A
CONVERSATION with
Mr. Israel Zangwill on
with a PREFACE by Mr.
Zangwill, the TEXT
by
SAMUEL ROTH
"Do I really contradict myself?
Well, then, I contradict myself."
WALT WHITMAN
New York
ROBERT M. McBRIDE
& COMPANY
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
ROBERT M. McBRIDE &
Co.
Printed
in the United
States
of America
Published
1925
TO
Judah L. Magnes
A
Prince in Israel
PREFACE By Israel Zangwill 9
THE FIRST CHAPTER Time and Space 31
THE SECOND CHAPTER Faith 37
THE THIRD CHAPTER God 43
THE FOURTH CHAPTER The Rabbis 47
THE FIFTH CHAPTER Intellect 52
THE SIXTH CHAPTER Beauty 59
THE SEVENTH CHAPTER Modesty
66
THE EIGHTH CHAPTER Jesus
73
THE NINTH CHAPTER The
Legend 81
THE TENTH CHAPTER America 88
THE ELEVENTH CHAPTER History 100
THE TWELFTH CHAPTER Diaspora 105
THE THIRTEENTH CHAPTER Prophecy 110
THE FOURTEENTH CHAPTER Antisemitism 114
THE FIFTEENTH CHAPTER Herzl
and Zionism 120
THE SIXTEENTH CHAPTER Orientalism 127
THE SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER The
Future 137
THE EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER Pharaoh 143
CONCLUSION 147
I
IT IS
fortunate that it is the habit of prefaces to appear in the front of books and
not as rear lights, or the reader of this volume would be puzzled to understand
why I should be writing a preface to a work in which I am abused or at least
misunderstood and misrepresented. Or would he perhaps imagine I took the
opportunity of countering? The simple truth is that I am an admirer of Samuel
Roth's poetry and pugnacity as becomes one who is himself a meek
"prosateur." Although I do not share his views on the Jewish Problem,
or on myself--apparently to him a still tougher Jewish problem--I respect
forthrightness, and I take off my hat to his Jewish faith--or, should I say, I
put it on? But he appears to belong to a young generation of Zionists who were
in their cradles when I was fighting for Zion, and who absorbed prejudice
against me with their mothers' milk or the honey with which Palestinian oratory
has never failed to flow. Among the stigmata of these young fanatics, whose
nationalism is incurably linked with a land they have never trodden, the word
"Uganda" is the most revelatory. Uganda is a country which never came
within a hundred miles of Jewish history. It is a country which, according to
my friend and neighbor, Sir Harry Johnston, whom the twentieth century found
implicated in its administration, is inhabited by a dense population of negroes
and Masai clothed and unashamed, many of them Christians, ticking away at
typewriters. Pigmies take up any space left by these civilized children of Ham,
and there is not room for a Jew to worm his way
into the polity even as High Commissioner. Yet the whole literature of Zionism
for a decade bristles with Uganda and Ugandaism. The region really offered to
the Zionists by the magnanimity of Joseph Chamberlain was a plateau in the
adjoining province of British East Africa. It was an empty, healthy territory,
free from politicians and almost from insect pests, and the refusal thereof by
the Jews was an historic blunder of the first magnitude, a spiritless
contradiction of the Hebrew proverb: Leolam Tikkach (Always take).
What could the "Elders of Zion" have been about, thus to refuse a
slice of the planet which, according to a famous manufacturer of motor cars and
myths, their one dream is to annex? Not only would thousands of Jews have by
now been settled happily on land which, even without their advent, has gone up
vastly in value, but Zionism, there exercising governmental functions,
would--as Professor Gregory, F.R.S., has pointed out--have been in a position
to claim and to take over the mandate for Palestine. In conformity with the
paradox of his history, Israel would have colonized his mother-land from his
colony. Still stronger would have been the Jewish position, had my scheme of
taking over the whole of British East Africa as a British Judća materialized
the scheme for which I had won the sympathy of both Winston Churchill and
Joseph Chamberlain, then on opposite sides of the House of Commons. "Great
work accomplished!" one of the zealots cabled to America when the East
African territory was rejected by the Zionist Congress. "Great work
unaccomplished" was, I remember, my comment on his cable. And what is
geography--any more than statesmanship--to passionate Palestinians, who have
never seen Palestine? And so Uganda it is which figures in Zionist annals as
the despised and rejected of the Jews, and Uganda it will be, I suppose, to the
end of the chapter. It even figures in Nahum Sokolow's monumental "History
of Zionism." "We have Palestine, why do we want Uganda?"
shrieked an hysterical Zionist at the critical Congress. "Have you
Palestine? Give it us then," came Max Nordau's retort.
It is
a curious debate to remember just now, when, despite a magnificent British
gesture, the possession of Palestine by Israel has become more nebulous than
ever. To the Dreamer of the Ghetto the Palestine of millennial vision was more
solid than the political Palestine of the British Mandate and Sir Herbert
Samuels.
II
BY AN
odd coincidence there arrived at this moment from their war-storage in London
seven packing-cases full of the pre-war correspondence of the Jewish
Territorial Organization with its upshoot the Emigration Regulation Department,
and, weltering in this dusty ocean of my dead past, I recall the pertinacious
slogan of the Zionists that only in Palestine could the Jewish State be
re-created. They were almost persuaded--despite their own point of location on
the planet--that save to Zion no Jew would ever emigrate. Not since the proverbial
German philosopher evolved the camel from his inner intuition has there been
such an example of inattention to reality. Inattention not only to the
existence in Palestine of 600,000 Arabs and an incalculable number of Christian
prejudices, but inattention to the actualities of geography, politics and of
Jewish psychology. One could forgive their turning a blind eye to the
Palestinian negatives, much as Nelson turned his blind eye to his
telescope,--it is faith that moves mountains. But to deny the extra-Palestinian
positives, that was not faith but fanaticism.
