The Maccabaean

THE Ghetto has left its mark upon the Jew; no one is found today to repeat the sonorous, but empty and dishonest cant of a few years ago, when it used to be claimed that we have emerged, out of the fiery furnace of the Dark Ages, without a smell of the burning upon our garments.

But it is much easier to identify outward and superficial signs, than to read the furrows which age-long suffering graves upon the soul. When the prisoner is released from the dungeon in which he has passed decades of confinement, starvation and maltreatment, the merest child may note the pallor of his face, the shrinking of the eye, the shuffling of the gait; but it is only the close observer, the deeper student who discerns the suspicions, the apprehensions, the sensitiveness and the misjudgments which are the inescapable penalties incidental to morbid conditions, to unnatural modes of living.

It is not surprising, therefore, though curious enough, that just those people are found wearing the deepest of Ghetto marks who are most in the habit. of denouncing Ghetto ways, of conjuring up Ghetto spectres, of pitying the Ghetto victim with whom they imagine themselves to have little or nothing in common. Achad Haam in his essay: “Liberty in the Midst of Bondage” has pointed his finger at one such unconscious Ghetto brand when, contrasting his elegant and cultured French coreligionists, in the enjoyment of complete equality, with their Russian brothers under the knout of Czarism, he proved that the French Jew, in the midst of his civic emancipation, is a cowering slave, not daring to be himself or to avow his identity without a humble apology, while the Russian Jew, in despite of pogroms and May-Laws, stands erect and refuses to pay to force or majority the homage of cringing.

There are other Ghetto marks of the soul-life which need to be pointed out. A great deal of the most highly cultured snobbery is nothing but Ghetto brand. The man or woman who turns his back upon his brothers, who wishes to obliterate, in one way or another, his Jewish identity, does so, largely, because he has the dungeon consciousness upon him; he wishes to escape the memories of his dungeon past; but he chooses the wrong route and only succeeds in calling attention to it. Every attempt to shuffle off the Jewish coil, to disappear in the indiscriminate throng, is only the vain struggle of the ticket-of-leave man to purchase that oblivion from the outside world which he cannot gain within himself.

One more or less deceptive symptom of the Ghetto bend appears in the blatant Jewish patriot. Virile people, of mature poise, are aware of the futility and absurdity, the vulgarity and ineffectiveness of loud and gushy protestation. But the "American of the Jewish persuasion" is too much of a Ghetto creature to appreciate this elementary fact in good manners; he must brag and profess and protest about his loyalty; he must extol and deify and idolize Americanism; he must be fanatic in his worship of it beyond others; else he might not be believed. Nay, utterly to convince his American fellow-citizens as to the depth of his own patriotic sincerity, he is willing to denounce, sell out, betray his brothers; there now, that ought to be proved. As if he could cover up the fact that it is not the love of

his country, but the devotion to his flesh-pots, which stirs him to the act of unbrotherly betrayal. Fortunately, the gentleman born knows the difference between the pinchbeck patriotism which is the last refuge of certain people and between that manhood which is true to the brother, as well as loyal to the fatherland.

We are having an outburst, just now, of Ghetto Americanism. Frantic appeals are made to the unthinking, in the name of our beloved country, not to let the Zionists rob them of their American birthright, not to let them substitute Jerusalem for Washington, the white-blue flag with the Shield of David for the Star-Spangled Banner; phrases like divided nationality, dual allegiance, hyphenism and the like are recklessly flung about; wherever some missionary with a sinister purpose can be found to disapprove of Zionism, his slanders are underscored and presented as the last word of unimpeachable authority; wherever some subtle flatterer condescends to beg us not to take ourselves off on a sudden pilgrimage, his compliments figure as serious arguments; it is the despairing fight of a losing faction which, knowing itself beaten, resorts to pleas and subterfuges which bear their refutation on their face.

There is no occasion to meet this eruption of acrimony with anything other than the calmness which befits a victorious cause. The Zionists can afford to be charged with disloyalty, even by a Jewish Congressman who, having never identified himself prominently with Jewish causes, suddenly blossoms out into a Jewish leader. According to his interviewer the Congressman is, at present “the leading Jew in American public life” Of men like Oscar Straus, Julian Mack, Abraham Elkus, an interviewer cannot be supposed ever to have heard mention. The new oracle is, of course, an authority on Jewish matters. That authority he documents by such bits of Jewish history, as this that Babylon conquered both kingdoms and that half of the captives refused to return; to prove himself equally well informed with regard to modern Jewish life, he edifyingly maintains that between Spanish and German Jew “there is intense bitterness with differences unreconciled” and that “in our own country the same feeling has continued between the so-called German Jews and the Polish or Russian Jews.”

Charity would prompt one to make some allowance for the recklessness of a politician's utterances and for the inaccuracy of the ordinary interview; but what is to be said of a so-called representative Jew who vouchsafes to a daily paper such a slanderous statement as this, that "to scrape together the necessary funds the Jews of Russia were compelled to resort to all sorts of questionable methods," and that the Roumanian Jews have "suffered similarly."

Can one imagine Mr. Louis Marshall or Mr. Adolph Kraus being guilty of defamatory statements of this character? It is to such hands that the anonymous "one hundred and fifty" [During the interval of the writing of this article and the printing the number of anti-Zionist protestants dwindled down to 31—EDITOR] leaders have entrusted their statement which had to be announced by cable, just as a certain rabbi had to use the telegraph, when he "respectfully" requested the President to change his mind.

Is it not rather late in the day to alarm the American nation as to the dangerous hyphenism of the Zionists?