Essays and Observations – Page 3 – Excursions in Jewish Military History and Jewish Genealogy

A Tale of a Tail Gunner: Louis Falstein and “Face of a Hero”

Sergeant Louis Falstein, Manduria, Italy, November, 1944

Sometimes, you have to change your routine…

The great majority of my posts at TheyWereSoldiers have approached the subject of Jews in the military though biographical records, photographs, official documents, and in a few cases, interviews of veterans. But, there’s far more to a man’s life than a straightforward recitation of dates, places, and events. His thoughts and beliefs; his understanding of the world around him, let alone his “own” interior world, may only germinate well after an event has actually occurred, regardless of whether that event – at least in the unknowing eyes of others – is mundane or dramatic.

And through this self-understanding, whether expressed in prose, poetry, the visual arts – or perhaps the irony of silence? – we can sometimes understand the nature of an era better, than through a nominal recitation of purely factual information. (People, after all, can’t be reduced to mere numbers. Though in 2022 many in the Managerial Professional Class would ardently wish it were so.) One way of understanding the past – a very well-known way, at that – is through the novel.

Louis Falstein’s 1950 novel Face of a Hero is a case in point. With a bent towards writing well before the Second World War, Falstein, an aerial gunner in the 723rd Bomb Squadron of the 450th “Cottontails” Bomb Group, found in military service the inspiration for this work, his first published book. Despite having received favorable to excellent reviews, his novel rapidly faded from prominence, only really returning to the public eye – and that, temporarily – in 1999. This came about as the result of questions about the origin of another novel: Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a work which has had enormous and continuing cultural and literary impact; a work – despite superficial similarities – utterly different in style and far more importantly ethos than Falstein’s novel.

Face of a Hero merits a deeper view for what it reveals about Jewish military service in WW II; for its portrayal of WW II aerial combat from the vantage point of an enlisted man; for the way that the author built a fictional world from one of fact. To that end, the following eleven (yep, count ’em, eleven!) posts cover different aspects of the novel, its author, and (to a limited extent), Catch-22.

____________________

[But first!…

…though this post was created on October 7, 2022, only yesterday – on October 18 – did I make a most fortuitous discovery: An audio interview of Louis Falstein by Warren Bower of WNYC Radio recorded on February 3, 1951. This 23-minute-long interview is “Archives Item 69684 / Municipal Archives Item LT715”.]

In conversation with Louis Falstein, Mr. Bower, of New York University’s School of Continuing Education, at first asks about how the novel was constructed.

It’s revealed that though Louis initially considered presenting his story from the vantage point of every one of the ten aviators in the crew of B-24 Liberator Flying Foxhole, this approach was rejected because he didn’t want to write a first novel that was “sprawling”.

So, he related and universalized the story through one man only – Ben Isaacs – to maintain “constant and dramatic movement” in the novel. In turn, Mr. Bower suggests that Isaacs, “…is not more important than the other members of the crew,” to which author Falstein agrees. However, Falstein adds that by “knowing” Isaacs better than the other nine crewmen and showing what he lived through, felt, thought, and learned, another dimension would emerge from the novel.

Stepping away from the novel’s contents, Mr. Bower addresses something ostensibly simple yet quite fundamental: The origin of the book’s title. When asked about the very meaning of “Face of a Hero”, Falstein replies that the title is intended to be realistic and not symbolic. “A hero is comprised of many things. A ‘hero’ is a very human, being, subject to many doubts, and many fears. Ben Isaacs knew why he fought, and that is part of being a hero.”

Mr. Bower’s observations about the novel mirror those of several reviewers, specifically in terms of the book’s explicit (at least, for the time!) use of language. When asked about this, Louis stated that the book reflected the reality of language as it was actually spoken by combat airmen, and that he didn’t want to forego linguistic realism. This included the use of the phrase “a man went down,” rather than the irrevocably grim expression “having been killed”, for all but the most unambiguous circumstances pertaining to the loss of an aircrew.

Ultimately, when asked about the motivation for continuing to fly combat missions despite one’s ambivalence about his ability to serve as an airman, or, in the face of the enemy, Louis stated that, “Indoctrination and knowing that one has a just cause gives one a great deal of so-called ‘courage’, that one might lack,” adding that Ben Isaacs felt as if he were reborn on the end of his fiftieth mission.

Mr. Bower concludes his interview with thoughts similar to those of the novel’s reviewers, for he admires the way the book is written: Simply, unostentatiously, and with no fancy style, but powerfully and impressively.

Though the radio program is about 23 minutes long, Mr. Bower’s interview of Louis Falstein only comprises its first eighteen minutes. The final five minutes pertain to two recent books; fiction and non-fiction respectively. The first is Ernest Hemingway’s latest work, Over the River and Into the Trees, of which Bower is highly critical (really – wow!), deeming the novel, “…a colossal bore,” suggesting that the author’s heart simply wasn’t in the work, which is simply a very thin autobiography. The second book, coming in for very high praise, is Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki.

Here’s Mr. Bower’s obituary, from The New York Times:

WARREN BOWER, TEACHER; WAS HOST OF RADIO SHOW

October 29, 1976

Warren Bower, professor emeritus of English and a former assistant dean of New York University’s School of Continuing Education, died Tuesday at St. Vincent’s Hospital. He was 78 years old and lived at the Salmagundi Club, at 45 Fifth A venue.

Mr. Bower was well known as the host of a WNYC radio program, “The Reader’s Almanac,” which offered interviews with authors between 1938 and 1967. In 1962 he was given the Peabody Award for the show, which reflected his deep interest in books and authors.

He was born in Elkhart, Ind., and graduated from Hillsdale College in 1920. He earned his master’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1923.

Mr. Bower was the author of “The College Writer,” “New Directions” and “How to Write for Pleasure and Profit.”

He is survived by his wife, Lesley.

____________________

And now (…minor drum roll, please…) here are the posts. They are…

____________________

1. A Tale of a Tail Gunner: Louis Falstein and “Face of a Hero” (This post!)

2: A Mirror of The Past (How I discovered Catch-22, and, Face of a Hero)

3: Louis Falstein’s War in the Air… Before, During, and After (Biographical overview of Louis Falstein’s life, focusing on his military service.)

4: First Published Writings: “Molto Buono”, and, “The New Republic”

5: The Events of the Novel (List and descriptions of characters in the novel; chronological list of events and details in the story)

6: Excerpts From the Novel – An Aviator’s Life and Thoughts

7: Excerpts From the Novel – Jewish Aviators at War

8: An Excerpt From the Novel – The Edge of Survival

9: The Art of The Novel (Cover and interior art of first (1950) edition of the novel, and its four subsequent editions.)

10: Book Reviews

11: After The Hero: Later Books (Illustrations of covers of Louis Falstein’s later works, with details about some.)

12: When Parallels Diverge – “Catch 22” and “Face of a Hero”

13: “Catch-22” In The Perspective of History

14: A Still, Small Voice; A Still, Small Novel

I’ll post these essays sequentially, rather than all at once, and link them to this introductory post, as I do so.

Here goes…

(Note: I want to thank Saul Schwarz for his “suggestion”: “Thanks, Saul!”)

Politics as History II… Ken Burns’ PBS Documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust”: “Ken Burns Is Not Worthy of His Own Best Vision”, by Shmuel Klatzkin

Akin to Jonathan Tobin’s critique of Ken Burns’ recent three-part PBS documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust, Shmuel Klatzkin, writing at The American Spectator, lauds the series in terms of Burns talent in conveying a story in a visual format. He particularly takes note of Burns’ skill use of narration (by Peter Coyote), and, through the incorporation of the actual voices of witnesses and participants.

But, also like Tobin, Klatzkin notes that the documentary, deliberately soft on President Theodore Roosevelt, by its end veers from an exploration of history to the exploitation of contemporary social issues on behalf of a distinct political and ideological agenda.

Excerpts from Klatzkin’s essay follow, with some key sentences italicized for emphasis. My sole disagreement with Mr. Klatzkin lies in his statement, “Mr. Burns, be worthy of your own best vision. Don’t let this moral failure define your contribution. It is clear you are much better than this.”

Perhaps, after all, this documentary actually is Mr. Burns’ best vision?

The full essay is available at the link.

Ken Burns Is Not Worthy of His Own Best Vision

But where was a focus on Louis Farrakhan, in one of any number of obscene, Jew-baiting moments?
Here is a powerful leader who is unabashedly anti-Semitic
and who is powerful enough to subvert politicians to his purposes
— that is, he’s effective and dangerous.
Why was he not featured?
The best guess is that Burns’ politics obscured his vision here.

Where was a showing of Jewish campus groups’ meetings being broken up,
Nazi-style,
by organized groups dedicated to the destruction of the country
where the world’s largest Jewish population lives?
Where is a clip of powerful Democrat politicians,
publicly embraced by Democrat leadership,
spouting anti-Semitic tropes on the House floor and in speeches
— Omar, Tlaib, Pressley, and other lesser lights?
Where is the focus on the leftist ideologies that identify Jews as a class
to be colonialists and white supremacists,
and therefore worthy objects of mobbing, exclusion, and even violence?

Furthermore,
Burns willingly and powerfully equates the denial of asylum to European Jews
facing Hitler’s annihilation machine
to today’s attempt to any organized control of America’s borders.
Can one really make a moral equation?
Is assuring that we can weed out the drug runners,
human traffickers,
and gang members from those seeking political asylum
equivalent to denying shelter to Jews fleeing the gas chambers?
Is it moral to conflate the two?
This is mere political propaganda,
an imposture of moral authority rather than the real thing.
It contaminates and poisons the moral message.

But until he makes a correction,
he is now on record as giving a pass to the whole spectrum of anti-Semitism that is alive on the left.
And by his reckless association of everything Trump with Nazism,
he overlooks the terrible complicity of those
who are strengthening the hands of a foreign national regime in Iran
that publicly denies the Holocaust,
has publicly pledged to destroy Israel,
and which is making every effort to obtain the nuclear weaponry
by which it can obliterate as many Jews as Hitler.

That is a large omission to make and still claim the moral weight of the Holocaust behind you.
Mr. Burns, be worthy of your own best vision.
Don’t let this moral failure define your contribution.
It is clear you are much better than this.
Please live up to it.

Politics as History I… Ken Burns’ PBS Documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust”: “America’s Holocaust failure through the lens of 21st-century politics”, by Jonathan S. Tobin

In the present there are always echoes of the past.

Case in point, Ken Burns’ PBS documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust“.

Much commentary has appeared concerning this three-part series, with doubtless more to follow. But, among this ongoing flurry of opinion pieces and reviews, the following essay from September 16 by Jonathan S. Tobin at the Jewish News Syndicate (linked below), especially stands out. I’ve quoted three key passages (the italics are my own, not Tobin’s!) that are particularly incisive, my only quibble being that the word “leftist”, or the phrase “professional managerial class” would be vastly more apropos than “liberal”.

(Digressing… I’m currently working on a whole bunch of blog posts, which are quite lengthy (typical for this blog, eh?!), some of which pertain to aspects of Jewish military service I’ve not previously addressed. I hope to bring these posts to fruition in the relatively (?!?) near future. Well, I hope!)

America’s Holocaust failure through the lens of 21st-century politics

The inescapable conclusion is that Burns and his team are,
as is the case with even the best of his films
(and some of his efforts like “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “New York” and “Jazz”
are among the greatest documentaries ever produced),
interested in both telling a compelling story
and in reinforcing the pre-existing biases of public television networks’ liberal viewing audience
and the issues that matter most to them.

… the attempt to frame the Holocaust as a function of general intolerance is always a mistake.
Anti-Semitism isn’t merely hateful sentiments;
it’s a political organizing principle that has attached itself to a number of different ideologies.
Then it was Nazism,
today it is the Islamism embraced by an Iran that seeks a nuclear weapon
with which another Holocaust can be perpetrated.
The answer to such threats isn’t open borders for America,
amnesty for illegal immigrants
or even more people reading The Diary of Anne Frank.
The only way to deter a future genocide of the Jews
is Jewish empowerment and their ability to defend themselves,
something they would only gain after the war with the creation of the state of Israel.