I
turn over the thousands of index cards devoted to the emigration which we
fostered to the United States by way of Galveston. Each bears the name of the
emigrant, the place of his origin in Eastern Europe, the number of his
relatives, if any, traveling with him, and the place of his settlement West of
the Mississippi. Pathetic it is to think of these Odysseys of the obscure in
quest of bread and peace, through a hostile world of bullies, sharks and
Bumbles. But we did our best to guide and protect, and, in the majority of
cases, the quest was successful; and the result of ten thousand such placements
was to set up a nucleus of Jewish settlement which has since served to draw off
into the rising towns of the West and Southwest myriads of Jews who would
otherwise have added to the congested Jewish quarters of the great Eastern
cities or fallen a prey to the massacres engendered in Europe by "the war
for righteousness." One can imagine what the gravitation would have been,
had my organization been able to present to the persecuted children of the
Pale, not merely the hope of bread, but of a Jewish self-governing State, which
their bread-winning would at the same time build up, a State complete with Jewish
institutions and the Jewish Sabbath.
As Mr. Winston Churchill put it in writing to a follower of mine
on New Year's Day, 1906:
"I
agree most heartily with the spirit of Mr. Zangwill's letter to the Times
of December 12, 1905. I recognize the supreme attraction to a scattered and
persecuted people of a safe and settled home under the flag of tolerance and
freedom. Such a plan contains a soul, and enlists in its support energies,
enthusiasms, and a driving power which no scheme of individual colonization can
ever command . . . . I do not feel that the noble vision you behold so vividly
ought to be allowed to fade, and I will do what I can to preserve it and fulfill it. There should be room within the
world-wide limits of the British Empire, and within the generous scope of
Liberal institutions, for the self-development and peculiar growth of many
races, and of many traditions, and of many creeds. And from an Imperial point
of view it is on the varied excellence of its parts that there is most surely
to be founded the wealth, the happiness, and the higher unity of the
whole."
This
letter has a peculiar interest in view of the fact that, by the whirligig of
history, Palestine has become British, and the writer holds its destiny in his
hands. But the driving power of which Mr. Winston Churchill speaks so
eloquently is not--be it marked--a force needing to be artificially generated.
There is here no question of Jews preferring, according to the stock gibe, to
be ambassadors in Paris of the Jewish State--a joke which rather lost its point
in the Dreyfus days. The driving force is actually at work, although, through
unskillful engineering, it is not producing its maximum effect. For under
pressure of persecution or poverty the population of the potential State is already
on the move. American messengers of relief, returned from the Ukraine, report
that the whole thought of millions of Jews is to escape to a place of safety.
It is little wonder when we read of the seven hundred bestial pogroms with
their orgies of slaughter and rape in some four hundred places, many of them
utterly wiped out. This panic-stricken stream is like water running to waste in
many directions, that might be diverted to and concentrated on some great
barren tract. Hood described his seamstress as "Sewing at once with a
double thread a shroud as well as a shirt."
The
Jewish artisan could make at once with a single tool a State as well as a
livelihood.
The
Jewish immigrant, whom even the cruelest tests of the American Statute Book
could not bar out, is not of the puny middleman type familiar to caricature.
From some statistics, carefully preserved in my packing-cases, dealing with
over 4,000 men who passed through a "Jews' Temporary Shelter" in
London during a year before the war, I find that 74 per cent. of the immigrants
followed a definite occupation. One thousand five hundred and thirty-eight
individuals were bootmakers, capmakers, furriers, tailors, etc., the kind of
workers who, although not necessary in the very first stage of colonization,
very soon became indispensable. Five hundred and sixty-three persons were
engaged in textile and technical industries, including blacksmiths, coopers,
smiths, tanners, that have an even closer connection with colonization. Closer
still to the needs of a new colony come the 420 bricklayers, builders, carpenters, road
paviors, gardeners, wheelwrights, glaziers, painters, plumbers, etc., and the
500 unskilled laborers who had been regularly employed as agriculturists,
porters, etc. Bakers and millers, butchers and confectioners, weavers and
painters, ropemakers and woodcarvers, bookbinders and brass founders, engravers
and electrical engineers, dramatists and dentists, they combine the
requirements of a whole civilization.
Moreover,
over 50 per cent. of the immigrants were between 20 and 30, the very age needed
for pioneering, and the bulk of these were unmarried. The majority, too, were
reservists who had had military training and no doubt experience in roughing
it. These had a very high economic value from the industrial point of view.
Practically every one had followed some definite pursuit and learned habits of
discipline and restraint in his term of service. Engaged in textile and other
technical industries were 990 or 24.4 per cent. of those whose callings are
enumerated. In the production of articles of dress, 764 or 18.75 per cent.;
engaged in trade, 481 or 11.85 percent.; in the building trades, 474 or 11.65
per cent.; in agriculture on their own account, 171 or
4.25 per cent.; engaged in means of locomotion (mainly as carmen), 161 or 3.95
per cent.; in the preparation of food, 148 or 3.65 per cent.; in the highest
professions 92 or 2.25 per cent.; unskilled labor (mainly engaged in
agriculture, but not on own account), 764 or 18.75 per cent.--oddly coincident
with the number in clothing factories. That the refugees, being notoriously
sober and industrious, formed a very desirable class of emigrants was not open
to question. Officers of the English army and doctors who examined the men on
departure, spoke in the highest terms of their physique.
