation at war isbesides winning the war to remove those factorswhich have caused the war, and that it should include

hardly anything else; while other grievances, howeverurgent, will have to be settled by some other method.Such responsible people are perfectly right. Never-

theless, if th


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THE MONSTER S FOOD 43would be avoided if these categories were kept rigor-ously apart. A war aim is something for which a nationactually and obviously fights, and if that nation doesnot achieve this aim as an outcome of the war, thiswill mean that it has been defeated. For instance, ifa repetition of such acts of violence as the invasionof Poland is not rendered impossible, the Allies willhave lost the war; crushing the Nazi regime is, there-fore, a war aim. But such a purpose as for instancethe restoration of free trade between the nations,

excellent though it be, cannot be described as a waraim. A peace treaty signed without mentioning suchrestoration would still be regarded as satisfactory.But a peace treaty cannot be effective unless itsweeps away the obstacles to any effective reconstruc-tion; unless it excises the malignant ulcers whichwould prevent any real recovery.One such ulcer is the Jewish tragedy of CentralEurope. It is impossible to imagine even a beginningof universal restoration unless that is removed. Thisoperation is a war aim in the fullest sense of the term.The Jewish tragedy is, of course, not the microbewhich has caused this war. It is only the culture-medium in which the microbe has grown to maturity.The mysteries of mass psychology, when both the

author and the reader are laymen, can best be ex-plained, or at least illuminated, by metaphor andanalogy; and no writer who means business need haveany scruples as to mixing his metaphors. There areseveral metaphors which will help to illustrate the


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44 IS IT A WAR AIM?organic role of Jew-hunting in the growth and progressof the war-disease. It may be likened to the r61e of aspice or sauce which enables the masses to swallowa species of poison which would be too corrosivewithout it; or to that of a lubricant which speeds downa chute a load which otherwise might get stuck; orto that of the sticks which a housewife lights to inducethe heavy log or lumps of coal in her big fireplace tocatch fire. We may find it convenient to use all thesemetaphors and others too, though none of them quiteexactly fits the case. After all, food can be swallowedeven without the spice or sauce; a load can be pusheddown a chute without a lubricant, etc.; but Nazismwould never have grown to its present proportionswithout the help of antisemitism. Culture-mediumEor the microbe is perhaps the aptest simile of all.The man in the street may not be conscious of thisintimate connection between the acuter forms of anti-Semitism and the war-peril. He may even think it amonstrous exaggeration to suggest that Jew-baiting inNazi Germany, however objectionable, was in anyway responsible for, let us say, the failure to heed theAjiglo-French warning about Poland, which was thedirect cause of the conflict. The man in the streetwill quite possibly dismiss such a suggestion as a symp-tom of megalomania: These Jews imagine that every-:hing, down to the weather, and the climate, andearthquakes, depends on what happens to them. Ofcourse, the Nazi programme and practice, beside thejreed for world-domination and the cult of violence,ncludes the persecution of Jews, but the latter is just


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THE MONSTER S FOOD 45a concomitant, an accompanying phenomenon, notthe essence of the thing. Nazism would have beenjust as dangerous if there had been no Jews on earth.

This is absolutely wrong. To destructive movementsof the Nazi type, antisemitism is infinitely more thana concomitant ; and National Socialism wouldprobably never have achieved its rapid and sweepingconquests if it had not ridden the anti-Jewish horse.Everybody knows that in propaganda the appeal of

love is slow and lumbering in comparison with theappeal of hatred. Hatred is the piquant sauce whichaccelerates both the swallowing and the digestion ofideas and policies. And the sauce can be fully effec-tive only if the object of hatred is close at hand,familiar to all, and easily and safely attacked. Had theNazi propaganda been confined from the beginning topreaching rebellion against the Versailles peace termsand the wickedness of the English or the French orthe Americans, its theoretical appeal might have beenstill powerful, but its actual progress among the masseswould have been so gradual that it is doubtful whetherit would ever have gathered enough energy for anexplosion. A Versailles Treaty is not a tangible objectof real and palpable hatred; the emotions of themasses cannot be stirred by an object which can onlybe seen at the public library. On the other hand, hat-ing the English or the Americans or the French iseither a torture to the hater himself, so long as he darenot express his hatred by deeds, or a very dangerousenterprise, if he tries prematurely to translate hishatred into action. There is only one ideal object for