Yet contrary to the film’s conclusion,
the Holocaust tells us little or nothing
about what to do about America’s contemporary immigration debates.
The fact that a CNN interview with Burns
led to a discussion in which efforts by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
to ship illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard,
whose liberal residents advocate for open borders,
were compared to the actions of the Nazis
shows just how misleading the filmmaker’s efforts to frame the issue along these lines are.
Nor should it help fuel efforts to falsely label those political opponents
whom the liberal establishment is trying to smear as fascists and Nazis threatening democracy.

A Question At War: “Shall I Not Fight For the Rights of the Jews?”

“I FIGHT not so much because of Pearl Harbor,
but because of what Pearl Harbor meant, because,
dually after skirmishes with the Ethiopians,
the Manchurians,
the Chinese,
the Austrians,
the Czechoslovakians,
the Danes,
the Spaniards,
and the Norwegians,
fascism was menacing us as we had never before been menaced,
because only the craven will not defend themselves.”

——————–

“I fight to remain free.”

– Corporal Jack J. Zurofsky, May, 1944

____________________
____________________
____________________

“As an American,
I am aware of the fact that in relation to the Zionist movement,
some persons, undoubtedly sincere,
have raised the question of dual allegiance.
They ask how I,
as an American,
can take a great interest in the Jewish people and in Palestine.
To that my answer is quite simple.
I as a soldier am at present fighting for the rights of the French,
the Russians,
the English,
the Poles,
the Czechs,
the Yugoslavs,
etc.,
that they too may have a chance for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

——————–

“Shall I not fight for the rights of the Jews?”

– Corporal Ben Weiner, September, 1943

________________________________________

A central and natural facet of human behavior – of men and groups; of men in groups – is aggression: Whether in terms of the emotional frisson generated by the random (and, not-at-all-so-random) violence of mobs; as cool self-defense and its mirror image in pacifism; by the calculated choreography of military offensives and defensives. Well, given the constancy of human nature, the need to understand the origins, nature, and often the dire necessity of aggression – whether understood through accounts of history, legend, or myth; whether viewed through the contemporary lenses of religion and science – will ever remain, regardless of changes in military technology or the changing fortunes or men and nations.

But, while the nature of what motivates aggression – what prompts men to fight – can also be approached from the vantage points of psychology, sociology, and politics, on occasion we can find at least an explanation of aggression that is as profound as it is simple: The intersection between a man’s values and priorities; his beliefs and ideals, with his sense of justice.

In this context, during 1943 and 1944, two American Jewish soldiers – Ben Weiner (residence unknown), and Jack Zurofsky of Brooklyn – both Corporals who’d served in the ground forces of the United States Army in the North African Theater of War – addressed this question in essays that were strikingly different in the nature of their arguments and literary style. Their writings offer a glimpse of the self-perception of American Jews during the Second World War, in terms of their identity as Americans, Jews, and, American Jews, in a way that continues to have resonance over seventy-five years later, in this year of 2020.

____________________

The “first” essay, “We Fight For The Jew, Too”, penned by Weiner, was published in The Jewish Times (Baltimore) and Jewish Advocate (Boston) on Friday, September 24, and Thursday, December 16, 1943, respectively. I’ve not been able to find anything “about” Corporal Weiner, per se, beyond the nominal description of him as having been a veteran of the campaign in North Africa. (Well, that’s kind of vague!) Alas, his name doesn’t appear in the 1947 book American Jews in World War II, which – as mentioned in many of my prior posts – is notable for the absence of many of the names that should have appeared in its several hundred pages.

So, here’s an image of Ben’s essay, from The Jewish Times…

…and, verbatim as verbatim can be, here’s the text of Ben’s essay:

We Fight For The Jew, Too –

A Soldier in North Africa Describes His Credo

By CORPORAL BEN WEINER
Somewhere in North Africa

September 24, 1943

There are hundreds of thousands of American Jews in the armed forces. They are fighting for the preservation of their country. But they are also fighting for the Four Freedoms. Here is one Jewish soldier, a participant in the first conquest of American arms overseas, who says that the Jews, too, are among the peoples for whom the Americans are fighting. He gives his reasons why. It is said that when the war is over, soldiers will do much to mold the thinking of the country. They are likely to do the same for Jewish life. – The Editor.

As soldiers at war we have but one major task in front of us – to win the war. It is however very important that we soldiers stop some times to think of the issues and principles we are fighting for, perhaps some day to give our lives for.

Among the things that the United Nations are fighting for are the rights, the respect and self-determination of the small as well as the large nations. We are sympathetic to the needs of the Greeks, the Yugoslavs, the Czechs, The French, the Poles, Russians and heroic Chinese. The small nations particularly have suffered from the German military machine and ideology. Yet, their only desire had been to develop their own culture under their own flag and government. The United Nations are deeply concerned with the problems of these small nations and are bound to give them due consideration at the peace table.

Throughout the centuries, ever since the Jewish people were destroyed as a nation by the Romans and were scattered to the far corners of the world, their life has been one endless struggle for existence. It is a story of a people who have been continually oppressed and denied a peaceful life, not because of anything wrong they had done as a people, but because of the nations among whom they lived.

In Poland, Germany, Austria, Rumania, France, Hungary and numerous other countries the same conditions existed in varying degrees.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, Germany was one of the most progressive nations in the world, industrially, technically and in the arts, sciences, literature and music. The Jews were given certain freedoms and their contribution to that country soon became apparent. More and more they thought that they had at last found the freedom that they had been constantly searching for. They mingled with the Germans; they intermarried. A few left their faith; many denied that they were Jews. They believed that assimilation would solve their problem.

The first World War came and went. Conditions became worse. There arose in Germany a bestiality of anti-Semitism that its predecessors had never known. History not merely repeated itself but made the blackest chapters ever recorded. At least 2,000,000 of my fellow Jews have died of the Nazi terror during the period of this war alone.

Can anyone wonder why I, as an American citizen, wish to find a constructive solution to the needs of the Jewish people?

Submit To “Fate”

For centuries the Jewish people of Europe submitted with resignation to the degrees of fate. They had to rely upon “chance,” “fate,” and “hope”. The time has come for them to rely upon themselves, upon their own resources both spiritual and physical, upon their energies, their youth and their faith in democracy. The time has come for the Jewish people to become the masters of their fate, to shape their destiny according to their needs and desires.

Many people speak of alleviating the conditions of these people. This alleviation must be carried forward aggressively and persistently. The solution is to give the Jewish people of Europe the country of Palestine as an independent state of their own, with their own flag and their own government.

In Palestine today one finds a rejuvenated people. From the far corners of the world they are coming to the land to build up a new world for themselves. They come from every nation; they speak every language; they bring with them a wealth of culture, knowledge and wisdom. They bring with them the ideals that are embodied in their heritage. Many of them have undergone cruel sufferings; yet, when they enter the land of Palestine their sufferings become a thing of the past. As they look about them and see their people creatively engaged in building a country for themselves they slowly lose the fear they have had for centuries and they join in the task of rebuilding their lives and their homes.

As an American, I am aware of the fact that in relation to the Zionist movement, some persons, undoubtedly sincere, have raised the question of dual allegiance. They ask how I, as an American, can take a great interest in the Jewish people and in Palestine. To that my answer is quite simple. I as a soldier am at present fighting for the rights of the French, the Russians, the English, the Poles, the Czechs, the Yugoslavs, etc., that they too may have a chance for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Shall I not fight for the rights of the Jews?

I am a young American, 23 years of age, who love my country and the flag more than anything else in the world. For the privilege of being an American I am ready and willing to give my life. My country stands for Justice, Truth, and Freedom, for the right to live a peaceful and honest life. In my heart there is not a doubt as to where my loyalty lies. Yes, it is because I am an American, because America has taught me the principles of Freedom and Justice that I look at the Jewish people and see that a great injustice is being done.

When Catholics or Protestants or any other human beings are in need, do not our hearts go out to them? Do we not try in every possible way to help them? When the Chinese were bombed [sic] did we not help them in various ways? Did we not do the same for the English, the Russians and the Greeks? Does not Christianity itself teach us, “Love thy neighbor,” and does it not tell us “Help thy neighbor in distress”? My loyalty to my country and my desire to help the Jewish people do not conflict. In fact my country has taught me that the principle of Justice is a universal one and should be applied to all people. I as a soldier at war am fighting so that principle shall prevail.

Against the White Paper

At present there exists a “White Paper” which states that immigration to Palestine shall stop in March, 1944. This, at a time when most countries will not allow immigration laws to be relaxed. The carrying out of this brutal statement would be pure and simple murder of several more million of our people who could perhaps in the future escape the hellhole of Europe. It must be our first duty as fighters of democracy to expose this farce. We must definitely go ahead with our plans for the upbuilding of Palestine. Our Senators and our Congressmen must be informed of this infamous “White Paper”.

Many writers of today have written clearly about the conditions that exist. Ben Hecht wrote “Remember Us”; others have written in the same vein. They always end up in despair, in helplessness; they never have a constructive conclusion. They seem fail to recognize that if Palestine were established as a Jewish State it would help tremendously the morale and strengthen the lives of the Jews the world over. They seem to fail to recognize that if they had a State of their own, throughout the world the Jews would be recognized as equals.

Jews in America do not have to go to Palestine. The fact that there are Irish in America does not mean that they have to go to Ireland, or that the French in America have to go to France or the Italians to Italy, the Poles to Poland, etc. It is for the Jewish people of Europe that Palestine stands as a beacon of light and a symbol of freedom. After the war the desire of millions will be to go to that land. The country itself is not very large but because of its intensified agriculture and the development of its industries it will be able to absorb millions of people. Perhaps some day in the not too distant future they too will make a “Louisiana Purchase” which will enlarge the country many times its size, and forever solve the problem of Jewish homelessness. Shall we not help them in their endeavor?

Destiny has placed in the hands of the Jewish community in America a great responsibility. It does not matter whether one be a Conservative, a Reform, an Orthodox or a Zionist Jew. The only thing that matters is that the entire community should realize its responsibilities and immediately take the proper action. This demands the energies and thoughts of all our people, young and old.

(Copyright, 1943)

Commentary

I like what Ben has written.

More importantly, I respect what Ben has written.

That his prose is not quite “purple” is hardly important, for the message of his essay takes priority over subtleties of literary expression. Simply expressed, his ideas are iron-solid, and the simplicity of his writing serves to reinforce the strength of his arguments. He minimizes appeals to emotion – totally foregoing personal references, except for the enigmatic fact that he was born (well, where?) in 1920 – which in any event is secondary to the overall “design” and purpose of his essay.

In this sense, his thoughts are presented to the reader in a structured manner, in three distinct sections.

Ben first discusses the fate of “small” nations in terms of their political autonomy and national survival, in the greater context of Germany’s (then, 1943) military occupation of much of Europe, and only-recently ended control of North Africa.

This is followed by laying out the dire implications of the lack of political and geographic nationhood for the Jewish people, in light of the abrogation of their citizenship and persecution by Germany – thus, negating assumptions about the possibility of Jewish assimilation, at least in a European context.

Ben then talks about the logic, morality, and simple justice of Zionism – the revival of Jewish political and social autonomy in the ancestral home of the Jewish people – secondarily in the context of world events and as being a haven from persecution, and primarily in terms of Jewish national autonomy being a natural right and need, paralleling – no more and no less – that manifested by other peoples of the world.

Admittedly, there’s an awkwardness to the statement, “…The Jewish people were destroyed as a nation by the Romans and were scattered to the far corners of the world.” While this passage adds dramatic weight to Ben’s essay, it’s a misreading of history, and retrospectively deterministic. Even if Jewish political and national autonomy was oppressed, curtailed and eventually eliminated in the wake of the first and second Jewish uprisings against Rome (66-73 and 132-135 B.C.E., respectively), Jewish communities had by then already existed throughout the Mediterranean coast, and beyond.