Nor,
except perhaps in periods of violent convulsion when flight at any cost is his
sole resource, is the Jewish immigrant a pauper alien who comes knocking at the
door with his begging-bowl or offering merely his muscles. According to
statistics collected by the Jewish Colonization, the number of Jews who
emigrated from Russia alone in 1905 was about 92,500, and the total amount of
money in their possession was nearly two milliards of roubles. "This,
then," I finished an annotation of mine, made in 1906, "is the force
of a high economic value which we freely give away to other lands with no
permanent political benefit to the Jewish problem, merely because we will not
take the trouble to organize it and use it for Jewish purposes. A Jews'
Temporary Shelter, that we are able to make, but what cries out to be made is a
Jews' permanent Shelter."
III
ALAS,
experience since 1906 has convinced me that even if one takes an infinity of
trouble, the world is unwilling to have the Jewish problem settled on a
territorial basis. The bulk of the globe has been parceled out between the
Great Powers--even the little ones like Belgium have millions of square
miles--and the few regions yet undeveloped and not too tropical are invariably
guarded by dogs-in-the-manger. This is not the moment to write the
history of the Jewish Territorial Organization. Concluding his sympathetic
survey of the Jewish problem, Mr. F. G. Abbott wrote in his "Israel in
Europe," published in 1907:
If the past and the
present are any guides regarding the future, it is safe to predict that
for many centuries to come the world will continue to witness the unique and
mournful spectacle of a great people roaming to and fro on the highways of the
earth in search of a home.
We
have seen that even in Palestine there is no safety for the Jews, no assurance
that he will be allowed to build up his National Home there. Envy, hatred, malice
and all uncharitableness assail the attempt to apply reason and good-will to
politics or to find a home for the only homeless people on the globe. The world seems to prefer Jews
scattered, to serve as scapegoats for its crimes and follies. In Palestine, the Arab hirelings of more
Machiavellian Powers terrorize their fellow-Arabs into massacring the Jews as a
way of getting rid of England and all her works. The Zionists, who had
overlooked such an obscure feature of the Palestine landscape as 600,000 Arabs,
are consoling themselves for the massacres by pointing to my humble self as the
cause. It seems that I have alarmed the Arabs by suggesting they must be
expropriated, or, at least, submerged. How it is possible for a Jewish National
Home to arise in Palestine without the one process or the other I do not
pretend to understand--indeed, submergence by the gradual immigration of Jews
is the public policy of Zionism. How else is the Basle, Program feasible? For
that runs--it will be remembered--"To create a publicly, legally secured
home for the Jewish People in Palestine." What called forth the
Arab alarm was, of course, the Balfour Declaration that this aspiration was now
to materialize. And if Mr. Balfour's Declaration in November, 1917, had escaped
Arab attention, which was far from the case, the menace confirmed in subsequent
years by Lord Curzon's reiteration of it, by great meetings at which
representatives of the British Government repeated it; while it was uttered in
less diplomatic form by the Labor Party which, by a resolution, reminded Mr.
Lloyd George of the necessity of Palestine "being reconstituted the
National Home of the Jewish people," and by President Wilson, who in a
message expressed his conviction "that the Allied nations, with the fullest
concurrence of our Government and people, are agreed that in Palestine shall be
laid the foundation of a Jewish Commonwealth."
The
Arabs, even were their simplicity uncontaminated by foreign agitators, even
were they not the puppets of religious and imperial intrigue, are not so
childish as to imagine that the establishment of a Jewish National Home would
leave them masters in their own country. Had my speeches or writings counted
for anything in their discontent, these would surely have been mentioned in the
elaborate petition they presented to Winston Churchill on his visit to
Palestine. But their argument based itself on the inevitable implications of
the situation. It was because I foresaw--and was alone in foreseeing--the Arab
difficulty, that the Jewish Territorial Organization turned its quest towards
"fresh woods and pastures new," to territories unpopulated and to
lands neither developed nor degenerated. It was only when that Nestor among
statesmen, Mr. Balfour, adopted the Zionist program, that I was compelled to
believe he had as a preliminary solved the problem of the existing Arab
population. But he seems to have been no more alive to the actual political
circumstances than an academic writer like George Eliot, whose "Daniel
Deronda" was utterly oblivious of the fact that Palestine was not
unoccupied. So far, however, from his having worked out any way of dealing with
the difficulty, Mr. Balfour has not even been able to persuade the British
military staff in Palestine that the establishment of a Jewish National Home
there is feasible, and the officers are almost as overtly against their job as
the Arab policemen. Even the Pope, who encouraged the Zionist leaders, has now
joined in the cleverly concerted attack against the ancient Jewish hope and the
new political adjudgment; while Mr. Chesterton, whose one cry against the Jews
has been that they would not be Zionists, now relapses into the characteristic
paradox that Zionism would be admirable could it be otherwhere than in Zion.
Apparently he has become a follower of my Territorialism but without any
suggestion of the alternative territory. Were he to propose any part of the
British Empire, I am afraid he would evoke the same hue-and-cry as was raised
against me when I projected setting up a Jewish Colony in one of the vast empty
spaces of Australia--a continent with a smaller population than London. Able
Australian editors pointed out that Australia was for the Australians, and
frenzied correspondents, ignorant of the realities of shipping space, pictured
a million Jews landing in Sydney in a single year. I find--in my
packing-cases--a letter of mine to a New Zealand paper, pointing out that,
willing as Jews are to be born outside the British Empire, it is increasingly
difficult. The difficulty has not been lessened by the many millions of square
miles which the war against German grab has added to the British Empire. In the
full flush of the world-wide enthusiasm called forth--even in the enemy
countries--by the Balfour Declaration that Britain would set up the Jews in
Palestine, my spirit bubbled over into Limericks which, I fear, had more
inspiration than many more portentous oracles.
