God Bless the Gentile

My fellow Southerners honor every deed, every gesture, every battered flag, every gravestone that descends from the Civil War. They have conferred sainthood upon every Confederate from Marse Robert himself down to the lowliest drummerboy. They love and cherish them all--all, except one--Judah P. Benjamin, called "the brains of the Confederacy," who served Jeff Davis as Secretary of War and Secretary of State. Not a hurrah--not a word. Nothing. And the interesting thing about this omission is that Benjamin, being a Jew, naturally out-Confederated the Confederates. Only he put it squarely on the line when he said the South was fighting the arbitrary confiscation of private property, Negro slaves.

A few years ago, the Jewish community of Charlotte, North Carolina, wanted to finance a stone marker commemorating Benjamin, which it intended to place on the sidewalk in front of the home he had occupied in the closing days of the War. The United Daughters of the Confederacy said they would go along with this. But then the Daughters balked. A letter had circulated among members of the local Stonewall Jackson Chapter charging that Judah P. Benjamin was a Communist--retroactively. The Daughters immediately canceled their participation in the ceremony. The Jews scared. They wanted to drop the project. One staunch Daughter, the late Mrs. J. A. Yarborough, remained pro-Benjamin. She insisted. She prevailed. When the Jews told her, "We have to live with these people," Mrs. Yarborough said, "Well, have you given though to the idea that you'll have to live with me, too?" The marker now stands on South Tryon, Charlotte's main street.

But what kind of Bolshevik was this Judah P. Benjamin? Old Judah was the Tory to end all Tories; he was far, far to the right of both Barry Goldwater and Marie Antoinette.

Right after this incident, I suggested that somewhere during the Sabbath services Jews should repeat a phrase, as part of the creed: Es vet Gornisht helffen (nothing helps).

Take the civil rights issue in America--probably as good a jumping-off point for a discussion of anti-Semitism as any. The reason the Negro keeps gaining equality is that his movement this time is almost wholly his own. The Negro wages his own battle, going to the courts, taking to the streets, organizing boycotts. Except for two or three embattled rabbis, the Jews of the South, almost entirely a proprietary class, reflect the total silence of the so-called "moderate" white Southerners.

But the organ of the States' Rights Party of Alabama and Gerald L. K. Smith's hate sheet keep up a constant barrage: "Jews mongrelizing the South." Yet the leading segregationist philosopher of Georgia, the man who devised the legal moves to keep colored children out of the all-white schools, is a Jewish lawyer, Mr. Charles Bloch of Macon. Another influential Jewish segregationist is the speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives, the Honorable Sol Blatt. Does the "States' Rights" editor or Gerald L. K. Smith exempt them? Do they say, "The Jews are mongrelizing the South except for Charlie Bloch and Sol Blatt"? They do not.

Es vet Gornisht helffen, because the Southern segregationist regards the Jewish white supremacist not as a fellow white Southerner but as a defector from the ranks of the enemy. He welcomes him with the same reserve he welcomed the few Negroes who inserted an ad in Southern papers during the mid-Fifties with the message, "This is to inform my white friends I am not now and never have been a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People."

I thought of all this after a lecture at Grossinger's in the Catskill Mountains. During the question period, a charming lady asked me with some indignation, "Why do you always talk about civil rights? Don't you know there are Negro anti-Semites? Besides, what has the Negro ever done for us?"

I asked her to look about Grossinger's, a wonderful resort that would make the pleasure dome of Xanadu look like a sharecropper's shack in the Louisiana delta.

"Lady," I answered, "when the Negroes have a Grossinger's I'll quit talking about civil rights. And besides, the Negro anti-Semite is about as convincing as the Jewish white supremacist."

(continued on page 188)God Bless the Gentile(continued from page 173)

In fact, the segregationists who accept the occasional Jewish white supremacist hold the Negro blameless for the agitation that is overwhelming the South.

"We understand the Negro," they say. "He is like a child. The Jews put him up to it. The Jews. Earl Warren and the other Communists."

• • •

My first brush with anti-Semitism came when I was a ten-year-old immigrant boy selling newspapers along the Lower East Side of New York City. One day I ventured a block or two beyond our slum into the Irish slum. Some Irish kids chased me, yelling, "Christ killer!"