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46 IS IT A WAR AIM?mass training in collective hate, and that is the Jew.He is everywhere within reach; he can be pointed

outat any street corner; and he can* be insulted orassaulted with only the minimum of risk, or with noneat all. To foster a movement of the Nazi type with-out the daily use of Jewish targets would be like stag-ing a pageant without rehearsals.The world outside Germany does not realize towhat an extent the Nazi movement has depended,through all the twenty years of its existence, on thehatred of the Jew for its vitality and driving power.Theoretically, a complete gospel of German NationalSocialism could have been composed without anyreference whatsoever to the Jews: rearmament, themilitarization of the Rhine district, the restorationof the colonies, the AnscMuss of Austria, and theannexation of the Sudetenland (to say nothing ofthat childish scheme of social reform devised in 1923by Feder, incorporated into the immutable pro-gramme of the party, and a little later abandoned).All these aims could have been preached every whitas forcibly had their authors never thought of Israeland Judah. But they evidently felt, from the verybeginning, that none of these aims would go downproperly with the masses unless they were duly sea-soned. So not a single spoonful of this witches' brewwas offered without the spice of antisemitism.

Only the foolish would seek to explain this infatu-ation by using the term mania/' With a few excep-tions, the Nazi chiefs are as sane as any other govern-


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THE MONSTER'S FOOD 47ment or party leaders in any other country. Nor isit to be explained by sadism ; nor by any otherabnormal urge rooted in the morbid subconscious ofmen, almost every one of whom, if cleansed of hiswar-paint and examined in the ordinary light of every-day reality, would probably appear as just an averagehuman being. Some of these chiefs have been quitecredibly reported as confessing how utterly fed-upthey were with the necessity of always talking of Jews,Jews, Jews. One does not do such things for pleasure:one does them only because of necessity. They knewthat their propaganda would not be accepted quicklyenough and widely enough without the piquant sauce.It is only thanks to the sauce that it has won suchwide and rapid acceptance. The word only is deliber-ately italicized in order to emphasize the fact thatJew-baiting is no essential ingredient of the Nazi prop-aganda, it is simply the lubricant without which theindigestible meal could never have slid down sosmoothly.

All this is nothing new; at least, not to the Jews.As early as the eighteen-eighties, after a pogrom inthe Ukraine, a Russian Socialist party published amanifesto which should have comforted all the friendsof liberty by arguing that an anti-Jewish pogrom was,after all, not such a bad thing, being rather in thenature of a rehearsal; the moujiks (it was explained)had only begun by attacking the Jews; they would con-tinue by massacring the police, and would end bysmashing autocracy. Years later,,again in Russia, it wasa Jewish revolutionary who uttered the often-quoted


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48 IS IT A WAR AIM?formula: Jew^h blood is the best for oiling thewheels of progress.The success of the Nazi experiment has provedinstructive. Now, in the light of the present confla-gration, the whole story of the last decade looks very-much like a vast shunting operation, in which theseveral nations have gradually moved into the one orthe other of the two great camps about to clash. Andit is a curious and significant fact that whenever anyone of these nations has thought of joining the ene-mies of the Western bloc (even in a hesitatingattempt, soon to be abandoned ), it has invariablybegun by qualifying for admission in the same way-by administering to its people a dose of the Jewishspice/' This was the meaning of the Goga intermezzoin Roumania: for a moment, at the end of 1937, ^eruling circles of that country were on the verge ofadopting the anti-Western orientation and the firstvisible symptom of this was the application of theusual lubricant, through a violently antisemitic cabinetand a broadside of

anti-Jewish legislation. A few weekslater the anti-Western orientation was thought to beundesirable; M. Goga was dismissed, and his legisla-tion was quashed. If we recall this short-lived incident,it is only to point its moral, which is obvious, andwhich should not be forgotten.** Roumania's expressed attitude towards the Jews following herabandonment of her Western orientation in July 1940, supplies un-questionable evidence to this effect. The violent wave of horribleanti-Jewish terror that swept the country, and the drastic antisemiticlegislation that accompanied it, were by no means a result of directNazi pressure. They were purely Roumanian phenomenon: the nat-ural result of joining the Axis.