There
was a lost lady of Zion,
Who
was offered a lift by a lion
She
was mounting astride
When
he roared: "Step inside,
There
is no room on top--of a lion."
Responded
that lady of Zion,
"Why
should I go inside a lion?
I
was promised a State
And
a happier fate."
"L'état
c'est dans moi," said the lion.
There
is a story of a Russian sea-captain who, weary of carrying a batch of Jews to
and fro between Odessa and the various countries which refused to receive them,
finally dumped them in the Black Sea. This is the only logical solution of the
situation, but it is one which, despite "the war for righteousness,"
the world is still not brutalized enough to adopt. With the power to
assassinate the Jews physically, it confines itself to moral assassination. It
says much for the Jews that to find a ground for attacking them, the forged
document of "The Jewish Peril" was necessary, of which
"Nilus" himself has deliciously said that the providence of God can
work even by dubious instruments.
When
De Witte was accused by the Czar of favorable sentiments towards the Jews, he
asked his imperial master whether he thought it possible to destroy six millions of his subjects--if not, they must be
given reasonable conditions of existence. Either Christendom must cease
reproaching the Jew for being on other people's territory--and there is not a
single country in which Antisemitism is not now raging--or it must give him a
piece of Christian, or even Islamic, territory. Dos pou sto--as
Archimedes said. A standing place is all Israel requires to be again a people
on a soil of his own. Unfortunately, standing places are only acquired by force
of arms, and a people without a standing place cannot muster an army. It is a
vicious circle. Meantime the world goes on babbling of Einstein, Bergson and
Freud and enjoying the incalculable Jewish contributions to every branch of
science, literature and art.
IV
MR. ROTH seems
obsessed by the notion that in dealing with England the Jews have been guilty
of some disloyalty to Turkey. That may be true of some few native Jews in
Palestine itself, whose aid was of prime value to General Allenby; but
assuredly the Zionist movement has no call to be grateful to the people which
did its best by the device of the red ticket to restrain Jewish immigration and
to baffle Zionism. I admit that the Turkish pressure did not begin till Zionism
had blurted out its aspiration; I am willing to believe that even the Armenians
enjoyed Turkish tolerance so long as they harbored no dream, of liberation, and
it is undeniable that throughout the centuries the Ottoman Empire has sheltered
the Jews more securely than Christendom has done. It is equally true that the
Christian ideas of Turkish life belong to the province of caricature, for
Islam, though inferior in idealism to Christendom, is considerably nearer to its
own ideal.
But
Jewry at large is no such political entity that it can be either loyal or
disloyal to Turkey. Zionism is indeed the effort to create such an entity. To
imagine it existing before it has been created savors of an Irish bull, or at
least of the Greek figure, prolepsis. The political loyalties of the Jews are
to their respective fatherlands, even to their step-fatherlands, and since the
overwhelming majority of the Jews found themselves in the opposite camp to
Turkey and Germany, they could not possibly have cast in their lot with Turkey,
even after the victory. For whatever the post-war sins of the Entente, there is
no Jew in the world--not even a German Jew--with any admiration for the
Prussianism with which Turkey chose to ally itself.
It is
curious enough that before the war the Jewish Territorial Organization was
involved in an abortive negotiation with Turkey, and despatched a scientific
expedition to Cyrenaica, as may be read in my preface to Professor Gregory's
report. And in those inexhaustible packing-cases I found sundry threads of
communication with the Ottoman world. One letter, which strikes me as
historically curious, if only because it was written eight months before the
Great War, may be reproduced here. It is signed by a legal representative of
Turkey in London, whose name, however, like those of the well-known
personalities of the letter, I have suppressed pro tem.
5th
December, 1913
Dear Sir,
Messers.
* * * and * * * and the Islamic Society have commissioned me to enlist the
cooperation of the most influential Jews for the purpose of the initiation of a
movement having for its object the union of Islam and Israel in order to
protect the religious and national rights of both the branches of the faith of
Abraham, my friend, Mr. * * * urges me to secure, first of all, your invaluable
advice on the subject.
In
view of the fact that the fate of Turkey (seat of the Khalifate) and Palestine
may, in the not distant future, come up for decision, I request the honor of an
interview with you, to consider what steps, if any, should be taken, to
consider the above matter; the solution of the Jewish question may, after all,
not be a dream!
I
am, dear Sir, Your sincere admirer,
*
* *
Here
is a distinct hint that Palestine might be available for the Jews. Yet to-day
Islam is not the least of the forces engaged in the conspiracy to destroy the promise of a Jewish
Palestine, which it pretends is against all Islamic sanctities and interests.
Whether the letter betrays any sinister foreknowledge of the coming war, I must
leave the reader to determine.
V
MR.
ROTH subtitled his book The Jews and the Future. It is a big title for
such a little book. When a Jewish farmer consulted me as to whether Jews could
keep pigs, I replied that the question was whether pigs could keep Jews. Similarly Mr. Roth's title sets me
speculating whether the Jews will have a future or whether the future will have
any Jews. Mr. Roth writes with a mystic assurance that there will always be
Jews and I agree--more scientifically--that they can no more be eliminated than
any other species which finds in diffusion its source of safety. The real
question is, will they face the future as a race, or as a religion, or as a
nation territorialized like any other? For the religious solution Renan gave
them a magnificent lead when he said: "By race we French are Latins, by
culture Greeks, by religion Jews." But to comprehend their real historic
glory and to wish to continue the world apostolate of Judaism on its own essential
lines is given to few Jews. The trend to-day is to concentrate on the racial or
national aspect, to the neglect of the missionary motif, which runs as much
through Jewish literature as the tribal thread. As if indeed the race of the
Bible could be disposed of as merely one of the many races whose friction
afflicts our planet!