A year later, three Irish buckoes caught me when I dared a similar venture. They "cockalized" me. There are hundreds of men in their 60s who know what it is to be cockalized. Indeed, cockalization was universal. My father once told me there were specific Polish and Russian words for the process. The enemy kids threw the Jew to the ground, opened his pants and spat and urinated on his circumcised penis while they shouted, "Christ killer."

Irish, Polish and Italian kids shouted "Christ killer" because for 1800 years the Church represented the Jews as a people cursed for the crime of crucifying Jesus. Children drank it in with their mother's milk, saw the hatred in action, and heard it confirmed by the prayer on Good Friday, which, until Pope John XXIII deleted it, called the Jews "perfidious."

The ritual of cockalization has disappeared in recent years. One reason is that so many Christian fathers consent to having male offspring circumcised. But the more important reason is that anti-Semitism has had a separate secular career aside from its religious one.

Since the beginning of this century, it has not been necessary to hate the Jew for what he allegedly did 2000 years ago but for what he might do in the future, which is to take over the world by one or another political or financial stratagem.

As a matter of fact, anti-Semitism has little religious life anymore, thanks to the publication of the Schema on the Jews, the Vatican's Ecumenical Council having decided to absolve the Jews from the guilt of having crucified Jesus. The Roman Catholic Church was trying to redress an unjust charge that has cost the lives of millions of people, destroyed millions of homes and led to enormous expropriation and exploitation.

There is no minimizing the good will and nobility of purpose that inspired both Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI. For that reason, I sent an open letter to the Jewish leaders of the world calling for a Jewish Ecumenical Council in Jerusalem. At that time, the Jews could issue a Schema on the Christians.

It is our turn. I propose that we forgive the Christians for the Inquisition, the Crusades, the ghettos and the expulsions. I think we can also include forgiveness for the usurpation of property that continued for 1600 years, the worldwide discrimination; we should also waive our annoyances at the barriers that guard country and city, fraternal and luncheon clubs, resort hotels and college fraternities.

The Christians have been nice. Now we can be nice. There is no reason for us to hold bitterness in our hearts because Crusader Godfrey of Bouillon drove the Jews of Jerusalem into the synagogue and set it on fire. There is no reason our Christian neighbors should be held responsible for the wholesale slaughter of the Jews in the cities on the Rhine by the Christians of the Second Crusade. Nor should they be held responsible for the murders perpetrated by Peter the Hermit and Peter of Clugny.

And why should we let the memory of the Inquisition haunt us?

Such a Schema will help the cause of brotherhood, because the absolution conferred on the Jews by the Ecumenical Council will not mean much to the anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism, according to every authority, has followed a notoriously narrowing career. In the beginning, it led either to conversion or to degradation, but at least it gave the Jew a choice. During some periods of history, conversion made the Jew a preferred citizen. In England, for instance, he lived in Jews' House, where Englishmen fed and clothed him and insisted only that he listen to three Christian sermons a week. From this religious base, anti-Semitism descended to its socioeconomic stage where the dictum ordered, "You cannot live among us." Which meant expulsion. This wasn't a nice choice, but it was still a choice. However, in its 20th Century political stage, the German Nazis took all the fat out of anti-Semitism. "You cannot live" is no choice at all.

These days, there's not much arguing with the injunction. But then, there was never much arguing to be done with the anti-Semite anyway. The anti-Semite is invariably resourceful. A case in point is Edouard Drumont, editor of Le Libre Parole, Who spearheaded the French anti-Semitic movement during the Dreyfus affair. When a heckler challenged him, saying, "How can you talk? You married a Jewish woman," Drumont replied, "I hate the Jews for having killed my Lord Jesus but I love the Jewish women for having wept for Him."

The truth about anti-Semitism is that it is a renunciation of logic and therefore no logic can prevail against it.

My closest friend, Carl Sandburg, once told me, "Harry, I'll never understand the mystery of anti-Semitism. I've heard it in the wheat fields and in the hobo jungles. I've heard it around the campfires in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War and I've heard it in the union ha'ls. I've heard it among fellow Socialists, and among fellow poets, I've heard it among the poor looking for a handout and I've heard it among the rich, the powerful and the intellectual. It remains for me a great mystery."

This may help explain why many American Jews often express a day-to-day concern over anti-Semitism. No matter how good things are, no matter how deep the involvement of some Jews in politics, others in Philanthropy, still others in civic works, anti-Semitism remains an ill-defined yet frequently present menace for Jews, and this despite the fact that American Jews are guaranteed political and religious liberty.