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THE MONSTER S FOOD 49As for the analogous behaviour of Italy, this was

even more striking than the Roumanian episode. InRoumania there had always been antisemitic tenden-cies in all classes of the population, high, middle andlow; so there was at least something for the gamblersto stake upon. But in Italy? It is not enough to saythat its people, for half a century at least, had genu-inely forgotten the alleged necessity of discriminatingagainst the Jew: they had actually lost all interest inthe question of who was a Jew and who was not Yet,when the time came for swinging the country into acertain orientation, it was immediately felt in somemysterious way that the new course could not befollowed without a dose of the usual lubricant. Butin this case the lubricant was applied in half-heartedfashion, with evident reluctance, and many apologies

as something a man does admittedly contre coeur,and only because he must: because, for this kind ofjob, the magical lubricant is indispensable.The author is neither a historian nor a sociologist;he does not profess to explain precisely why this lubri-

cant of antisemitism should be indispensable. Likeothers, he has often asked himself this question: In-numerable wars have been fought in the past, yet itwas not thought necessary to prepare for these warsby especial emphasis on the Jewish question. Whydoes it appear so necessary now?One explanation is perhaps almost comforting: Itis because the world is, after all, progressing. Theworld has been moving on, despite all our scepticism.


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50 IS IT A WAR AIM?The masses can no longer be sent to their deathsimply by order: nowadays they need some kind ofreligion to die for. Those observers of the Spanishcivil war may have spoken truly who affirmed thatthe programmatic difference, or the clash of realinterests, between Burgos and Madrid was infinitesi-mally small: it was not so much a fight over tangibleissues as a pure and simple guerre de religion.But a religion to fit Germany's claim to world-

domination must be a formidable faith. Populationsspeaking German dialects and occupying contiguousterritories in Europe count close upon ninety mil-lions, as against 40 to 45 millions each of Britons,Frenchmen, or Italians. There is an inherent sugges-tion of supremacy in these very figures: a suggestionnot of ascendency or predominance or influencemerely, but of actual subjugation, of power such asa slave-owner could wield over his negroes. The temp-tation to succumb to such suggestion can be curbedonly by some powerful spiritual self-discipline: by thatcombination of complex traditions ethical, philo-sophical, religious, cultural, democratic which we callcivilization, and whose end is progress. All these hadto be swept away before a nation with such a literatureas the German could be made to put the clock backa thousand yearscould be induced to accept a creedas primitive and cynical as this: We Germans arethe salt of the earth; our neighbours' land is our living-space; their human value can be acknowledged onlyin so far as it is useful to us; we may impose forcedlabour on their able-bodied men and women; we may


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THE MONSTER S FOOD $1drive them away from their towns and villages tomake room for Germans. Such action will be just andproper, and any opposition to it will be criminal, andthe means to be used in suppressing such oppositionneed not be weighed in any balance of ethics, but onlyin the balance of efficiency/'We cannot, of course, deny that a similar mentalitywas displayed in primitive conquestssuch as thosedescribed in the Old Testament; and also thousandsof years later in Europe's colonial policy, since thedays of Columbus, and even down to a couple ofgenerations ago. It is idle to defend our ancestors,to apologize for the sins of Gideon or justify thebarbarities of Cort6s. Such bygone instances have nobearing on our theme, for in those ancient times themass-mind of humanity was still so liable to relapsesof bestiality that there was no need to preface therelapse by any profound moral revolution. But thelast century has brought such conceptions as humanityand equality home to the minds of countless millions:and to make a clean sweep of these conceptions, toclear the ground for the return of the beast, a formi-dable effort is required.And not only a formidable effort, but a formidableamount of training by rehearsal, by cheap and easyexperimentation in corpore vfli. The dormant brutein the German soul seems to have been

hibernatingvery near the surface, but even so it had to be trainedin beastliness and cruelty by a gradual drill. LikeVoltaire's deity, if the Jews had not existed they wouldhave had to be invented.


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52 IS IT A WAR AIM?Our Western statesmen would be guilty of culpable

blindness were they to disregard the historical truthof this statement When the Nazis across the fron-tiers, or their hirelings in Britain and France, yell orwhisper that this is a Jewish War/' they are perfectlyright: the microbe of war would have died had it notbeen allowed to batten on the Jewish tragedy.