More importantly, the loss of Jewish territorial nationhood and political autonomy for over eighteen hundred years – between 135 and 1948 B.C.E. – did not destroy the Jewish people’s sense of nationhood: It transformed it.

Well, then, in the “literary center” of Ben’s essay, we find the statement, so refreshing to see in American-Jewish writing from 1943, “They ask how I, as an American, can take a great interest in the Jewish people and in Palestine. To that my answer is quite simple. I as a soldier am at present fighting for the rights of the French, the Russians, the English, the Poles, the Czechs, the Yugoslavs, etc., that they too may have a chance for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Shall I not fight for the rights of the Jews?”

In his conclusion section, Ben expresses his thoughts about Britain’s “White Paper”, and comments upon Ben Hecht’s Reader’s Digest essay of February, 1943, “Remember Us“. He closes with a prescient view of the future of the (then, only five years hence) re-established Jewish nation-state, and – a perennially true and thus perennially necessary – plea for Jewish unity.

Alas, that’s true today, as well: It often seems that the only unifying quality of the Jewish people is their utter lack of unity. Such is the way of the world.

____________________

Let’s move ahead eight months: Here’s Jack Zurofsky’s essay, as it appeared on page five of The Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday, May 14, 1944.

First, a view of the entire page, found via Thomas M. Tryniski’s FultonHistory website. (Off topic: Those advertisements are pretty cool…)

…and now, a close-up of the essay…

…and now, from a pixeled picture to pixeled text.

[But first, a caveat: The Inquirer misspelled Jack’s middle initial: It’s actually “J.”, not “F.” Perhaps – in the era before spellcheck – someone made an error in the Inquirer’s compositing department?]

Corporal, 28, in North Africa Wins Army Essay Contest
(A “Why I Fight” essay contest, conducted in the North African Theater of Operations by the Morale Services Station, has been won by Corporal Jack F. Zurofsky [correct spelling is Jack J. Zurofsky], a 23-year-old infantryman, of Brooklyn, N. Y., who has been in the Army 16 months, the War Department announced yesterday. Corporal Zurofsky’s prize-winning essay, for which he was awarded a $100 War Bond, was selected from entries submitted by more than 300 soldiers, sailors and WACs in all service branches. It is printed herewith:)

By Corporal Jack F. Zurofsky

THIS IS why I fight.

I fight because it’s my fight.

I fight because my eyes are unafraid to look into other eyes; because they have seen happiness and because they have seen suffering; because they are curious and searching; because they are free.

I fight because my ears can listen to both sides of a question; because they can hear the groanings of a tormented people as well as the laughter of free people; because they are a channel for information, not a route for repetition; because, if I hear and do not think, I am deaf.

I fight because my mouth does not fear to utter my opinions; because, though I am only one, my voice helps forge my identity; because I can speak from a soap-box, or from a letter to the newspapers, or from a question that I may ask my representatives in Congress; because when my mouth speaks and can only say what everyone is forced to say it is gagged.

I fight because my knees kneel only to God.

I fight because my feet can go where they please, because they need no passport to go from New York to New Jersey and back again; because if I want to leave my country I can go without being forced and without bribing and without the loss of my savings; because I can plant my feet in farm soil or city concrete without anybody’s by-your-leave; because when my feet walk only the way they are forced to walk they are hobbled.

I fight because of all these and because I have a mind, a mind which has been trained in a free school to accept or to reject, to ponder and to weigh – a mind which knows the flowing stream of thought, not the stagnant swamp of blind obedience; a mind schooled to think for itself, to be curious, skeptical, to analyze, to formulate and to express its opinions; a mind capable of digesting the intellectual food it receives from a free press – because if a mind does not think it is the brain of a slave.

I fight because I think I am as good as anybody else; because of what other people have said better than ever I could, “certain inalienable rights” “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” “give me liberty or give me death.”

I FIGHT because of my memories – the laughter and play of my childhood, the ball games I was in and the better ones I watched, my mother telling me why my father and she came to America at the turn of the century, my sisters marrying, my high school graduation, the first time I saw a cow, the first year we could afford a vacation, the crib at Camp Surprise Lake after the crowded, polluted Coney Island waters, hikes in the fall with the many-colored leaves falling, weenie and marshmallow roasts over a hot fire, the first time I voted, my first date and the slap in the face I got instead of the kiss I attempted, the way the nostrum quack would alternate with political orators on our street corner, seeing the changes for the better in my neighborhood – the El going down, streets being widened to let the sun in, new tenements replacing the old slums – the crowd applauding the time I came through with the hit that won us the borough championship: the memories, which if people like me do not fight, our children will never have.

I fight because I have something to fight for.

I FIGHT because of the life I hope to live when the fighting is finished, because that life offers opportunity and security and the freedom to read and write and listen and think and talk, because, as before, my home will be my castle with the drawbridge down only to those I invite. Because if I do not fight, life itself will be death.

I fight because I believe in progress, not reaction; because, despite our faults, there is hope in our manner of life, because if we lose there is no hope.

I fight because some day I want to get married and I want my children to be born into free world because my forefathers left me a heritage of freedom which it is my duty to pass on, because if we lost, it would be a crime to have children.

I fight because it is an obligation, because free people must fight to remain free, because when the freedom of one nation or one person is taken away the rights of all nations and all people are threatened, because through our elected representatives I had the choice: To fight or not to fight.

I FIGHT not so much because of Pearl Harbor, but because of what Pearl Harbor meant, because, dually after skirmishes with the Ethiopians, the Manchurians, the Chinese, the Austrians, the Czechoslovakians, the Danes, the Spaniards, and the Norwegians, fascism was menacing us as we had never before been menaced, because only the craven will not defend themselves.

I fight because “It is better to die than live on one’s knees.”

I fight because only by fighting today will there be peace tomorrow. I fight because I am thankful that I am not on the other side; because, but for the Grace of God or an accident of Nature, the brutalized Nazi could have been me and, but for my fighting, will be my child.

I fight in the fervent hope that those who follow me will not have to fight again but in the knowledge that if they have to, they will not be found wanting in the crisis.

I fight to remain free.

Commentary

Jack was an excellent writer.

That, I will more than readily grant.

The literary style of his essay, attributable to its organization as much as of its language, make it a fast-paced, emotionally compelling, very easy “read”.

Every paragraph, regardless of content, topic, or length, commences with the two-word phrase, “I fight…”. This phrase also appears in the piece’s title. This repetition – commencing at the very start of the essay – is particularly effective in setting up a kind of literary rhythm, by which as soon as you fish one paragraph, well… You anticipate the next. And, so, on. Until the end:

It draws you in, and keeps you going.

So, yes. Jack was an excellent writer.

And yet, behind everything is “the dog that didn’t bark”; a certain “thing” that by virtue of its absence undermines the message could otherwise have blossomed via Jack’s literary skill.

There are allusions to abstract, universal (and valid) ideals of freedom, thought, and association. There are comments about threat of totalitarianism. There’s mention of Jack’s residence in the New York metropolitan area, colorful allusions to his parent’s “immigrant” origins, and memories of his upbringing in New York City.

But, in the entirety of this essay, published in mid-1944, by which time news about the fate of European Jewry was certainly known in a general sense – and even in relative detail, assuming one followed the secular and Jewish media with even moderate attention and focus – there’s absolutely no allusion or reference – amidst mention of the “…Ethiopians, the Manchurians, the Chinese, the Austrians, the Czechoslovakians, the Danes, the Spaniards, and the Norwegians,” – to the fate of the Jews.

Why? Well, one can surmise…

Compare and Contrast

Perhaps it was a question of time and an issue of place.

The “Why I Fight” essay contest was conducted by the “Morale Services Section” in the North African Theater of War, probably (a guess here…) under the auspices of the War Department. As a skilled writer; cognizant of his primary and secondary audience and the prevailing zeitgeist, perhaps Jack rightly believed – given the tenor of the times; given the social “place” of the Jews of the United States (and beyond, even in the other Allied nations) in the 1940s – that a literary work calling attention to the Jewish people as Jews, in an explicit, singular, and specific sense, in the context of a larger war, might well have negated the work’s literary acceptability, let alone its public acceptance.

Well, as reported in The New York Times, of the 300 essays received by the Morale Services Section, the top three winners – along with Corporal Zurofsky – included Private Clarence Weinstock of 219 East 12th Street, Manhattan (second place), and Sergeant Henry C. Nelson, 1250 Brooklyn Avenue, Brooklyn (third place). According to the Times, there were twelve judges (names not given), who, “represented a cross-section of the Army and included men and women, officers and enlisted men.” Honorable mention awards went to, “Sergeant Kenneth Board, member of an Army Air Forces heavy bomber unit, whose home is at 9765 North Martindale Street, Detroit; Private Robert E. Stark, Medical Department, of 2140 Sixteenth Avenue, South Birmingham, Alabama; and Private First Class Benjamin E. Karn, member of an anti-aircraft unit, of 1997 Fillmore Avenue, Buffalo.”

On the other hand, assuming that Ben Weiner intended that his essay would appear in the Jewish press, perhaps what could superficially be perceived as a constraint gave him the ironic freedom to express himself frankly and fully.

________________________________________

But, things aren’t what they seem…

And yet, appearances, whether visual or literary, can be deceiving:

Jack Zurofsky was a deeply identified and committed Jew, in both word and action. For example, while serving in the Jewish Community Council of Essex County, New Jersey, he authored the professional article “Interpreting Jewish Social Work Today”, which appeared in the publication The Jewish Social Service Quarterly, I think some time in the 50s. Later, in the Daily News Bulletin of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of June, 1961, his name appeared in an announcement concerning his appointment as “Director of Community Publicity Services of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds” (whew – long title!).

This was apparent even earlier. In 1944, his short story about the Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion, “Warsaw Epitaph”, was published in The Jewish Advocate of October 19, 1944. If “the dog didn’t bark” for the “Why I Fight” literary contest, it certainly howled (and quite loudly!) here. Notably, the essay was expressly written for publication by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which literary setting – paralleling Ben Weiner’s essay in The Jewish Times – may have granted Jack Zurofsky free reign to express his ideas and beliefs (albeit in the context of fiction, through the words of the symbolically named narrator “Israel”) in a manner not feasible for the “Why We Fight” contest.

Thus, “Warsaw Epitaph”:

WARSAW EPITAPH

“Today I Die”
By Corporal Jack J. Zurofsky, U.S.A.

(The author of the following short story based on the heroic resistance of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto recently won first prize in a contest among U.S. servicemen overseas for the best essay on “What I Am Fighting For.” He is now stationed in this country. This story was written exclusively for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. – THE EDITOR.)

Today I am going to die.

I do not know exactly bow. Perhaps it will be by a rifle slug tearing through my heart or a machine gun bullet clipping my brain. Who knows? It may be a grenade exploding through my vitals.

The thought is not pleasant. I do not like to dwell upon it but this I know, today I must die and not only I but the rest of us, the handful that is left.

We have resisted them now for forty-two days. No longer do they despise us Jews. Our ghetto streets have become passages to Hell for them. No longer do they come here arrogant and unafraid. Now they advance behind a curtain of fire, after an artillery barrage, taking advantage of whatever cover remains. Now they keep their heads down and their proud chins tucked in. Now they fear a well-placed bullet from our pistols or one of our accurately hurled grenades.

They were surprised that first day. Symbolically, it was the first Passover Seder. They came in as they always do with the lists in their hands. And they suspected nothing. We watched them round up their victims as we had watched them round them up before. As always they took the old and the weak, the ones who could not work for them, the lame, the halt, and the blind, the decrepit, the ones who were useless to the Master Race.