Nor does the Jew's concern--or may I call it fear?--abate when anti-Semitism issues only from the months of obviously discredited hatemongers such as George Lincoln Rockwell and Gerald L. K. Smith. The Jew is doubly exposed. He is exposed as a Jew, a marginal member of society, and he is exposed because so many of his numbers are now in the middle class, and the congenital disease of the middle class itself is--fear. This month is good. But what about next month? Will we meet the quota?

Knowing this, I have often wondered why my fellow Jews did not take advantage of middle-class status to end anti-Semitism. In fact, I offered the Golden Plan to End Anti-Semitism to the Anti-Defamation League some years ago. I urged them to insert a full-page ad in every morning and evening newspaper, every weekly and monthly magazine in America. The ad would declare in effect that the next time we heard any anti-Semitism, we would all become Christians immediately. Most of us, I am sure, would naturally head for the High Episcopal Church; and the prospect of several million Jews entering such Fifth Avenue institutions as the Church of the Heavenly Rest or St. Thomas' would make the Episcopalians plenty nervous. They might even volunteer to support the Anti-Defamation League and establish a truly influential phalanx against the anti-Semites.

The ADL did not take me up on this plan, but that's because they thought I was kidding.

Only this kind of magic will banish anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism is also a powerful magic. In the hands of a demagog, it works better than magic.

It enabled Hitler to convert economic and political misery into the hatred of "the conspirators" who wrought the misery. It does not alleviate the misery, but it convinces people that if they search out the enemy, the misery will go away (continued on page 307)God Bless the Gentile(continued from page 188) of its own accord. The Germans hated the Versailles Treaty, they hated the inflation and the unemployment, conditions for which there were not any viable short-range solutions. But anti-Semitism cuts through the economic and political and historical abstractions, and pins a faceless, ubiquitous enemy to the wall. Thus the Nazis found the devil who caused their troubles: the Jew.

This is not a process Hitler invented. Anti-Semites have a natural facility for this maneuver. My friends, let's face it--anti-Semitism cannot possibly be explained; it can merely be recounted.

In 1913, Tom Watson of Georgia, an old Populist who was then out of elective office, regained political power with the anti-Semitism he poured forth in his newspaper, The Weekly Jeffersonian. Georgia was literally destitute. The price of cotton had dropped to five cents a pound. Farmers burned it for fuel. The average wage in the mill villages was 20 cents an hour for an 11-hour day. Then on Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, 1913, someone murdered a little factory girl named Mary Phagan. The police arrested her boss, Leo Frank, the superintendent of the National Pencil Company, the last man to see Mary alive, when she had come that Saturday noon to collect her pay. Leo Frank, in Tom Watson's hands, soon became the symbol of everything that oppressed Georgia. He was the Northern employer, the Jewish capitalist, the college-educated snob who desecrated virgins. That Frank was innocent made no difference; that his trial judge doubted his guilt, that two justices of the Georgia Court of Appeals doubted, that Justices Holmes and Hughes of the United States Supreme Court doubted, that Governor John Slaton doubted to the degree that he commuted the sentence made no difference.

Whipped on by the talented polemics of Watson, a well-trained band of men calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan broke into the Milledgeville Prison, seized Frank, drove him 170 miles over backwoods roads and hanged him from an oak tree near the house in which Mary Phagan had been born. Tom Watson went to the Senate after campaigning on the Leo Frank case.

More than contributing to the agony of the innocent Leo Frank, Tom Watson also sparked the only European-type pogrom America has experienced. A boycott of epidemic proportions drove 100 Jewish families from Georgia. Physical intimidation of Jews was commonplace for the next few years.

Tom Watson of Georgia is an excellent example of the factors involved that make a man an anti-Semite: an alcoholic with a hacking cough; a politician whose influence wanes; a small merchant for whom the competition is too tough; the fellow who can't keep a decent job. Give him the panacea--anti-Semitism--and each is on his way. As an active anti-Semite, he suddenly feels an attachment for a cause as old as history itself. Yesterday he was a nobody--today he is a warrior ready to do battle for mankind against a "shrewd" eternal race.

And why the Jews?