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CHAPTER IVTHE ANTISEMITISM OF MEN

rriHERE are two distinct forces at work withinJL the general phenomenon called Antisemitism:the one is a subjective repulsion, strong enough andpermanent enough to become anything from a hobbyto a religion; the other is an objective state of thingswhich tends to ostracize the Jew almost independentlyof whether his neighbours like or dislike him. Weshall call the first category the Antisemitism ofMen/' and the second the Antisemitism of Things/'For a study of the former, the best field of observationis Germany; of the latter, Poland. In the present chap-ter we shall deal with Germany.At the moment of writing, there are supposed tobe some 200,000 Jews in Germany of the Versaillesfrontiers, 100,000 in Austria, 100,000 in Bohemia andMoravia, 130,000 in Slovakia and 2,000,000 in theparts of Poland occupied by the Nazis.* These figures

* The number of Jews under Nazi domination has greatly in-creased since then. It comprises not only the entire Jewish populationof Poland (3,250,000 in 1939), but also the Jews of the BalticStates (250,000), the Balkan countries (100,000), the Lowlands(60,000), Occupied France (approximately 50,000) and OccupiedRussia (perhaps 2,000,000 the majority of Russian Jews). All inall, some 7,000,000 Jews the bulk of European Jewry are nowunder the yoke of Nazi oppression.

53


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54 IS IT A WAR AIM?are largely guesswork rather than reliable estimates;moreover, they are bound to be considerably affectedby the transfers of population effected by the Nazigovernmentsome already carried out, and othersplanned for the near future. Finally, some may hopethat a considerable proportion of all these Jews willdie out before the war is over, so that the problemfacing the managers of the future reconstruction willbe appreciably facilitated. Nevertheless, it is sure evenso to present a formidable problem.The author assumes as an axiom that the war can-not end without the liquidation of the Nazi regime.Its collapse will probably be followed by the restora-tion of the sovereignty of all or most of the annexedterritories, and by the establishment everywhere ofconstitutions as liberal and democratic as possible inaccordance with the best Allied or American advice.And finally, the creation of something like a new andvery much improved edition of the League may beexpected. It would be futile now to attempt any guessat the details, even at the broader and more essentialdetails, of that future; but the final political outlookmay be described as essentially bright, and the writervery firmly believes in its reality.

Furthermore, he believes that all these oppressedpeoples, restored to security and sanity, will honestlytry to devote themselves to sober reconstruction. Hebelieves that they will cherish a suppression of war;he hopes that they will, for at least a generation, dis-card all thought of armed revanche; he expects themto give much more active support to the new League


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THE ANTISEMITISM OF MEN 55of Nations, or the European Federation, or whateverelse it may be called, than was ever enjoyed by theold Geneva League. True, one point is not quite clearyet, even to a trustful believer, and that is, how thenations 'will settle all those prickly questions of eth-nically mixed provinces in such a way as to- satisfy alland to stamp out irredentism; but so fervent is hisdesire to believe that he prefers not to think of theprickles. Everything, in short, will somehow get ad-justed in time, with a great deal of labour, but withoutany further disasters. Some people may find thisoptimism absurd: but this the author denies; his mostsanguine expectations are soberly and moderately real-istic. Credo, quia NON absurdurn.There is, however, one aspect of such optimismwhich even the most 'sanguine should discard utterlyand ruthlessly: namely, the belief that the cancer of

antisemitism can be cured by such means as liberalconstitutions and League supervision. No doubt, allthe suitable provisions will be duly included in theseconstitutions, and in the League's new Covenant, en-suring the inviolability of equal rights for all. But theenforcement of these constitutions will have to beleft, in every country, in the hands of national gov-ernments; and democratic electoral methods will en-sure that those governments will be as representativeof the true attitude of the masses as possible. It istherefore on the attitude of the masses that the actualoperation of any clauses relating to equal rights willdepend, so far as the Jews' rights are concerned. It isotherwise in the case of other minorities: they live for