The scene was an old one to us. We had seen it many times before. We betrayed no emotion when they tore a child from the arms of its mother, clubbing it to death before our eyes. This was routine. Nor did we cry out when they took Reb Shmulkevich, that harmless old sage, a lover of the classics and a student of the Talmud all his life. Half-starved, old, infirm, he did not move as fast as the gauleiter desired. They pulled his beard, and booted him in the genitals, leaving him writhing on the cobblestones. Perhaps it was mercy when a storm-trooper spitted him with a bayonet.

No, we said nothing. We watched and said nothing. But the call was already out. Our time had come.

We had made our decision. Unanimously. Like the Maccabees whose blood flowed in our veins we would fight. For so long we had submitted, tried to appease those whom nothing could appease.

What had we to lose? Our lives. Our laughter is harsh and ironic. What were our lives? We were outcasts, pariahs, beyond the pale, slaves to the Master Race. They killed us without -mercy, looted, plundered, raped our women and we adapted ourselves.

Our elders said we had to submit. It was our duty to survive. God would help us. The wrath of God would fall upon the oppressor as his hand fell upon Pharaoh.

They were our elders, our rabbis, the leaders of our people. We listened. Some of us never listened. I was for fight from the beginning. But we heeded the admonition of our elders and our resistance was only passive.

But all the time we planned. We contacted the Polish underground. Many of my friends joined the guerrillas in the forest. I stayed. My place was here. It takes courage to keep your hands at your sides, to wait, and wait, and wait.

But we could not wait if we had not planned. We smuggled in arms – pistols, hand grenades, knives, some rifles, even a few machine guns. In the depth of our misery we waited and prepared.

When they came with the deportation plan we saw through their diabolical scheme. But we were not ready, not yet ready. By now we had organization. We met in little cells. We could trust each other. Who among us would betray a fellow Jew to the enemy?

Each of us had a pistol and by now the rabbis were with us. They too knew of the crematorium at Lublin, the death camps at Trawnicki and Krakow.

Adam Czymansky, the president of the Warsaw synagogue, committed suicide. He hoped his action would bring our plight to the rest of the world. He was wrong. Suicide is not the way. If you die you must take an enemy with you. Do not do his work for him.

While the Nazi brutes gathered their pitiful victims we gathered our forces. Long ago we had picked out our password for that day.

“Kill”

The gestapo rats suspected nothing. They did not notice us creeping out of the cellars. None of them saw me creep up to the sentinel at the ghetto gate. None of them heard when I slit his throat, like a schochet would a chicken. How could they hear: His sound went no further than his throat where the knife met and stilled it.

They laughed and chuckled at their work. The pigs enjoyed it. For these it was their last laugh, their last chuckle.

It is beautiful to kill a Nazi. It is honest work, a satisfying duty, like pulling weeds, or exterminating rats.

Sometimes I wonder at myself. How could I feel that way? I, a Talmud student, a believer in the Commandments. “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”

I used to blanche at the sight of blood. My mother wanted me to become a doctor, a healer. But I was against it. I thought that I could not stand the sight I or stench of blood.

Since then I had seen much blood spilled, always Jewish blood, and always let by the Nazis. I had seen the corpses of my people in the streets of the ghetto and fat the factories. I had seen the Nazis stride into our synagogue and desecrate our altars with their killing. How often they violated the Sabbath eve with their murder.

The sight of blood became as familiar as the veins in my hand, as normal as the anger which grew in my heart, as inevitable as the purpose which sharpened in my mind.

So it became a pleasure to destroy those who had destroyed pleasure. I would think as I would draw a bead with a rifle, “This will hit him in the stomach right about the belly button. He will sit down suddenly and watch his guts desert him. The bullet will make a small hole in the front and a large hole in the back and it will rip his intestines as it passes. He will not like the feeling. Maybe then he will remember the little boy he clubbed to death, or the Jewish girl he raped. He will suffer a long time and his moans will disturb his comrades. It will remind them of the fate which awaits them. Even then he will die too soon though he lived too long.”

In that first fight we learned we were better men than the Nazis. We saw then that they were afraid of us, that they were only little men wearing large and heavy armor. When it came to the showdown we had more courage. But they had the tanks and the incendiaries. We had purpose and determination but they had all the food and all the drink that they wanted.

On that day we left none of them alive. Not one storm-trooper who came into the ghetto left it. They hardly put up a fight. Terrorized completely they died like rabbits. We did not lose a man and we gained many rifles and lugers.

Most important we gained several uniforms. Once- we removed the damned yellow badge and put one of them on who of the super race could tell us from them.

Thus the battle began.

We knew the Hitlerites would strike to quell our revolt. We knew that already gestapo headquarters had sent out a call for reinforcements, that they were routing the seine out of the beer halls and the brothels.

We prepared. The ghetto wall was a natural barricade. The women heated hot water for us to hurl from the roofs. We dispatched messages to the guerrillas. Our arms came out of hiding. Messengers hurried to the slave factories and our young men left their benches and hurried to the defense of the ghetto.

Nor did we wait. We attacked. Bands of us tore off our yellow badges and invaded Warsaw proper. We learned how easy it was to kill, a simple thrust of the knife, a twist, and you can wipe it on his uniform.

They came at us that night. They hoped to overawe us with six tanks. We let them come in for, by now we knew how to wait. When they reached the main street we let loose. They tried to flee but they were too late. They were cremated in their tanks.

The uprising became general. Each house became a fortress, each cellar an arsenal. We grouped our main strength in the larger houses and all that night we dug trenches in the streets. Even the children were put to work. They became our messengers. They brought us food which the women and the old people prepared in the communal kitchens.

Next morning we hung up our flags. Beside the Polish colors and the red flag we flew the pennant of Zion, the Star of David flying for the first time in this war.

By noon a cordon had been established around the ghetto by the Germans. Many Poles, suspected of complicity, were killed. Ten tanks, besides numerous machine guns and small arms, headed the Nazi array. They opened fire almost immediately. Our answering fusillade was telling.

Still they underestimated us. They refused to admit to themselves the fierceness of our resolve. But they had to stop us. The news of this battle must be contained. The outside world must never learn of this breach of the Nazi festung’s inner defenses. But that was just why we were fighting, why I am writing. The world must know what we have done here.

A council of leaders were organized. In it were the leaders of every schism and sect in ghetto life. Atheists and orthodox Jews united in a common bond. Communists fought shoulder to shoulder with Revisionist Zionists.

I was wounded that first day. Just a scratch. Not worth mentioning. I participated in a sortie just about twilight. The enemy tanks had been destroyed and we were determined to capture the survivors. In a mad charge we swept them before us but I didn’t see the surrender – the clubbed end of a rifle slugged me unconscious, lacerating and tearing open my scalp.

For one week I was out unable to fight not even knowing what was going on. During my convalescence I fell in love. Romantic, isn’t it. In the midst of all this terror, both of us certain we would never live through the battle, Deborah and I fell in love.

I didn’t find this out until several days later but it was Deborah who saved my life. When she saw me fall in the melee she dashed out of the shelter of the building and dragged me back. How she was not hit by a flying bullet, or a stray shell fragment none could explain.

Anyway, for the record, we fell in love. I write this because it is important not because it was me or even because of Deborah. It is important because it proves that life went on even in the shadow of death. We were married during the siege and we both spent our wedding night on the barricades.

Realization had finally come to the gestapo that they were dealing with an organized revolt Orders came from Berlin that the ghetto was to be destroyed. Somehow we knew this. How, I cannot tell, but we have our own intelligence which maintained liaison with the Polish underground throughout the siege.

Once, I know, we asked them to rise with us and they sorrowfully answered. “For us, the time is not yet ripe.”

And we fought on, each apartment a fort, each building a citadel. Slowly under the weight of superior force we gave up for each advance they made but we paid too. We fought with everything we had, boiling water, bricks, cobblestones, but still our ammunition could not last. Each day our ranks were thinned, more and more.

On the eighth day of the siege our spirits were greatly raised by the news that the prisoners in the Pawiak jail had heard of our uprising and had sent a message to us saying. “Save us and we will fight for you.” Now was the time for the captured German uniforms. That night 400 of us donned the swastika, slipped through the German cordon, and attacked the prison stockade. We were successful. All the prisoners, including Nazi deserters joined our ranks.

The fiercest attack came on the ninth day. Tanks poured through the breaches in the ghetto wall, cannon lumbering behind them. Volley after volley was leveled against us. Our suicide squads met this attack by disguising themselves in German uniforms and crawling under the tanks to blow themselves and the tanks up. For the Nazis their loss of life was terrific. They withdrew and gave up the attack.

From then on the horror began in the ghetto. Each night we would be bombed with incendiaries. We organized fire brigades and fought the flames as best as we could but we could not save all the buildings. Night after night other houses were consumed in the flames. The ghetto became a funeral pyre for our warriors, and our women and children.

We hoped and prayed that our example would fire the rest of enslaved Poland to revolt. But the days passed and the battle did not spread beyond the confines of the ghetto.

Meanwhile we fought on and on and on, retreating from building to building, killing as long as we could, dying as best we could.

Now this is the morning of the forty-second day. This is the last day. We know it Deborah knows it. I know it

Today all of us will die.

Already, as I write this on that roof of the last building left standing in the area, the sun is beginning to rise in the east. With the dawn will come the last and final attack.

It is a miracle that we have lasted this long. Forty-two days. Six weeks. Seven, days to each week. Twenty-four hours to each day. Sixty minutes to each hour. Sixty seconds to each minute – and each second filled with fighting, the rumble of tanks through the narrow ghetto streets, the clipped staccato of machine gun bullets, the bark of rifles, the crackle of flames burning the ghetto, the sound St buildings collapsing, bombs bursting, the sound and the smell of death.

From my eyrie up here I can see all of the ghetto. Remnants, of buildings thrust upward from the ground like jagged teeth. There is debris everywhere. Bodies lie unburied, rotting. In the distance, out of rifle shot, I can see the Germans regrouping, getting ready for the final lunge.

I have little time for they will come soon. I do not know whether or not this will ever be read. But this story must be told. The world must listen. They must know of the Jews of Warsaw. They must hear of the descendants of the Maccabees, the sons of Joshua and of Gideon, the warriors whom, unafraid as David, faced the nazi Goliath.

***

Again I am on the roof. Fate has reserved me for the last. This building has six floors. Fourteen stairs separate each floor. On each of these steps we have left a life, taking two for each one we gave.

Deborah, my wife, was the first to die this morning. She expired in my arms. I ask no more. Soon I will join her.

We fought for every room, every stick of furniture. We covered ourselves with glory.

Now only I am left but they will not have me alive.

With me on the roof I have the flag of the Jews, the flag of the nation that is no nation.

I am going to wrap myself in it and I am going to jump off the roof. I will die as Anna and her sons did in ancient times.

I die but in my dying I know the Jews will live, forever. We are tough. We will bounce back. The Jews will never die.

I will die as a Jew should, shrouded with the flag of my people, with the Shema on my lips, for my name is Israel.

Some comments…

Obviously a work of fiction, perhaps “Warsaw Epitaph” was inspired by contemporary news accounts and fiction in The Forward (Forverts), The Jewish Morning Journal, and Der Tog, as well as the “general” press.

In any event, regardless of his sources, some facets of his story are intriguing. Such as…

…The comment about, “…Reb Shmulkevich, that harmless old sage, a lover of the classics and a student of the Talmud all his life,” evokes the question: Would an elderly Talmudic Scholar in the Warsaw of 1943 even be a devotee of “the classics” (implying secular literature…?), in the first place? Perhaps this characterization of a rabbi as a scholar who bridged the worlds of Talmud and contemporary culture, was intended to facilitate a largely secular audience’s identification with the story.

…The narrator, symbolically named “Israel”, describes himself as, “…a Talmud student, a believer in the Commandments. “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Really? If “Israel” was a “Talmud student”, then he certainly needed to brush up on his Tanach, for that statement is a disconcertingly common mistranslation of the sixth commandment, probably inspired by secular or non-Jewish sources. The correct text actually reads, “You shall not murder.”