There are Jews who have assayed better answers than I can offer. Shmyra Levin wrote, "Where planes meet, friction begins." The Jews and the Christians "met" long ago. The Jew bears an identity with every step of the Christian's way; with his birth, his marriage, his Church and his death. The Jew is identified with the Man on the Cross, his birth, his death, his Second Coming, and with the life everlasting.

Chaim Weizmann said, "We are a cinder in their eye." And Sigmund Freud, expanding on his theory of the Oedipus complex, theorized: "The Jews had a father religion and the Christians a son religion and the subconscious wish is to kill the father from time to time."

In discussing the origins of modern anti-Semitism, Miriam Beard suggests that the mythical Nordic innocents of the pre-Jewish, Pre-mercantile era were thought of as "swashbuckling D'Artagnans scattering louis d'or without thought of the morrow...indeed the burden of guilt [of inventing capitalism] was laid upon the Jew who was supposed to have misled the gentiles away from the Table Round to the stock market."

There is the apocryphal story of the anti-Semitic poster nailed to the bulletin board of a Vienna steel factory that detailed all the troubles the Jews had caused. Commented one worker to another with a shrug, "There'll be another wage cut on Monday."

Nor must we forget the value of anti-Semitism as a gauge of self-respect and proof of individual worth to the gentile middle class and poor. Jean-Paul Sartre believes the Dreyfus case was a boon to the bourgeoise of France, "...it opened the doors of the aristocracy to them." A Frenchman could say, "I am no janitor, I'm an anti-Dreyfusard!"

Let's talk about these "social" restrictions for a moment. In Charlotte, for example, the grandson of a Jewish merchant who donated money to help the city pay its schoolteachers during an economic crisis in the 1870s cannot join the City (luncheon) Club, but a newly arrived (gentile) branch manager from Ohio is immediately welcomed with open arms. This situation exists throughout the country, and there's more to it than the usual excuse that the country club and the "downtown" luncheon club are private organizations. We are a socially oriented society. The contract for the new school is discussed over lunch at this "exclusive" club; the city council often meets there and the artist in town for a concert that evening is entertained there. But much more is involved. I had a bit of a grant in 1950 to study this problem. I spoke with managing directors of a number of major corporations, all of whom employ Jews in their research, engineering and sales departments --in the metropolitan areas. They did not say as much, but I was left with the unmistakable impression that they would not promote a Jew to a regional managerial position, no matter how qualified and deserving. Such a position requires total social integration at the local level--the country club, the downtown club, the entertaining at one another's homes--and a wife who would be socially acceptable, immediately.

I do not know how it is in other parts of the country, but in the South the wife is the key to this complete social acceptance. This enables the Southerner to move through two worlds, one populated by ordinary creatures and one populated by his wife. He need never commit himself socially with the people he meets unless he commits his wife. I have known Jewish merchants in the South with a record of business success and civic works who have lived in their community for over a quarter of a century in good fellowship with their fellow gentile businessmen but who have never met the wives.

I recall a question I once put to a Christian missionary whose denomination supported a "Mission to the Jews." I asked him how come he and his fellow missionaries were so anxious to save me, to have me join them in heaven through all eternity, but they wouldn't let me join the City Club where I'd come only once or twice a month for a comparatively limited number of years?

All of this is not as sad as it sounds, because the restrictions do tend to accelerate the Jew's competitive drive. The poet Heine said it over a century ago: "We must be twice as good to get half as much." And it should be remembered, too, that in America these restrictions have never been sanctioned by either law or public opinion.

These restrictions grew up in snobbery. Anyone can trace the vein of anti-Semitism that ran through American literature in the 1920s. That vein was nourished by such antipathy as collected around aliens such as Sacco and Vanzetti; it was fed by Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General who arrested and deported radical foreigners by the boatload; by the Ku Klux Klan, which redefined America as containing only white Protestants of northern European origin.

Forty years ago, some of our most famous writers felt that the threat of the Jews was not to the true faith or to the pocketbook but to the social structure. The Nobel Prize-winning poet T. S. Eliot was one of the pioneers in the expression of genteel anti-Semitism. In his well-known poem Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, Eliot complains not that Bleistein is a Jew but that he has pretensions to culture in a world wracked by social disorder and instability. It dismays him that a Chicago "Semite" invades the museum to gape at a painting by Canaletto.

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who could not agree why the rich were different from the rest of us, did agree on the Jew. Robert Cohn of The Sun Also Rises and Meyer Wolfsheim of The Great Gatsby are no doubt genuine literary creations, but they are also dehumanized figures, deliberately graceless, with no compassion offered.