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56 IS IT A WAR AIM?the most part in close territorial clusters, in districtsor even cantons, and they can to some extent lookafter themselves. The Jews live scattered throughoutpredominantly Gentile towns and villages: at everystep, in the street or in public or private life, they areexposed to the impact of the good or ill will of thelocal majority. To pretend that under these conditionsany essential results can be ensured by law is childish.NON credo qufa absurdum.This aspect of the matter will be the better appre-ciated if the reader recalls that the principle of equalrights for Jews, even in East-Central Europe, is noth-ing new. On the contrary, in almost every one ofthese States the legal recognition of this principle isjust as old as the State itself. Only Austria-Hungarywas older than its Jewish equality law, which wasinscribed on her statute book in 1867. When theGerman Empire was created in 1871 its imperial con-stitution established equality for all, irrespective ofcreed or origin. When the Treaty of Berlin (1878)definitely delimited the frontiers of Roumania, Serbiaand Bulgaria, it was guaranteed by the same treatythat in all these countries all citizens would enjoyequal rights. When the peace treaties of 1919 createdPoland, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic States, specialminority clauses were solemnly inserted to ensureequality, and the League of Nations was to superviseand guarantee their execution. To tell once again howall these provisions proved ineffective would betedious; the only fact that may not be widely knownis that pre-war Roumania, which never took the equal-


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THE ANTISEMITISM OF MEN 57ity clause seriously, and openly treated her Jews asforeigners, never had any trouble on that accountwith any of the signatories of the Treaty of Berlin-one of whom was Great Britain and another France.

Strangely enough, the formidable past history ofGerman antisemitism seems to be rapidly sinking intooblivion. In the democratic countries a myth is beingcreated to the effect that the evil has originated withthe advent of a person called Adolf Hitler, who wasbora in 1888, so that if he can be removed it willdisappear. But the truth is that Hitler has just as muchto do with the origin of this evil as Napoleon had withthe invention of gunpowder. Napoleon did not inventgunpowder; he only made magnificent use of it; andwhen he was gone, others arose who surpassed him.Germany and in this respect Austria was one with

her long before the Anschluss has ever been the para-mount workshop of modern antisemitism. There andnot elsewhere was the discovery made, and the prin-ciple proclaimed, that the objection to the Jew is notreligious but racial, and he must therefore be perse-cuted even if baptized. There and not elsewhere wasantisemitism sublimated to the rank of a scientificphilosophy. In no other nation was Jew-hatred as amode of thought openly adopted by so many reallyprominent men, some of them even of the first emi-nence in the various walks of spiritual leadership:Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Duhring, Treitschke. Hous-ton Stewart Chamberlain, to achieve success in anti-semitism, had to settle in Germany. In Germany, too,


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58 IS IT A WAR AIM?not elsewhere, was the practical aspect of antisemitismmodernized and perfected: what had been a meretendency to desultory street-rioting was by Germaninitiative promoted to a political system. Stoecker andAhlward founded the movement in Berlin, bringinginto the Reichstag, about 1893, the first bunch ofdeputies to be solemnly (and quite democratically)elected as the Antisemitische Partef; and in Vienna,two years later, Lueger triumphantly conquered theVienna Town Hall on a platform whose main, orrather only plank was hatred of the Jew, was electedburgomaster amidst scenes of the wildest mass-enthusi-asin, and kept his seat for decades. Such things hadbeen happening for three-quarters of a century beforethe Nazi Party was ever thought of.It is nonsense to pretend that the Germans aremanifesting antisemitism only by order, so that whenthe order is annulled by the liquidation of Nazismthey will forget all about it. Germans abroad, who runno risk if they choose to disobey orders from Berlin,have amply and repeatedly shown that Nazism canwin them by its own powers of fascination, and notthrough their fear of the Gestapo. The clearest proofof this was the Saar plebiscite of 1935, held underideally democratic conditions, with British police en-suring the fullest freedom of propaganda, of con-science and of franchise: out of 525,000 valid votes,477,000 were cast for incorporation in Nazi Germany.Perhaps even more significant are the impressive pro-portions of the Germans in Italy, Latvia and Estoniawho have accepted the call to return to Germany:


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THE ANTISEMITISM OF MEN 59all but autochthonous, the descendants of conquerorsand settlers of centuries ago, they left. their oftencomfortable homes and respectable social positions forthe pleasure of breathing the Nazi atmosphere. Totop it all, there is the record of the frank and vocifer-ous delight displayed by all classes of the Vienna mob,in the first weeks after the Anschluss, when Jewishladies in fur coats were ordered to scrub pavementsand ganz Wien flocked to watch and yell with joy,and mothers lifted their babies over their neighbours'heads so that they should not miss the lovely sight.By order? Of course there must be an order tounleash the innermost brute: but the main point isthe presence of the brute underneath; and what amultitudinous bruteAntisemitism is traditionally and organically en-demic in Germany; not in Germany alone by anymeans, but in no other country more than in Ger-many. Here again, being neither a sociologist nor astudent of psychology, the author will not attempt toexplain the phenomenon: but only a fool or a liarwould deny it.The collapse of Nazism can bring no essentialremedy to this endemic disease. One must, of course,be realist enough to allow for the so-called swing ofthe pendulum: when Hitler goes, there may be somekind of popular scurry to atone for the antisemiticorgy, partly for opportunist reasons, but partly also,no doubt, out of genuine disgust at the sub-human,beastly forms which the persecution has assumed.Moreover, there will be those equality-clauses in the


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60 IS IT A WAR AIM?peace treaty and the new constitution. And further:there is not the slightest doubt that many Jews whowere forced to leave Germany after 1933 will then bemost eager to return, and ready to forgive and forget:some because of discouraging experiences while inexile, some out of genuine attachment to the Germanland and civilization. That much we all admit. But allsuperficial optimists should be warned that the resultof this backwash will bealmost immediately, per-haps within a few weeks only of the new 6dit deNantes which will have opened the new era a venom-ous recrudescence of the incurable evil.One shudders to think how venomous it would be.Apart from racial idiosyncrasies, sheer material interestwill constitute a formidable charge of high explosive.The value of Jewish property in Germany which, inone form or another, has passed into German hands,is in the vicinity of 25 billion marks. At a conservativeestimate, since 1933 in Germany and since 1938 inAustria, over 300,000 Jewish breadwinners of all kindshave been affected by the Nazi r6gime; most of them(and the proportion is constantly increasing) havebeen altogether deprived of their employment or pro-fession, while a dwindling minority are still clingingto some sort of job. All that they have lost has beengrabbed by the Aryans. That all includes myriadsof commercial and industrial positions, from directorto typist or shop-assistant, thousands of professionaljobs from panel doctor to journalist, while a compara-tively important percentage of civil servants, fromschool teacher up to fudge and chief constable, were


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THE ANTISEMITISM OF MEN 61Jews. These were posts filled by the middle class, theintelligentsia, the haute bourgeoisie that is, by themost conspicuous, most vocal and most sensitive strataof modern society. To the members of these classesthe return of the Jews would mean a vast influx ofextremely dangerous competitors, in many cases farbetter qualified than the usurpers, and they would befaced, as a rule, with the alternative: reconquer orstarve. In all cases they would be morally entitled tothe redress of an admitted grievance, an intolerableinjustice.The kind of welcome which would await them maybe imagined. I do not presume to foretell how soon itwould rise to the pitch of direct persecution, or howthe inevitable de facto denial of equal rights wouldbe disguised to suit the constitution and the peacetreaty: but it should be remembered that under ademocratic constitution parliaments and governmentsare bound to be powerfully influenced, firstly, by theendemic idiosyncrasy of which I have spoken, and sec-ondly, by the menace of competition, more desperatethan ever before. Nor should anyone be misled by thepleasant recollection that in the good old days ofBismarck and Wilhelm the Last, the principles ofantisemitism were put into practice without any uglyand disorderly brutality, but with due restraint andmoderation; so that the new after-war regime, underwhich all brutality will be strictly prohibited by proto-col, may in the end prove not so bad, or at all events,not so bad for the Jews, who, after all, must not forgetthat they cannot be the choosers. . . . The recollection


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62 IS IT A WAR AIM?is irrelevant: in the interval the brute has been un-leashed and has tasted blood.To make the outlook yet clearer, one may ask the

readersupposing him to be a Gentile to forget thatbeggars cannot be choosers, and to imagine that asimilar prospect is offered not to us, but to him andto other Englishmen: the prospect of living at themercy

of a ninety-nine to one majority trained forgenerations to abhor the English, under the sole pro-tection of paper paragraphs and the supervision ofGeneva, or the substitute for Geneva; and to workfor the Allied victory with unfaltering zeal, though allit promises him is just this prospect


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PART IITHE ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS


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CHAPTER VTHE HUNTING-GROUND

GERMANYwas the war-monster's favoured pas-

ture, rich in the spicy fodder which it loves.Poland was its coveted hunting-ground, ever more de-fenceless and more tempting to the monster as thesame pungent weed grew more rankly on its soil.