Mr.
Roth seems to imagine that there can be a Jewish nation in Palestine
irrespective of whether it has political power in Palestine, or rather that
this nation, already existing disseminated everywhere, can express itself
through commercial achievements in the Holy Land and the Orient. Even if this
were not a political chimera, it is an anti-climax, not only to the Zionism of
the Prophets but to the Zionism of Herzl, which Mr. Roth reverences without
understanding it. He is too young to have known Herzl, and too old to be
willing to learn about him. But he exhibits a pride of race, a faith in
Jehovah, and a moral self-assertion which would give Zionism more dignity than
it exhibits under its professional leaders. By his manly temper, his haughty
scorn in face of the ethical bankruptcy of Christendom, he takes his place in
that remarkable band of Jewish writers who have arisen--whether in France, in
America, in England, or in Germany--to be the world's conscience
in a day when every state does what is right in its own eyes. It is the school of Hebrew prophets
forming itself again under modern conditions, though writing least of all in Hebrew.
ISRAEL
ZANGWILL
London, July, 1921.
N O W A N D F O R E V E R
A conversation between
ISRAEL ZANGWILL and SAMUEL ROTH
THE FIRST CHAPTER
MR.
ZANGWILL'S telegram read: "Have tea with us at three o'clock," but it
is easier to read Mr. Zangwill than to find him, for his London residence is an
obscure corner in that cascade of brown stones, The Temple, praised in the Faërie
Queene by
Spenser, who probably never had to find his way through it. In my worst plight,
when it began to appear that I was lost to myself as well as to my engagement,
I stumbled luckily into Mr. Louis Zangwill, a brother and a brother novelist,
who guided me safely the rest of the way. Mr. Zangwill received me with
pontifical kindness.
One
is first impressed by Mr. Zangwill's height, then by the fineness of his gray
hair, and finally by a strong resemblance in his face, in his manner, in the
sloping of his shoulders, to Mr. George Arliss' famous impersonation of Mr.
Disraeli. Did Mr. Arliss, searching for a living clew to the genius of his
semitic subject, consciously adopt as an explanation as well as an illumination
the personality of Mr. Zangwill? It would be interesting to know, as it would
also be interesting to speculate on why Mr. Zangwill, who has as much wit as
the famous prime minister has so much less political ingenuity.
When
his brother had made a gentle jest of the helpless plight in which he had found
me, Mr. Zangwill expressed surprise that I should have lost my way. "And
you have been two months in London," he cried, "whereas any Galician
schnorrer emerging for the first time into the swelter of Waterloo station
finds me easily enough."
Recollection
rushed in on me of a similar slight perpetrated by Mr. Zangwill against these
humble folk in the prelude to his then current book, The Voice of Jerusalem.
I felt stirred, hurt. "That is surprising," said I, turning to
him, "because I am myself a Galician, and
maybe something of a literary schnorrer."
"Well,
then," replied Mr. Zangwill with unstinted gayety, "living in America
so long has obscured that talent in you. If you had come to me directly from
Galicia instead of stopping off for eighteen years in America I feel certain
you would have had no trouble whatever finding me."
I was
introduced to Mrs. Zangwill, to two gentlemen who at the moment of my arrival
were engaged in discussing with Mr. Zangwill a new angle in the problem of time
and space, to the visiting sculptor from Bulgaria, Glicenstein, and to a little
lady in a heavy brown coat and extraordinarily thick glasses who asked me had I
already been to the exhibition of the Royal Academy. More guests were being
expected, among them Dr. Yehudah of the University of Madrid, whom we were to
accompany to the auditorium of the University of London to listen to the first
of a series of his lectures on Genesis.
I
turned back to Mr. Zangwill. "Genesis," I ventured, "is a good
beginning for almost anything, but since the matter of the Galician schnorrers
is so personal to me, would it not be best to settle it immediately?"
Mr.
Zangwill looked a little troubled, a trifle worried. Great men do not object to
being argued with occasionally, but it is usually assumed that they must be
allowed to set their own leisurely pace. The innocence of my expression must
have reassured him. "I warn you," he laughed, "that I have been
settling with them for a quarter of a century, and I don't seem to be through
with them yet."
It
was evident that, unless I kept him effectively to the point, Mr. Zangwill
would escape from me with a witticism, possibly even with a pun. I shall be the
last to appear to underrate a witticism or a pun, good specimens of which are
so rare nowadays, but, whatever other excellent uses it might have, a pun
cannot relieve mental anxiety, and I was grieved as well as anxious. "This
may be very true," I insisted, "nevertheless I cannot understand your
repugnance for those poor fellows whose only offense seems to be that they come
to you to borrow money. Now I grant you that it is far from pleasant to see
your resources drained continually by utter strangers who come as impersonally
as though they were applying to a public institution. But no, they come to you
with a certain reverence: they come to you as they are said to have come to the
house of Dr. Herzl: and if they do not actually kiss the front steps of your
dwelling (as they are reputed to have done at the house on Leopoldstrasse) it
is because you are so careless as to have no front steps.
"What
an extraordinary and enviable position yours is! Untitled, you receive
obeisances which should make you the envy of every crowned head in Europe.
What, beside you, for instance, is the reigning king of England? The only
pilgrims to Buckingham Palace whose presence may be noted in any appreciable
numbers are the servant girls of Victoria who ride by behind solemn
perambulators to exchange glances with the handsome redcoats standing
motionlessly on guard at the great gate. Whereas to you come, in an unwavering
stream, from every part of the earth, representatives of the humblest, hardiest
and most vividly intelligent people on earth. No community is so insignificant
that its ambassador does not come to you for half fare to America. Yet you are
dissatisfied.