…The sentence, “We knew the Hitlerites would strike to quell our revolt,” would – yes – actually be correct in the setting of this story. Though I’ve never encountered this word – “Hitlerites” – in American or British news reports, military documents, or popular articles in reference to German military forces or German WW II war crimes, the appellation was commonly used as a noun and / or epithet in Soviet WW II news items and military documents (along with the terms “Fascist”, “German-Fascists”, and “Occupiers”) as opposed to the simple and more valid term “Germans”.

…“Beside the Polish colors and the red flag we flew the pennant of Zion, the Star of David flying for the first time in this war.” I don’t know enough about the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt to know if the Polish national flag, some variant of a communist or Soviet “red” flag, and Zionist flag, were simultaneously flown during the revolt. Perhaps there’s something about this in Marek Edelman’s The Ghetto Fights (listed below).

Withall, the essay, like “Why I Fight,” is a fine example of Jack’s literary skill. What it lacks in historical veracity it makes up for – at least, by the standards of the day – in being an attempt at sincerely expressing anguish, solidarity, and inspiration.

______________________________

Jack Zurofsky’s portrait, which accompanied the article in The Philadelphia Inquirer…

______________________________

A photo of Jack and New York Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, in a photo published in the Brooklyn Eagle on June 3, 1944. Originally from Manhattan, Jack resided lived in Brooklyn with his sister, prior to entering the Army.

______________________________

Jack Zurofsky passed away in mid-September of 1999.

Alas, I know nothing more about Ben Weiner. I assume that he, too, has since left this life.

But, Ben’s words remain as valid now, as they did seventy-seven years ago.

And, given ideological, political, and sociological trends in the world of 2020, even more.

________________________________________

References

Communication from Jack J. Zurofsky’s daughter, Rena. (Thank you, Rena!)

News Articles (Chronologically Listed)

Corporal Ben Weiner

Jewish Times (Baltimore), Sept. 24, 1943, “We Fight For The Jew, Too” – A Soldier in North Africa Describes His Credo (Essay by Ben Weiner)

Jewish Advocate (Boston), Dec. 16, 1943 – “We Fight for the Jew, Too”, by Corporal Ben Weiner

Corporal Jack J. Zurofsky

New York Times, Dec. 25, 1943, “Yule Cheer Buoys Troops in Algiers”

New York Times, Feb. 27, 1944, “G.I. Cast In Algiers Ready For Its Show”

New York Times, May 14, 1944, “Brooklyn Soldier Wins Essay Prize”

New York Times, Sept. 14, 1999, Death notice for Jack J. Zurofsky

Philadelphia Inquirer, May 14, 1944, “‘Why I Fight’ – Corporal, 28, in North Africa Wins Army Essay Contest”

New York Daily News, May 22, 1944, “Listening In, with Ben Gross” (Eddie Cantor’s upcoming radio narration of Jack Zurofsky’s essay, scheduled for June 11, 1944)

Jewish Advocate, June 8, 1944, “In Our Country’s Service” (Biographical profile of Corporal Jack Zurofsky)

Jewish Advocate, Oct. 19, 1944, “Warsaw Epitaph – ‘Today I Die'”, by Corporal Jack J. Zurofsky (Essay about Warsaw Ghetto Revolt)

Jewish Telegraphic Agency News Bulletin, No. 124, June 29, 1961, “Jack J. Zurofsky to Head CJFWF Community Relations Programs”

– and –

Dublin, Louis I., and Kohs, Samuel C., American Jews in World War II – The Story of 550,000 Fighters for Freedom, The Dial Press, New York, N.Y., 1947

Edelman, Marek, The Ghetto Fights – Translation of a pamphlet published in Warsaw, Poland, in 1945 by the Central Committee of the “Bund”, American Representation of the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Poland, New York, N.Y., 1946

Gilbert, Martin, Atlas of Jewish History, Dorset Press, 1976

161

2020 06 30

The World at War, The Jews in War: Jewish Military Service in World War One, in David Vital’s “A People Apart”

Thus far, many of the posts at TheyWereSoldiers have focused upon Jewish military service in the Second World War. While I possess a vast amount of information “waiting in the wings” for future posts pertaining to that era, some of my forthcoming posts may (? – !) have a change of emphasis: I hope to focus upon aspects of Jewish military service in the (now) over-a-century-passed First World War, or, as that conflict was known until the advent of World War Two, the “Great War”.

By way of a preface to this vast topic, I searched for a substantive, yet not overly detailed summary of Jewish military service in the military forces of both the Allies and Central Powers during the years of 1914-1918.

Then, I remembered Dr. David Vital’s magisterial, brilliantly written book A People Part – A Political History of the Jews in Europe, 1789-1939, which includes – as an introduction – just such an account. There, Dr. Vital’s describes the military experience of European Jewry in the First World War in sociological, cultural, political (and geopolitical) terms. (This text appears within the book’s third and final section, entitled “New Dispensations”, as the start of Chapter 7, pertinently entitled “War”, on pages 647 to 651.)

Dr. Vital’s treatment of Jewish military service in the Great War is consistent with the underlying nature of his book. His 896 page monograph (in the softbound edition, the cover of which is displayed below) covers a 150-year-span of the history of European Jewry in a tone that is at once analytical, quietly impassioned, and practically (well, seems to me…I couldn’t put the book down) novelistic in literary style. This is particularly so in the sense that the “contemporary” reader – contemplating Vital’s text from the vantage of the early 21st century, after the events recounted in the book have receded into and become part of the past – already “knows” how the story will conclude … even as the innumerable individuals mentioned within the book’s pages, by the very nature of time would not, could not, and did not.

Notably, the late Dr. Robert S. Wistrich wrote a very insightful review of A People Apart that appeared in the November, 1999 issue of Commentary. While praising Dr. Vital’s book, Dr. Wistrich expressed ambivalence about what he deems to have the book’s focus upon interpretation of Jewish history centered upon politics and power relations, coupled with a relative lack of attention to the contributions and successes of European Jewry. Be that as it may, the overall thrust of his review is solidly positive. Other reviews – all laudatory – can be found at GoodReads.

__________________________

By way of digression, thus far, my posts at this blog have avoided presenting opinions, musings, or speculations about culture, politics, and religion. Yet, the verbal “structure” of the title of Dr. Vital’s Book – the end of which temporally “brackets” the course of European Jewish history within the time-frame of “1789-1939”, can’t help but make one ponder the condition of the Jewish people in contemporary times: Only one year before the commencement of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, whether a historian in a future distant, or a future only a few decades from now, will compose a study paralleling A People Apart – for the history of post-WW II European Jewry; for the history of American Jewry – or whether such a work will be unnecessary, is as yet unknown.

What is certain about the history of the Jewish people (and, truth be told, the history of all men) is that though there can be similarities in the pattern and course of events between historical eras, history never repeats itself, from one era to another, with complete geometric congruence. The only certainty we possess about the future is that “things” and “events”; “occurrences” and “circumstances” – in the lives of individual men and women; within families; among communities; in nations; and, within civilizations – can be expected to continue much as they always have.

Until, of course, an era arrives when they no longer do so.

__________________________

So. With appreciation and acknowledgement to Dr. Vital, his text is presented verbatim, below.

“THE Jews of Europe passed through the valley of the shadow of death during the years 1914-18 with the rest of the continent’s population – which is to say, as best they could. That they were no more spared the crippling horrors of the war than any one else was at once the result and the supreme expression of the radical change in their circumstances. The days when, insignificant exceptions apart, it was natural, but also possible, for Jews to keep out of the way when the gentiles foolishly and incomprehensibly fought each other were over. Where their participation in continental warfare, if any, had been on an essentially individual basis – as bankers and provisioners, but only very rarely as soldiers – it was now first and foremost as ordinary fighting men in the ranks of each of the armies of the belligerents. Countless numbers of perfectly ordinary, non-political Jewish people marched off to war and to personal, often fatal involvement in the great and terrifying events that proceeded to unfold from August 1914 onwards along with all the other ordinary, non-political people who were marching off to war. They did so, moreover, for all the world as if it were a natural and (in central and western Europe) a worthy and desirable thing to do. Their political masters had still to determine whether, and if so in what way and to what degree, further advantage was to be taken of their services. And in this respect there were differences. In Russia there was no question at all of access to positions of influence and authority of any kind. In Germany too the contradiction between what wartime state interest appeared to dictate and the political and military classes’ refusal to acquiesce in a really serious relaxation of the rules by which society had been governed in the past remained incapable of resolution to the end. It would be worn down somewhat by undeniable necessity – as in the case of the sullen (and temporary) appointment of Walther Rathenau to a post as a principal organizer of the German war economy – but, no lasting change occurred. In the west Jews were taken on freely enough wherever they seemed likely to bring advantage and, unlike in Germany, regret at the prospect of irreversible change in the social order tended to be wistful rather than bitter. The unspoken rule remained, however, that while, when it was really necessary to do so, Jews might be admitted to the inner sanctums where high policy was decided, they would only be given places below the political salt, those reserved for specialists and experts, not those that would entitle them to wield real power.

Admission into the ranks of the armies themselves was free and unrestricted everywhere. In the dire circumstances of the times and the universal, unslakeable thirst for men to man the trenches, the old assumption that the Jew was useless as a fighting man was forgotten. In an environment that had generally been alien and hostile to him, the Jewish soldier was apt to be treated rather more decently than he had been in the past. If he distinguished himself in battle he was more likely than before to be awarded the honours that were his due. In some armies distinction in battle opened the way to promotion as well. But not in all. The imperial Russian army stood its ground in this respect to the end: its high command, with the full approval of the Tsar, refusing to sanction the granting of officer rank even to the most able, willing, and battle-proven of Jewish soldiers whatever the occasional fair-minded regimental commanded might say on his behalf. But even here matters were not absolutely cut and dried. Officer rank as military surgeons was conceded to Jewish doctors. Here and there, where the dearth of literate, willing, and responsible echt-Russian candidates had reduced a battalion or brigade commander to desperation, the official eye might briefly overlook an individual Jewish soldier’s being given de facto authority to perform an officer’s role. (1) (Of the flatly infamous treatment to which the Russian army’s high command subjected the civilian Jewish population in the area through which its forces moved on their way to the west and, more especially, on their retreat back towards the east, more will be said in in a moment.)

The German army, previously at one with the Russians in this respect, now rescinded its once unwavering refusal to promote suitable Jews to officer rank. By the end of the war some two thousand Jews had been commissioned. Still, no Jew was allowed to reach senior rank in the German army, unlike the Austro-Hungarian army in which, interestingly, some Jews had held rank as general officers even before the war. And the true spirit in which the German high command viewed the matter of then Jewish citizens, and that of Jews in uniform in particular, is conveyed by its notoriously bloody-minded decision in October 1916 to launch a formal investigation into the contribution of the German Jews to the national war effort and of Jewish soldiers to service in the trenches by initiating a systematic counting of heads. This so-called Judenzahlung (or Jew-count) was not only nastily hostile, but unwarranted. Actual Jewish Frontsoldaten (front-line soldiers) were outraged. It was, someone said, ‘as if the yellow patch had been sewn back on’. (2) A tiny handful of pacifists and extraordinarily courageous and determined social democrats had indeed opposed the war and been jailed or otherwise hounded out of society and home. But rare exceptions apart, German Jewry’s support for the war had been immensely (in retrospect almost embarrassingly) wholehearted at every level: from men of the greatest academic distinction (Hermann Cohen, the Kantian philosopher, and Fritz Haber, the chemist, for example) down to the simplest and least politically imaginative petit bourgeois. When the war was over, the society of Jewish Frontsoldaten, the stain on their honour still burning, conducted a meticulous survey of its own. It found that at least 100,000 Jews had served in the German armed forces or 18 per cent of the total Jewish population of imperial Germany of 550,000. Of these 12,000 had been killed in action or died of wounds: namely 2.2 per cent of German Jewry. Their study further demonstrated that these figures were virtually identical with those for the population of the city of Munich (a fair comparison, the Jews being a largely skilled and educated, urban population, much like the citizens of Munich): 645,000 citizens in all; 13,700 war dead. (3) The German general staff’s own figures were never published. But perhaps the most ominous aspect of the Judenzahlung was that when it was proposed and brought up in the Reichstag it was supported not only by the right wing, as was to be expected, but by the Catholic Centre Party and the National Liberals under Gustav Stresemann as well.