But if we are to isolate the disease of anti-Semitism, we cannot locate it by an examination of the Jew. It is the anti-Semite who is sick, misinformed, hateful and unfair. For, indeed, anti-Semitism is isolated in the mind of the anti-Semite, the man whom Eric Hoffer called the "hitchhiker of mankind" in his little treatise The True Believer. To this "hitchhiker," anti-Semitism offers an immediate hope of help as well as a sense of participation in something as important as saving the world.

Perhaps most important of all inspirations, the anti-Semite often burns with a consuming hatred of Jesus, which he prudently expresses against the people who produced him. Hating Jews also allows the anti-Semite to strike blows against the restricting ethics of Christianity without risking his standing in the community.

There are other reasons why men become anti-Semites. It is nearly always profitable. Whole duchies once existed on a Jewish "life" tax and on periodic confiscation of Jewish property. Some men have become anti-Semites because their teeth hurt, or because they are sexually impotent, or because they are just plain insane. But whether insane or opportunists, they are always alert to the "devil" of the moment, the devil who has just invested the Jews. In this decade, of course, that devil is Bolshevism.

A century ago, and even less, counting Tom Watson, the devil was capitalism. Brooks Adams never recovered from his melancholia induced by the Jews because they "invented" money and thus "...gave rise to the bourgeoise that destroyed the world of priests, knights, peasants and artisans." Hugh Dorsey, who prosecuted Leo Frank, asked the defendant's mother, "Is it not true you own stocks and bonds on Wall Street?" The devil of capitalism invested Jews for over a century.

A famous Southern tent evangelist, Reverend Mordecai Ham, lived long enough to embrace both ends of modern anti-Semitism. In the early 1920s the evangelist inveighed against Jewish "international bankers," and in the 1940s old Ham charged the same Jewish "international bankers" with conspiring to destroy free enterprise.

In reaction to all of this, the modern Jew has almost always thrown himself into the struggle for liberal causes, because the Jew believes the liberal causes he espouses at the moment will benefit the general population. He wants the gentile to have more and more peace of mind--Social Security, hospital insurance, full employment and pensions, a dozen TVAs if necessary.

The Jew knows that the state of the economy is an important factor in the rise and fall of anti-Semitism. In Russia, the pogroms came at a period of almost unbelievable poverty of the peasant; in France in the 1890s, it was the disaster following military defeat and the depression following the Panama Canal swindles; in Germany, it was the defeat of the war machine in 1918, the inflation and the economic collapse. And in the state of Georgia in 1913, it was the poverty of the tenant farmer and the frustration of the mill hand who was getting 20 cents an hour in the cotton mills. Anti-Semitism really turns on two things: the state of the economy and the mental state of the individual anti-Semite.

But this is our big advantage. The anti-Semite, no matter how talented, must pray that his country and its people meet with some major disaster--plague, famine, economic disruption or military defeat; otherwise he talks into the wind, even if he's as talented as Hitler, Watson or Drumont.

At a convention of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity, which I addressed in Chicago, I told the delegates: "You may not know it, but there are five and a half million Jews in America praying for you fellows every day. They don't go into synagogues and pray, but I believe most of them somehow utter a prayer for you, hope that your children are healthy, that you remain prosperous and that you never have bad luck. Because when the gentile is in trouble, the Jew catches hell."

The Jew knows the anti-Semite can give him hell and still retain and perhaps enlarge his standing in the community. While anti-Semitism has never been as respectable in America as it has in Europe, no one goes to jail for it.

Well, no one asks a man to love a Jew simply because he is a Jew. That is a bargain not much better than anti-Semitism. That is not the point at all. As Isaac Babel, the Jewish writer, once remarked, it is impossible to live without enemies. The point is that the anti-Semite's sole purpose in life is to do harm to other human beings--men, women and children indiscriminately, because they happen to be Jewish--men, women and children who never did him any harm, whom he does not even know.

But the anti-Semite who wishes to remain civilized can do so in only one way: He must renounce his religious creed that descends from one of the Semitic religions--Judaism, Christianity or Islam--and he must dispense with the clergyman's last words over his remains: "How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob," if a Protestant, and "Into the bosom of Abraham," if a Catholic.

He should live so long.