"If
you are not more careful, Mr. Zangwill, some wag will say: 'He has become so
puffed up with pride that, content no longer with being the uncrowned king of
Israel, he is attempting to pose as a God by treating his subjects as though
they were his worshipers--with scorn.'"
Mr.
Zangwill smiled, the gentlemen interested in time and space smiled, the little
lady in the brown coat and the extraordinary thick glasses asked me once more
if I had been to see the new exhibition of the Royal Academy, and as I turned
to explain to her that I had not gone there yet, that I probably never would, I
realized with sinking courage that, for the present at least, Mr. Zangwill, who
had resumed the argument my entry had broken, was lost to time and space.
I
listened with impatient intentness to the little lady's innocent patter of talk
about pictures and daubers, but my eyes were on the tall, stooping, faintly
malignant figure of the author of Children of the Ghetto to discuss with
whom the many-faceted problem of Jewish nationalism had been one of my
cherished desires when I crossed the Atlantic. Our brief, mutually suspicious,
yet eager correspondence on the subject had been most unsatisfactory to me, for
letters take a long time being written, in traveling some three thousand miles
over land and sea, in being answered, and in traveling back again the same
distance. Time and space were always against me.
But
hope dawned as Mrs. Zangwill began to serve tea, and Mr. Zangwill thoughtfully
made the rounds with the cake-tray--what a use for such a man, but that is what
wives make of the best of us! I gazed intently at him as I chose my cake, and
he must have understood the plea in my eyes, for presently he drifted away from
the philosophical young gentlemen, paused before us, and, having said something
pleasant to the little lady, asked me how I liked London.
It
was my moment, no mistaking it.
"London,"
said I to Mr. Zangwill, "is everything or nothing to me according to how
much time you will give me in which to adjust my differences with you."
"Are
the differences so sharp?" he asked.
"Sharp
or not," I replied, "they exist, Mr. Zangwill, and now your sole care
should be that they prove to be interesting, for I tell you that I am
determined to thoroughly thresh them out with you before leaving you at peace
again."
THE SECOND
CHAPTER
ZANGWILL--I
think it will simplify matters if you tell me directly what it is in my
attitude towards the Jewish problem that you disagree with.
Roth--That is done with almost no effort, for it is precisely your
attitude, root, trunk and branch, that I disagree with.
Zangwill--Splendid! I was a little afraid you
might make it a debate, but this is really going to be a quarrel.
Roth--You state the Jewish problem with a tragic exaggeration
natural in a writer of drama but not at all to the point and rather misleading
in the leader of a people. The Voice of Jerusalem paints the Jewish situation
so blackly that, judged by it, we Jews would appear to be the poorest, the most
persecuted, and the most reviled people on earth, in danger as much from
annihilation by the sword as from death by starvation.
Zangwill--Am I to infer from this that to you the
prospect looks brighter?
Roth--To such a turn have things come, I may say without
exaggeration, that our prospects are as bright and as dark as the prospects of
mankind.
Zangwill--Poor mankind!
Roth--It has so long been our national habit to pull a long face
before the world that, in spite of its glaring inaccuracies, your book goes by
unchallenged both by Jews busy simulating distress and by gentiles so
accustomed to beholding it that it would not occur to them to doubt it. In the
interests of our people as well as of truth whom you occasionally profess to
serve I beg you to consider that our plight, though far from happy, is not by
any means pitiable. Pitiable our plight once was when the world itself was a
safer and happier place. But since, by one of these adroit maneuverings of fate
which proves her to be indifferent to race and party, Europe has caught up with
us in an unaccountable progression of misery, let us abandon once and for all
time our age-old tragic rôle of the sufferer among the nations. The part, never
a beautiful or enviable one, though it has several times caught you almost
defenseless in the searchlight of history, is no longer ours. In Armenia, to
give only an instance, we have a nation which, without having a tenth of what
we have, and with a history as ancient as our own, suffers a great deal more. I
know how difficult it is going to be to convince you of this, but I am
determined to try. I am also determined that you shall not stop me. Will you
admit, to begin with, that there never was a time in Jewish history when there
were so many Jews in the world--more than fourteen millions?
Zangwill--Readily, but I get little consolation
from the knowledge that so many more are suffering at one time.
Roth--Admit that never before in our history were Jews as rich,
and as powerful in commerce as they are to-day?
Zangwill--Why not? I see that you have become
quite thoroughly Americanized. Is it not the American idea that to be rich is
to be happy?
Roth--Korach had that idea too. But it is too late now to stop
to establish the value of wealth--admitted enthusiastically by those who have
it, and fiercely by those who hope to have it. But in climbing mountains let us
try to avoid the humiliation of stubbing our toes against pebbles. Admit that
never before were Jews as independent as they are to-day.
Zangwill--In America, where they are not Jews?
Roth--In England where they are good Englishmen, in America
where they are good Americans, in France where they are good Frenchmen, and in
Arabia where they are good Arabs. Your role being that of the tragedian, you
are naturally thinking of the Jews of Russia, Poland and the Ukraine where they
live in a state of temporary hopelessness and exhaustion. But when you think of
the misery of the Jews in those countries you might remember that even the
gentiles in those countries are not better off.
Why
are you so eager to count our losses, and so reluctant to count the losses of
the enemy? Have not the Europeans suffered as much from the war as we have?
While they pogrommed us did they not butcher one another? We lost lives, but they lost
wealth which is not so easily replaced.
Our gains in this
war, I tell you, were greater and our losses proportionately smaller than those
of the gentiles.