No such inquiries were instituted in other countries; nor were any warranted. (4) The general record of Jewish participation in the fighting forces of the various belligerents was in each case at least as high as that of the general population and in some cases higher. No figures as precise as those collated in Germany are available, but it has been fairly reliably estimated that some 450,000 Jews served in the immense Russian army – where it appears, moreover, that in consequence of the severely restrictive rules governing the military functions Jews might or might not perform, they tended to serve somewhat more commonly than others as front-line infantry soldiers and to suffer higher than average casualty rates in consequence. Some 275,000 Jews served in the Austro-Hungarian army: c. 11 per cent of the total Jewish population of the empire; 41,000 served in the British armed forces or a little under 14 per cent of British Jewry; (5) 35,000 in the French army: or c. 20 per cent of the total Jewish population of France. The overall figure for Jews serving in all belligerent armies (including the American army, in due course, in which the proportion of Jews was exceptionally high) was of the order of 1,500,000 or about 2 per cent of all mobilized manpower. It was therefore roughly double that of the Jewish proportion of the entire population of the countries concerned. (6)

There was thus a sense – an ironic one, one may think – in which the Great War, in practice, was the supreme occasion on which the Jews Europe were called upon to be ‘useful’ to each of the several states which they were nationals in very much the sense that those men of the Enlightenment who had troubled themselves either to think about or to legislate for the Jews or both had had in mind. The Jews’ skills, knowledge, experience, and native energy – coupled, in the central and western states, but not totally absent even in the east under the Russians, to their habitual loyalty to the sovereign power in the land and their manifest desire to please it – proved as easily available for harnessing to the machinery of war as Joseph II of Austria or his advisers had ever wished. And the total effect, again very much as the men of the Enlightenment would have wished, was further to promote and hasten their acculturation. The war initiated none of the essential processes of social and cultural change to which European Jewry was subject. But by dint of scattering and dissolving great numbers of young Jewish men into the larger mass of mobilized society on a basis that was unprecedentedly random it did greatly accelerate them and intensify their impact. It loosened the ties binding the individual to his community. It provided Jewish soldiers – much as it provided great numbers of other disoriented people – with new, alternative, if of course no more than temporary focuses of loyalty. And while it lasted there would be much else in its impact to support those who felt that the now century-old, imperfectly kept promise of fair dealing and equitable integration had not, after all, been false. None the less, perversely, the lasting impact of the war so far as the Jews were concerned was to reassert and re-emphasize the ascription to the Jewish people of their ancient status as a distinct – and for certain purposes justifiably autonomous – national entity. The major powers of Europe were moved, each in its way, in varying degrees, and, to be sure, with unequal consequences, to consider whether and how their own urgent national-political needs and interests might be squared with what were reckoned to be the collective needs, Interests, and aspirations of the Jewish people. This was a most dramatic alteration of perspective, as remote from the ordinary hostility that fueled policy towards them in some cases as from the somewhat more considerate, but always unsystematic and severely limited, philanthropic basis on which their affairs were viewed (when they were viewed at all). Nothing, certainly, could have been more remote from the legacy and purposes of the Enlightenment itself.”

______________________________

The following information, from The Committee for A Jewish Army’s 1943 publication The Fighting Jew, presents a statistical overview of Jewish military service in the First World War. The data is, “Condensed from the booklet Jews in the World War, published by the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, in October of 1941.” Notably the figures given below are identical to those presented in Martin Gilbert’s Atlas of Jewish History, on a map (appropriately) entitled “Jewish Soldiers 1914-1918”, on page 87 of that work.

Personnel Mobilized

Allies
Belgium	1,000
British Empire	50,000
France	55,000
Greece	4,400
Italy	6,000
Rumania	38,000
Russia	650,000
Serbia	1,200
United States	250,000

Central Powers
Austria-Hungary	320,000
Germany	100,000
Bulgaria	12,500

Total Casualties (Killed or Died in Service)

Allies
Belgium	125
British Empire	2,400
France	9,500
Greece	300
Italy	500
Rumania	900
Russia	100,000
Serbia	250
Turkey	18,000
United States	3,400

Central Powers
Austria-Hungary	40,000
Bulgaria	1,000
Germany	12,000
Turkey	1,000

(1) See Yohanan Rattner’s autobiography, for example: Hayyai ve-ani (Tel Aviv, 1978)

(2) Cited in Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State (Oxford, 1992), 205

(3) The Reichsverband Judischer Frontsoldaten’s compilation was published in 1932 as the 423-page Die judischen Gefallenen des deutschen Heeres, der deutschen Marine und der deutschen Schutztruppen 1914-1918; ein Gedenkbuch. It consisted chiefly of the names, regimental affiliations, and dates of death of the war dead (where known). The great warlord himself, Hindenburg, now president of the republic, contributed a friendly preface.

(4) One partial exception was the case of Jews of Russian nationality who had settled in Great Britain, who for the greater part of the war were neither obliged nor permitted to serve in the British army, and who regarded consequent pressure to return to Russia to serve the Tsar as absurd, if not monstrous. They were therefore a source of unending embarrassment to the established segments of English Jewry, but of opportunity to the Zionists who saw them as natural recruits to the ‘Jewish Legion’ that they founded to fight alongside the Allies (on which more below).

(5) The proportion of the general population serving the British armed forces was 11.5 per cent (Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry (Oxford, 1992), 235).

(6) A.G. Duker, ‘Jews in the World War’, Contemporary Jewish Record, 2, 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1939); Y. Slutsky, and M. Kaplan, Hayyalim yehudiim be-ziv’ot eiropa (Tel Aviv, 1967); Encyclopaedia Judaica, xi, col. 1550; Felix A. Theilhaber, Die Juden im Wcltkriege (Berlin, 1916); Michael Adler, The Jews of the Empire and the Great War (London, 1919).

References

Gilbert, Martin, Atlas of Jewish History, Dorset Press [no location given], 1976

Gitelman, Zvi, A Century of Ambivalence – The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, Schocken Books [Published in cooperation with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research], New York, N.Y., 1988

Nathans, Benjamin, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939 by David Vital [Book Review], The Jewish Quarterly Review, Spring, 2006, 288-295, at JSTOR.org

Vital, David, A People Apart – A Political History of the Jews in Europe, 1789-1939, Oxford University Press, 2001

Vital, David, A People Apart – A Political History of the Jews in Europe, at GoodReads.com

Wistrich, Robert S., A People Apart, by David Vital (Book Review), Commentary, November, 1999

The Fighting Jew [no author], The Committee for a Jewish Army, New York, N.Y., 1943

Thoughts from The Frontier: The Kurds: A Submerged Nation, by Michael Salomon (Jewish Frontier, April, 1949)

This second article, written by Michael Salomon and published in April of 1949, summarizes the history of the Kurdish people. However, the main theme – akin to Zev Sherf’s 1946 article, but presented in much more detail – is a chronicle of British foreign policy in the Persian Gulf, by which a League of Nations Mandate which would have eventually have permitted autonomy for the Kurdish and Yezidi peoples, was calculatedly abandoned in favor of British geopolitical interests.

As noted by Salomon, “Identical situations called for similar policies in Palestine and Kurdistan, where Great Britain, after having played up to the Zionists and Kurds, as well as the Arabs, finally played the Arab card at the expense of the others.” Likewise, “The guarantee of a British Mandate for twenty-five years over the territories assigned to Iraq was the sole legal protection of the Kurdish population, and that was soon to fail them. So sure was Great Britain of attaining its strategic and economic ends anyway, that it no longer seemed necessary to maintain a Mandate over Iraq.”

______________________________

The Kurds: A Submerged Nation

By Michel Salomon

Jewish Frontier
April, 1949

THE EMERGENCE OF ISRAEL has already caused sever disturbances in all the Middle East and will produce still more serious ones in the future. Particularly, the struggle of the Jews of Palestine against the Arab States will appreciably affect the Kurdish national liberation movement, especially in Iraq.

Because of their numbers and the strategic importance of Kurdistan, with its exceptional subterranean riches, the Kurds are an element of prime importance in the mosaic of peoples and ethnic groupings of the Middle East. A factious people, split for centuries among civilizations which have been unable to assimilate them in spite of close affinity, the Kurds constitute one of those formidable unsolved problems raised by the eternal “Eastern question”. It is natural for the maneuvers of English imperialism to have woven themselves deeply into Palestine and Kurdistan during and after the First World War. A glance at the Near Eastern map shows why. The richest oil resources in this part of the world are in the vicinity of Kirkuk. The main branch of the pipeline to the sea empties at Haifa. The other leads to Tripoli and Lebanon, zones outside of the British sphere of influence under the Anglo-French agreements of 1916 (Blue Zones) and 1918 (Western Zone).

Identical situations called for similar policies in Palestine and Kurdistan, where Great Britain, after having played up to the Zionists and Kurds, as well as the Arabs, finally played the Arab card at the expense of the others.

This article will deal mainly with the struggles of the Kurds in Iraq, and we shall try to show to what extent the so-called “Arab Bloc,” homogenous and girding the state of Israel on all sides, is a chimera. There exits numerous national entities in the Near East, Moslem or Christian, Maronites, Druses, Circassians, Assyrians, Kurds, etc., who are trying to cast off the tyrannical yoke of the Arab States, and who, by virtue of this fact have a natural affinity with Israel.

KURDISTAN, the veritable backbone of the Middle East, occupies an area if about 500,000 square kilometers, running through Asiatic Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and to a very small extent in Soviet Armenia and Syria. It can be compared very roughly to a right triangle with its base in the north running from Alexandretta on the Mediterranean, on the west, to Kars near the Turco-Soviet border in the east; the side of the right angle, after jutting across the Soviet frontier, crosses the western portion of Iranian Azerbaijan, rimming the left bank of the large lake of Urmia, and drops sharply to the Persian Gulf; the hypotenuse first describes a concave area up to Badra at the Iranian border, at the level of Baghdad, then a convex area shouldered by the heights of the Jebel Hamrine ending at Mosul, and from there it continues in a straight line, following essentially the Turco-Syrian border, back to the port of Alexandretta. A mountainous country, formed by high chains running northwest-southeast, Kurdistan is covered with fine forests and dug out by valleys difficult of access but famous for their fertility.

The Iraqi portion of Kurdistan, in the southwest, is the least important, at least as regards area and population, being about an eighth of the territory claimed by the Kurds and containing about 200,000 inhabitants out of the 9,000,000 who inhabit “Kurdish soil”. (1) Nevertheless it is the richest part and the one which has aroused the most outside interest, since it includes the famous oil deposits of Kirkuk and Mosul, which yielded about 4,000,000 tons in 1948 and which are expected to go to 16,000,000 tons in the very near future. There are in Iraq Kurdistan about a dozen towns, of which Suleimania the capital of Kurdish nationalism, Erbil and Kirkuk alone are of some importance.

THE KURDS are a very old nation of Aryan origin whose traces go back to remotest antiquity. Descendants of the Medes and the Achaemenides, the Kurds were devotees of Zoroastrianism and had the privileged task of guarding the temples in the Aryan empires of the East. They were converted to Islam in the 9th century. Although they have given to Islam some strong personalities and several royal dynasties – the great Saladin, conqueror of the Crusaders under Richard the Lion Heart was a Kurd – the Kurds are in the main very lukewarm Moslems. Islamism does not seem to have penetrated among them very deeply. Numerous travelers have noted this. In 1839 Vol Moltke, (2) then a young officer attached to the Turkish general staff, while accompanying a unit on a campaign of repression in Kurdistan, noted that the Kurdish landscape does not show any minarets, a detail since confirmed by many travelers. (3) The majority of Kurds are of the Sunnite rite but they include some Shiite elements. There exist, finally, almost 100,000 Yezidis, or Manichean Kurds, who still cling to the old ancestral cult. A large anti-Islamic movement has been discernable for several years among the Kurds, affecting especially the intellectuals and the youth, particularly in the lands of Arabic language such as Iraq and Syria – a defense reaction at once political, social, and cultural. The baleful influence which Islamism has never ceased to exert in Kurdish history is denounced vigorously by numerous leaders of the Kurdish national movement, among them the great poet Djeguer Khanin, who lives at present in Syria.