Poland's part in the Jewish pre-history of the waris a drama by itself, which will be dealt with in laterchapters; here the writer wishes only to point to thestrange and tragic duality of her historical r61e duringthese twenty years of her renewed existence. This wasa period during which the new world-war was hatch-ing; during which her government strove in manyways to prevent the war; and yet, after Germany her-self, Poland was, objectively, considered the main soilon which the war-microbe bred.A story is told of the late Marshal Pilsudski's inter-view with an important French envoy, soon after theNazis had taken power in Berlin. The Frenchman wastrying to persuade him to join France and England(plus,

of course, Soviet Russia) against Germany.Pilsudski took his guest to a big wall map, wherePoland was shown squeezed in between the U.S.S.R.and Germany. If these two clash some day, he said,

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66 THE ANTISEMITISM OF THINGSall their battles will be fought on our soil. Now youjust imagine

that this soil is not Poland, but France,and tell me what would be your policy thenFrom the moment of Pilsudski's accession to powerin 1926, and perhaps even earlier, the policy of thePolish Republic was dictated by this paramount aim:no war on Polish soil. And this or so it seemed thenwas tantamount to no war at all. Of all intensely

and inherently peaceable nations Poland was probablythe most genuinely anxious for world peace: notbecause of what is generally understood as pacifism,but because of something much more effective thanpacifism namely, obvious and unmistakable self-interest.At the same time the whole of the East-Centralbelt of Europe, extending from Riga on the Balticdown to Constanza on the Black Sea, was in the

throes of the most pernicious kind of social fever: andthe main focus of the infection, from which it spreadto North and South, was Poland. It was, of course,the same old evil: the fever of antisemitism.

Its origin was the statistical fact that the Jews con-stituted 10% of Poland's total population, and aboutone third of her urban population. This inescapablefact vitiated and perverted every civic value. Democ-racy in this atmosphere meant that in the town hallsof Warsaw, Cracow, Lodz and every other importantcity, the Poles would have to share mastery almostevenly with the Jews: that was what it meant, or sopeople thought. Equality of rights in this atmos-phere meant that in every branch of economy which


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THE HUNTING-GROUND 67requires a little learning the long-urbanized Jew wouldovertake and beat his Polish competitor, the son orgrandson of slow-witted peasants: or so peoplethought It is useless to speak of the moral beauty offair play: the bare fact is that in Poland the Poles'jealousy and fear of the Jews were poisoning the veryatmosphere of her public life. We shall see in otherchapters how true it is that in some countries the de-cisive factor is not the antisemitism of men but theantisemitism of things. And here we have a firstglimpse of this factual antisemitism.The result of this statistical fact was that for twentyyears Poland was always on the brink of inner con-vulsion. I do not mean to suggest that the Jewishquestion was her only painful spot; she had otherand perhaps more serious troubles; for example, theUkrainian problem. But neither this nor any otherinternal difficulty of Gentile origin possesses theone special and accursed peculiarity of antisemitismits unremitting vitality, its power of accumulatingsocial toxins. It was something like a bad chronic coldin the head, not a serious disease in itself but a con-stant invitation to all other kinds of disease. Partystrife in that pathological climate became murder-ous hate; criticism degenerated into calumny; thetemperature and temper of all public life was that ofthe proverbial bear with a sore head.Yet this was Poland, by her size and numbers andprestige the central rock of East-Central Europe. Hadshe been given, by God or fate, a chance of developingcalmly and steadily, her influence would have stabi-


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68 THE ANTISEMITISM OF THINGSlized the whole of that zone, and would have made ofit a real TTiird Europe,

a cohesive force capable ofsobering its German neighbours, despite their numer-ical strength (for East-Central Europe has a totalpopulation not far short of 100 millions). As it was,Poland's unrelaxing feverishness acted as a constantprovocation to her predatory neighbours.The conclusion is clear: no restoration, in Centralor East-Central Europe, will ever make for a durablepeace unless the ulcer of antisemitism is excised.Among the factors w

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Jabotinsky the War and the Jew