At
the end of the war, what are the gains of Europe? For the military menace of
Germany she has the military menace of France. A bad bargain, for the Germans
are better soldiers just as the French are better story-tellers, and now you
will have in France more soldiers and fewer novelists. In Russia the rule of
the aristocracy has been put aside for the dominance of the peasantry: the jeweled
crown has been exchanged for the leathern halter. What else have they gained? I
had almost forgotten: the League of Nations.
In
the meantime we
Jews have gained freedom and a beautiful revenge. Oh, it was worth being
pogrommed for. The
government which strangled us writhes hopelessly in the dust of oblivion, the
new government does not dare invoke the old anathemas. Where we were once the humbly
persecuted we are to-day the majestic and relentless persecutors. They have not yet admitted us to the
League of Nations? What would we do there--the only people on earth without a
war-debt?
It
would be vulgar to insist on a comparison of losses. The losses on both sides
were fearful, and we shall never cease to mourn with Europe. But one thing the
gentiles have lost we still retain: our faith.
Zangwill--Have we retained our faith?
Roth--Who should know this better than you? What, pray, is the
meaning of the pilgrimages of Galician and Lithuanian schnorrers to your London
rooms? Do you believe that they merely pick you for an easy mark, as we say in
America? Human conduct is not so shallowly motivated. It means that these
schnorrers have something in common with you. Now what is this community of
interests which draws them to you from the innumerable ends of the earth? It is
not your dress, your speech or your thoughts--least of all your thoughts. Would
you like to know what it is? I will tell you. But do not smile. It is the
Jewish faith. After all the idols have been smashed in the sunlit temple of
Baal the God of Israel continues to look down on us from his throne of glory,
towering, distant, immutable and alive. These poor Jews, burned out of their
homes like rats, scatter tumultuously over every part of the earth, in every direction
that the wind and the sunlight open up to them. Do they lose their reason?
Do
they lose their sense of direction? Do they even lose their money? What can be
the secret of it all except that, wandering through a hostile and crumbling
world, they keep bright, untouched and palpitating in their bosoms their faith
in the God of Israel who is also the God of Israel Zangwill?
Zangwill--I am not exactly a theist, but you must
permit me to object to involving God in the discussion of a purely practical
problem.
Roth--If you were not so incurably Anglicized there would be no
need for me to point out to you that God is at the very foundation of our
practical program.
Zangwill--Really?
THE THIRD
CHAPTER
ROTH--Ours
is not, as you know, the first civilization to have made faces at the
imperturbable skies. Thanks to the patient researches of Germans with a good
nose for dust we know that race after race of mankind before us built up out of
the rock and granite of the earth towering castles to glitter awhile in the
sun. When the earliest community of Jews congregated for the first time on the
feverish desert of Arabia to whisper something of that mysterious law which
binds together the sands of the desert like a necklace, many such civilizations
were dying and many others like them were being born, in their turn to flower,
fade, crumble and disappear.
Why,
argued our first Jews amongst themselves, do these civilizations die? The
springs of life are deep, and the current of life is without beginning and without
end. Yet the life of a civilization hath a terribly swift end. Between the dawn
and the twilight of a civilization stretches the meager span of a few
centuries.
And
among those Jews there were some who were wise (and they made the fashions and
created the manners of the people) and some who were only persistent (but it
was they who did most of the difficult and useful work). And the wise ones
said: "It is so because all human labors have assigned to them an end
which is not perceived by us because He who makes the assignations remains
invisible to us." Whereat the persistent ones said: "Then it is only
a matter of finding for ourselves some occupation which is without end, for
when we shall have found that our civilization will also be without end."
The
persistent ones had their way, as usually they do. In persisting they
discovered that the tongue of man is boneless and may be wagged ceaselessly to
and fro at all times almost without effort. Now the tongue of man was even at
that time an ancient and honorable instrument, ancient in texture and honorable
in the uses to which it had been put. But whereas it had been employed to
modulate the sounds issuing from the human throat when the desire was for
things indescribable by the human throat unaided, to express excesses of
pleasure and pain, and, by being boldly wagged, to express defiance, it had
never yet been employed in the idle luxury of talk. And this was precisely the
use to which it was now being put; for the tongue, true to the discovery of the
persistent ones, can make subtle sounds enduring longer than those echoes which
steal through the hills when the mists rise out of the valleys to confound the
deer in her running and the stag in his leaping about among the wooded rocks.
The
surmise proved to be correct. Talk is the secret of survival of our
civilization. I mean, of course, our Jewish manner of talk which is in evidence
wherever there is danger of the disruption of civilization. For there is first
some disagreement about the distribution of wealth or privilege, followed by
savage warfare, and then a sanctimonious patching up of differences the use of
which is like applying bandages to flowing wounds, and so instead of helplessly
bleeding to death we rise, like the old phoenix, above the ashes of our own
bones.
Zangwill--But surely you can not believe that
with mere talk----
Roth--Yes, mere talk, schmoos. Here is an instance.
Nelson and Wellington fought for England. What did they achieve? Glory. What is
glory? A word. Disraeli went to the Congress of Berlin and by talking changed
England from a kingdom into an empire.
Zangwill--But what has our genius for talk got to
do with God?
Roth--Everything. God is our chief talking enterprise. The first thing we do for a people once we have invaded it is
to give it a God to talk about, for, with a God to celebrate, a people is not
so particular as to what it receives in exchange for its wares.
Zangwill--Do you realize that you are justifying
the enemies of our people who already claim that we are purely commercial and
that our idealism is only a pretense?
Roth--Our idealism is our own, Mr. Zangwill. Do we not suffer
for it? As for our market-wisdom, it is our staff of life, as it is the staff
of life of the nations, since their fields are plowed up by it as we pass
through them dragging the dreary thing after us. If there is any pretense in
our idealism it is in the expressed belief that the rest of the world shares it
with us. Every time we assert the hope that Europe will some day become
Christian we are guilty of a pretense of the first order.