UNTIL the Treaty of sevres, which completed the dismemberment of “the sick man of Europe,” the Kurds of Mesopotamia suffered the fate of all the Kurds in the Ottoman Empire. Relations between Turks and Kurds were already strained at the end of the 18th century when the Kurdish principalities, until then faithful to the Empire, broke with the Sublime Porte, whose drive toward centralization was destroying the semi-independence which they had enjoyed previously. From the first Kurdish rising of Baban in 1806, to 1886, there were countless armed revolts. With the appearance of the authoritarian Young Turkish Republic conditions became much worse than under the regime of the Sultans. The Kurds were practically in a state of permanent insurrection. After the defeat of the Central Powers and their ally the Turks, the Treaty of Sevres was signed with the latter on August 10th, 1920. It was at that time considered a veritable “Kurdish Balfour Declaration”. It recognized the right of the Kurds to independence explicitly, in fact, in its articles 62, 63 and 64.

“…The Commission sitting at Constantinople and composed of three members named by the governments of Britain, France and Italy respectively, shall arrange, within six months from the effective date of this treaty, local autonomy for those regions where the Kurdish element predominates.” (Preamble to article 63.)

The clause aimed particularly at the Kurds of Mesopotamia was the following: “…If and when the said renunciation (meaning the renunciation of Turkish nationality by the Kurds) shall have taken place, no objections will be raised by the principle Allied powers against the voluntary adherence to this independent Kurd state of those Kurds inhabiting the part of Kurdistan included up to now in the Vilayet of Mosul.” (Article 64.)

These arrangements were destined to remain a dead letter. At the Treaty of Lausanne on July 23rd, 1923, the preceding articles were juggled away, and the cunning of Mustafa Kemal, conqueror of the Greeks in Asia Minor, reduced to ineffectiveness the timid provisions of the Treaty concerning the protection of minorities. Most of the Kurds were subjected anew to the policy of assimilation of the Turkish Government. Not so, however, the million of them located beyond the armistice line of Moudros. The special clause of Article 64 of the Treaty of Sevres could still hold for them. In default of attachment to the Vilayet of Mosul to the Kurdish State that had just been buried so neatly, the vilayet could nevertheless attain independence itself and thus became the first free province of Kurdistan. The country which was to become Iraq, between Palestine (there was no Transjordan then) and Iran, comprised three vilayets under the Ottoman Empire, those of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul. The first two were predominantly Arab, the last almost entirely populated by Kurds. If not for the desire of the English to control the Middle East and exploit the oil resources of Mosul, would Iraq have been born? We doubt it. In his work on Mesopotamia, Sir A. Wilson, first High Commissioner of His Majesty in Iraq, writes: “The concept of Iraq as an independent nation had hardly taken form, for the country lacked geographical, economic and racial homogeneity.” Further on, the author writes with a naivete not devoid of flavor: “The vilayets of Basra and Baghdad could hardly be expected to maintain their existence as an autonomous state without the revenues it was hoped eventually to obtain from the Vilayet of Mosul.”

Attaching the Vilayet of Mosul to the Arab portion of Iraq was an absurdity, since three-quarters of its population were non-Arab. Seven out of ten inhabitants were Kurds and the vilayet included, besides, important communities of Yezidis, Assyrians, and Jews.

AT THIS point there enfolds a particularly sordid chapter of British Middle East diplomacy. The methods were the same as those adopted elsewhere, with the Zionists. Thus England betrayed for the first time the spirit of a mandate entrusted to her, which enjoined her to lead the communities later inequitably swallowed up in the political frontiers of Iraq to their complete emancipation, and not to favor the Arabs alone.

The English entered Kirkuk in May, 1918. The named a young Kurdish notable, Sheik Mahmoud, governor of the vilayet. The Turks recaptured the city and the English did not return until the Armistice in November. In the meantime Kurdish national sentiment had grown. The Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916 and the Balfour Declaration of November 7, 1917, had strengthened hopes in Kurdish political circles. In southwest Kurdistan the nationalists gathered around Sheik Mahmoud, whose influence grew continually and who in fact exercised real authority over a large part of the country.

In 1918, the English, true to that empiricism in matters of foreign policy which in an early stage leads them to play all the cards, named Mahmoud governor of a small part of the Mosul vilayet situated north of the mountain stream of the “Grand-Zab”. Sheik Mahmoud was not content with so little. In May 1919 he descended on Suleimania in the heart of the vilayet and proclaimed himself King of Kurdistan. This did not suit the English, who sent in a unit under the command of General Frazer. The ephemeral kingdom was dissolved and Sheik Mahmoud taken prisoner. The short period from 1919 to 1923 saw the sealing of the fate of the Kurds of Mesopotamia. From the dissolution of the “kingdom” of Mahmoud to the Treaty of Lausanne, the English, although they had definitely sacrificed the Kurds to Iraq, continued to maneuver, for reasons which Sir A. Wilson expresses with his usual simplicity. “…The degree of control of southwest Kurdistan, must depend on the needs of the country – Iraq, and on imperial strategic considerations.” (4) Having obtained the League of Nations Mandate over the three former Turkish vilayets in May 1920, the English called the Emir Feisal, who had just been expelled by the French from Damascus, to the throne of Iraq, in August 1921. The violent repression of several insurrections – the RAF came into action four times from March 1923 to May 1924 – at the same time did not deter them from making specific and repeated promises of local autonomy:

“His Britannic Majesty’s Government and the Government of Iraq recognize the right of the Kurds living within the frontiers of Iraq to establish a Kurdish Government inside these frontiers.” (Declaration of the British High Commissioner, December 24, 1922.)

After the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, burying all hope of a free Kurdistan, the English, henceforth free of all obligations, let the Iraqis take over on their own. There was no longer any question of local autonomy, or even semi-autonomy. The Kurds were accorded at most, as a matter of form, some small privileges.

“The Iraqi Government has no intention of appointing Arab officials in Kurdish districts, except for technicians. Nor does it intend to oblige the inhabitants of the Kurdish districts to use the Arabic language in official communication. The rights of the inhabitants and of the civil and religious communities in the said districts will be safeguarded.” (Declaration of the Iraqi Council of Ministers, July 11, 1923.) In fact, however, these promises were never kept.

Now masters of the game, the British requested a technical commission of the League of Nations to delineate the Turco-Iraqian frontiers, asking that the line take account of “ethnic” considerations. The Commission was courageous enough to oppose the English maneuvers, proclaiming that: “If a conclusion had to be drawn from ethnic considerations, it would lead to the creation of an independent five-eighths of the population. And if such a solution were envisaged, it would be proper to add to the preceding figure the Yezidis, Kurds of the Zoroastrian religion, and the Turks, whose assimilation by the Kurdish element would be easy. In a reckoning made this way, the Kurds would constitute seven-eighths of the population.”

One cannot help noting here a striking analogy with British policy in Palestine towards the end of the Mandate there. The English solicited a commission of inquiry from the League of Nations, as they were to request the participation of the U.S. in their Commission in 1946, and as they requested the UNSCOP from the UN in 1947. Faced with conclusions by these Commissions unfavorable to them, they do not hesitate to override them. Better yet, after some clever maneuvers by the British, who had in the meanwhile made some safe alliances with in the League of Nations, the Council of this body, on the motion of the British delegate, decided on December 16, 1925, to attach the Vilayet of Mosul to Iraq. The Security Council, in pretending last October to ignore the resolution of the General Assembly at its historic session of November 29, 1947, could look back upon an illustrious precedent.

The guarantee of a British Mandate for twenty-five years over the territories assigned to Iraq was the sole legal protection of the Kurdish population, and that was soon to fail them. So sure was Great Britain of attaining its strategic and economic ends anyway, that it no longer seemed necessary to maintain a Mandate over Iraq.

The famous British Middle East expert, D. Clayton, let it be known in February 1929 that his government was ready to have Iraq admitted to the League of Nations in return for a treaty of mutual assistance – or more correctly, of permanent vassalization. The Iraqi, who could refuse their protectors nothing, signed this treaty in 1930. It is still in effect. Together with that treaty concluded with Abdullah of Transjordan on March 22, 1946 and that imposed upon Egypt in 1936, it is the “justification” for Bevin’s political intervention against Israel.

FREE of the mandate and its obligations, especially that or protecting the minorities in Iraq, Great Britain was content to exploit the natural riches of the country and concentrate troops there, leaving to the Iraqis the handling of their “internal” questions. The Kurds understood the situation very well and in their despair revolted under the leadership of Sheikh Mahmoud. “Faced with the incompetence of the Arab army and gendarmerie, the English once more assumed the burden of repression. The RAF bombarded Kurdish localities mercilessly and after eight months of sporadic risings, “order was restored to Kurdistan.” “The RAF bore the brunt of the military operations and the bombardment of villages was inevitable if the rebellion was to be crushed; nevertheless, it took eight months to obtain the surrender of Sheikh Mahmoud.” (5)

At this point, believing the Kurds crushed by British planes and defenseless, the Iraqi government in July 1931 bravely took the offensive to liquidate the “mountain bandits”. This action in broad daylight was a departure from the hypocritical policy of deceit and discrimination by decree. It took this initiative for two reasons: it had the unlimited backing of the British forces in Iraq; and it based its Kurdish policy on coordinated action with the Turks, with whom it had established contact since 1930. Once more the Arab forces were completely routed. The intervention of the RAF again saved them from catastrophe. Under their glorious wings the Iraqis threw themselves on the Kurdish provinces, razing 79 villages to the ground and deporting tens of thousands of Kurds. A final rising of the clan of the Barzani, celebrated in Kurdistan for its bravery, was crushed by the RAF. The Kurds of Iraq were not heard from again.

AT THE beginning of the Second World War, the British services in the Middle East began a feverish activity. The entire Arab world seemed won over to the Axis cause. In Rome Mussolini assumed the title of Protector of Islam. In Berlin the “Arab” section of the Abwehr was in constant contact with Arab fascist organizations in the Middle East and with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was to set up the Moslem legions there after the fall of Rashid Ali in Iraq. In Cairo, the members of the Egyptian parliament in full session went so far as to call for a German victory. The English tried to gain support from all non-Arab communities of the Middle East, the very minorities whom they had lightly sacrificed to the xenophobe imperialism of the young Arab states. The Kurds, among others, were solicited and worked on my emissaries of the Intelligence Service, who went so far as to promise them independence after the victory. Rapidly won over to the Allied cause, they abstained from taking part in the revolt of Rashid Ali in April 1941 and participated substantially in the Allied war effort. (6) As recompense, the British appointed several Kurds as functionaries in Iraqi Kurdistan, always hinting at eventually possibilities of autonomy and even of full sovereignty.

In 1943 a political chief of the Barzanis living in forced residence at Suleimania, Mulla Mustafa, distrusting the vague promises of the English, decided in complicity with Sheik Latif, son of the famous Mahmoud, to try a coup de force. The Iraqi police sent after him were caught and disarmed by Kurdish partisans. The government mobilized the army. It was routed by a few detachments of mountaineers without modern weapons. The government then tried to negotiate. The head of the government, Nun Said, of Kurdish origin, reached agreement without too much difficulty on several of the Kurdish demands, such as a fairer distribution of food to Kurdistan, the building of schools and hospitals, the appointment of autochthonous officials, etc. As we see, the demands of the victors were very modest. When the situation was completely restored and Nuri Said returned to Baghdad, the Regent annulled the engagements undertaken. Nuri Said had to resign for lack or parliamentary support. A new era of repression began.