Zangwill--I should warn you that your confusion
of Judaism and Christianity is historically inaccurate.
Roth--But what do the historians know about religion? Oh, they
have talked so much nonsense, and the truth itself is so simple. Hear me. It is
only true that we have wandered through the valleys and over the hills of the
earth. And every time we reached the peak of a high hill we built a fire before
which to warm our bones and mumble out our fatigue. Once we crested Rome which
is higher than any of her seven hills, and there we built our greatest bonfire
and knelt down to murmur our exceeding tiredness. It is this they call
Christianity.
Zangwill--But are there no essential differences
between Judaism and Christianity?
THE FOURTH
CHAPTER
ROTH--There
are very interesting, very vital differences, that reach back to the sources of
two separate streams of human conduct, though they are not differences obvious enough
for the historians of religion to recognize. A significant indication of how
profoundly Christianity varies from Judaism is that the goyim have put their
religion in the charge of priests whereas our religion is in the charge of
rabbis.
Zangwill--Forgive me, but I cannot remember that
I have ever seen much difference between a priest and a rabbi.
Roth--Then you have had dealings only with reformed rabbis, who
are really priests in disguise. Do you believe that a rabbi can be made by the
mere act of ordinance? When being a rabbi meant, as in the time of Rabbi
Jochanan, the putting away of all hope of attaining worldly possessions, you
had rabbis. But these orators whose careers are a ludicrous struggle to
"make the rabbinate pay"--let us leave them out of our discussion.
Zangwill--You have proven that orthodox rabbis
are superior to reformed rabbis by the simple device of saying that the
orthodox rabbis are good and the reformed rabbis bad, but will you kindly
explain how rabbis are better than priests?
Roth--I did not say they were better, I said they were
different. But never mind, better is what I meant. The priest is a soldier
obeying an invisible general. In the battle into which he is commandeered only
a passive interest keeps him at his post. The rabbi must himself be a general
and a strategist whose eyes are always on both extremities of the battlefield.
Zangwill--Can it be good for a people to have so
many generals?
Roth--But only see how they have led us.
Zangwill--We have at last returned to our
essential difference. The rabbis have certainly led us a long way, but do you
not think they would have done better to have made the way somewhat pleasanter?
Roth--The business of a general is to make the battle as
dangerous as possible, danger being the only true test of a soldier's courage.
Zangwill--Our way, I say, has been made not
dangerous but unpleasant. Was it daring to so completely insulate ourselves?
Was it not the rabbis who forbid intermarriage?
Roth--It was, if you please, one of their great strategic feats.
Zangwill--And look at the result.
Roth--What I see is good. What is the result as you see it?
Zangwill--Well, among other things, we are not
exactly loved by our neighbors.
Roth--But we have survived, have we not? And not meanly either.
Are we not to-day as highly motivated a people as we ever were, whereas every
nation which allowed itself the luxury of intermarrying with its neighbors
either lives in shameless degeneracy or in the exclusive and refined dust of
the memory of historians?
Zangwill--The rabbis also forbid Jews to make
paintings and statues.
Roth--Another wise act.
Zangwill--You amaze me. What good has it done?
Roth--None whatever, since we did not heed it.
Zangwill--You don't seriously mean that you
regard the making of statues and paintings harmful?
Roth--Only the other day I was explaining this to one of your
Georgian poets who was sharing tea with me in a dark corner of the Savoy dining
room. "How is it," he asked me, nodding a pig's head, "that you
Jews have contributed nothing to the plastic arts?" I took up the delicate
saucer from under my cup and gently rapped it against his bald pate. He looked
grieved, but I hastened to explain myself. "If you knew," said I to
him, "that every time you made such a saucer it would be split over your
head, would you be anxious to continue producing them?"
But
the making of statues and paintings is harmful to us in yet another way; for, to survive, we Jews must love
nothing better than ourselves. This
is how the rabbis considered the matter: once Jews take to the making of
images, they would create in shadow and in stone figures so much more
beautiful, so much more appealing than the figures in their own flesh and blood
that, being a people with a sense of justice, they would learn to prize them
more. They feared that the presence within our sight of overwhelmingly
beautiful figures sprung out of our own foreheads would degrade for us the
people passing before us in the common robes of humanity. Our contempt for our
fellow creatures was already more than we could bear.
No
one, Mr. Zangwill, can realize what harm has been done in the world by the arts
which have given us so much pleasure. Weighed in the balance against the damage
they have caused, I wonder if the arts would survive judgment. What is the
nature of the harm? Man has learned to lift his worship above man, with the
result that while pictures and statues sell for great sums of money and are
jealously guarded in the strongest and most beautiful houses we know how to
build, men, women and children wander about lonely and hungry over the face of
a cold planet. When Mona Lisa leaves her place on the walls of the Louvre the
whole world shakes with excitement, whereas many a philosopher is put out of
his house into the rain without any one even asking why.
Zangwill--But there are so many philosophers and
only one Mona Lisa.
Roth--True. There is just one Mona Lisa, the only mother of the
human imagination who remains unchurched. But shall philosophers be neglected
because there are so many of them? Consider----
Zangwill--I will not consider the philosophers
another moment. Pray, get back to the Jewish Question unless you have decided
to leave it to the rabbis. If you have, I suggest that you consult them about
it immediately. You may find, as I have found so many times, that no rabbi,
reformed or not, will seriously give himself over to the solution of a problem
which is not of immediate or demonstrable benefit to the congregation which
pays him for his services. Besides, your quarrel is not with the rabbis but
with me. How, tell me, how I myself have been found wanting in my attitude
towards the Jewish problem?