IN THE SPRING of 1945 nearly 45,000 infantry and police, two motorized units from Egypt, and 25 pursuit and bombardment planes (the total Iraqi air force) under Major General Renton were concentrated on the approaches to Kurdistan to dislodge the 5,000 men of Mulla Mustafa, armed with rifles and machine guns, the latter captured from Iraqis in previous campaigns. The offensive was launched on August 7, 1945. The Iraqi forces were crushed. Violent combats took place at Revanduz and Dallet in the midst of the mountains, where four Iraqi battalions were annihilated. The Kurds took important military posts, and, leaving their mountains, descended on Erbil, on the road to Bagdad, which was now open to them. Panic rage seized the English who already visualized the precious oil of Mosul in Kurdish hands. The RAF attacked more savagely than ever, dropping incendiary and delayed action bombs on the near villages, destroying 55 towns, and leaving a thousand dead and 15,0000 homeless among the civilian population. The Kurds had to yield the ground that had won. The mopping up was left to the eminent specialist General Renton, former commander of the “desert rats” of Libya. London, like Pontius Pilate, could wash its hands since “General Renton was not on the active list of the British Army, but as chief of the military mission at Bagdad was carried on the budget of the Iraqi army.” (7) The incident recalls the “justifications” resorted to when it was decided to unleash General Pasha and his Transjordan Legion on Jerusalem at the end of the Palestine Mandate.

Mulla Mustafa, however, was not beaten. He retired into Iran and the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad was proclaimed, at the same time as the Republic of Azerbaijan. The two ephemeral republics did not live long, for the area was re-occupied by Iranian troops.

FROM 1945 on the position of the Kurds in Iraq became more and more precarious, as did that of the other minorities, Turcomans, Yezidi, and Jews. Iraqi Kurdistan is in a state of virtual siege. Martial law was proclaimed March 12, 1947. A government interdict still prohibits the reconstruction of towns destroyed during the last campaign of repression. About 10,000 Kurds, among them the political and intellectual elite and practically all the able men of the renowned Barzani clan, have been separated from their families and thrown into the sinister concentration camps of But el Ammara and Meyadin, where they have been joined by thousands of Jews accused of “Zionism” and incarcerated after being stripped of all their possessions.

If the Iraqi part in the Palestine hostilities has been so quantitatively and qualitatively feeble, it is the Kurds who are in large measure responsible. Efforts to raise troops among the Kurdish population have had no success. On the contrary, the Israeli victories have dangerously excited the nationalism of the Kurds. Considering the economic and political crisis with which the Iraqi government is wrestling, there is a chance that the Kurdish question will shortly reappear on the Iraqi agenda.

At the beginning of November 1948, demonstrations of a clearly insurrectional nature appeared in all Iraqi Kurdistan. The world press passed this event by almost in silence, but it seems that the term “Kurdish revolution” used by the rare journals which mentioned it (e.g. Jerusalem Journal of December 2) is not altogether unwarranted. At Suleimania a great mass demonstration took place demanding the liberation of political prisoners, the carrying out of economic promises to Kurdistan, and the cessation of the war in Palestine. The police arrested 200 demonstrators, who were released by the crowd, which invaded the prison of Suleimania. At the end of a secret session of the Iraqi parliament, the minutes of which became available in spite of the total news blackout and censorship, the ex-Premier of Iraq, Muzahem Pachachi, stated: “We should have kept the bulk of our troops in Iraq from the beginning, because of the aggravation of the situation in the Kurdish regions. Events have proved that our information was correct, for two weeks ago out Mosul garrison had to be dispatched in all haste to the Suleimania region to put down a new Kurd revolt. Our action is proceeding satisfactorily, but we cannot spare another Iraqi soldier for Palestine. Not only can we not furnish new detachments for the defense of Arab Palestine, but we have to envisage the eventuality of withdrawing the Iraqi forces already on the Palestine front. We must not forget for a single moment that we are surrounded by internal and external enemies.” (8) Independently of other factors such as the traditional rivalry between the Husseini and Hashemite dynasties in the bosom of the Arab League, it is perhaps unnecessary to seek farther than the causes outlined above by the ex-Iraq Premier for the passivity of the Iraqi Army during the Negev battles, despite the frantic SOSs of the Egyptians.

On the morrow of the war of 1914, the interests of the imperial powers were the only factors considered in the partition of the Middle East into states made up of the whole cloth and others arbitrarily enlarged, almost always at the expense of the non-Arab populations. The existence and strengthening of the State of Israel, the first truly sovereign state in the Middle East since Turkey, will lead to a reconsideration of the “Eastern Question,” and will be a factor for peace and economic and social stability in a region of the world that the egoism of the imperial states has tried to keep out of the march of progress.

(1) According to the Mijulgeha Kurdi (National Center of Kurdish Studies, located at Paris), the Kurdish population is distributed as follows:

Afghanistan          100,000
USSR                     160,000
Syria                     250,000
Iraq                    1,200,000 (29% of the total)
Iran                   3,500,000 (23% of the total)
Turkey              4,000,000 (28% of the total)

Figures partially verified by numerous specialists whose objectives are unquestionable, such as Louis Lambout: Les Kurdes et le Droit, Paris, 1947.

(2) Von Moltke: Das Land und Volk der Kurden (Augsberger Allgemeine Zeitung, 1841)
(3) A Turkish proverb says: “The Kurds are Moslems – compared to infidels.”
(4) Sir A. Wilson: Preface to Mesopotamia. Oxford, 1931.
(5) Capt. Philip Mumford. Kurds, Assyrians and Iraq. (Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, Vol. 20, January, 1933).
(6) More than a thousand Kurd parachutists and commandos served in Montgomery’s army.
(7) Palestine Post. August 31, 1945.
(8) Minutes supplied by the Mijulgeha Kurdi. (National Center of Kurdish Studies, Paris.)

Suggested Reading

Berman, Paul, “Realism and the Kurds – Bernard-Henri Lévy presents his extraordinary documentary Peshmerga at the United Nations, but civilization isn’t listening”, Tablet, November 29, 2017

Cohen, Ben, “Western Powers Must Protect Kurds, Urges Iraqi Jew Escorted to Freedom by Masoud Barzani”, Algemeiner, November 6, 2017

Kedar, Mordechai, Lt. Col. (res.), “The U.S. Betrayal of Kurdistan Is a Warning Sign for Israel”, BESA Center, November 22, 2017

Levy, Bernard-Henri, “The Kurds, Trump, and the Decline of American Power – Why the United States’ inexplicable abandonment of the Kurdish people is ‘the geopolitical equivalent of a stock-market crash’”, Tablet, October 30, 2017

Rozhbayane, Rebin, “The Assault on Kirkuk: A Firsthand Account – A frontline Kurdish peshmerga officer describes what it was like to be abandoned by the West in Iraq in October of 2017”, Tablet, May 9, 2018 (Originally appeared in La Règle du Jeu (“The Rules of The Game”), under title “La bataille de Kirkouk, au Kurdistan, racontée par l’un de ses principaux témoins”, May 3, 2018)

Warner, Rex (translator), History of The Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides, Penguin Books, New York, N.Y., 1954 (1980 edition)

Jewish Coalition for Kurdistan

Thoughts from the Frontier: The Kurds in Iraq and Iran, by Zev Sherf (Jewish Frontier, March, 1946)

“…the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.”

This aphorism, from Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, is often quoted (albeit with stylistic and literary variation) in discussions concerning the political, military, and economic actions by nation-states. The central issue raised by the phrase remains a simple, perennial, and perhaps irresolvable aspect of international – and not only international – affairs: What is the place of morality – can there even be a place for morality? – when a nation-state or people of lesser power is confronted and acted upon by a nation-state of greater power, when that “greater” power feels fully confirmed in the logic, rationality, and justice of its own decision-making?

The above phrase appears within passage 89 of the last chapter of Book V of The Peloponnesian War, otherwise known as “The Melian Dialogue”. In essence, this passage represents dialogue and negotiations – as imagined, reconstructed, and dramatized by Thucydides – between representatives of the Athenians, and the Melians, a people inhabiting the Aegean island of Melos.

The Athenians demanded that the Melians surrender, pay tribute to Athens, and join the Delian league (an alliance of city-states led by Athens, juxtaposed against the Peloponnesian League, a parallel and opposing city-state alliance led by Sparta). Insistent on retaining their independence, the Melians refused. Already occupying the island, the Athenians set siege to the city of Melos, which surrendered during the winter of 416 or 415 B.C.E.

Upon the Melian surrender, the Athenians killed all the adult males, and sold the surviving women and children into slavery.

______________________________

Inevitably, the world has changed since the war between Athens and Sparta. Nations and have arisen and fallen; peoples maintained their identity – with the great majority – through gradual and voluntary acculturation and assimilation, demoralization, conquest, or worse – passing out of existence and blending into surrounding societies. That technology has changed and is changing the world; how man looks at the world; how man looks at fellow man – assuming that in the FaceBooked and Twitterfied world 2018 he yet remains capable of “observing” his fellow man – is a given.

Yet withal, human nature – the nature of “man” as an individual; the nature of mankind as a whole, has not changed. And, neither has the issue embodied in the Melian Dialogue: The seeming perennial irreconcilability of morality and realpolitik.

This was addressed by the Jewish Frontier in the late 1940s, in two articles that addressed the history, political situation, and future of the Kurdish people.

Certainly it’s no coincidence that these articles appeared in the late 1940s; one before, and one after, Israel’s Declaration of Independence – and thus, its re-establishment as an autonomous Jewish nation-state – on May 14, 1948. While the parallels between the geopolitical position and historical experience of the Kurds and Jewish people are obviously not identical (no historical parallels ever are; ever can be) their situations shared enough commonalities for the Jewish Frontier to merit their publication.

Thucydides confronted us with the observation:“…the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept,” which, based on the lived experience of nations and even individuals, seems to be true.

But, this observation carries within its own negation, for it does not address the fact that the very qualities of “strength” and “weakness” are neither absolute, guaranteed, or indefinite.

Whether or not the path of history embodies a sense of justice is highly debatable. Yet, what is not debatable is that if the strong do not remain forever strong, neither do the weak remain weak, forever.

______________________________

This first article, written by Zev Sherf and published in March of 1946, focused upon the situation of the Kurds since the First World War, in terms of their historical experience in geographic areas and nation-states manifesting a significant Kurdish historical and demographic presence (Iran, Turkey, and Iraq), and in terms of the foreign policies of Great Britain and the Soviet Union.

In a passage still strikingly relevant in 2018 (and for the future…?), Sherf quotes a “well-known British officer” (who?) who stated – in words both prophetic and cautionary – ““On the day when the national consciousness of the Kurds matures and they become united, the states of Turkey, Persia and Iraq will be shattered to bits.” But one should not expect to find more than a part of the truth in any prophecy, and certainly there is some truth in this one. Even a partial truth of this kind is enough to disturb the rest of the rulers of all these kingdoms, as well as their sponsors and guides.”

______________________________

The Kurds in Iraq and Iran

by Zev Sherf

Jewish Frontier

March, 1946

IT IS HARD to avoid the impression of a close connection between the Kurdish revolt which was suppressed late last year in Iraq and the more successful Azerbaijanian autonomist movement in Iran. Unquestionably, local factors specific to each case must be recognized in these two movements, but they had two basic causes in common. One cause was the general tendency, in all the independent and quasi-independent Middle Eastern kingdoms, to make the interests and will of the majority people the sole guide to government policy. This tendency in Iraq resulted in attempts to force the Arabic language and culture upon Iraqi minorities of a different tongue, in an effort to establish the majority religion as the dominant faith, and in neglect of regions inhabited by minorities. What little was done in the way of health service, education, and public works in Iraq or Iran was chiefly concentrated in the capitals and their vicinity and in other favored districts, chosen either as show windows to the outside world or because their leaders are influential at court. All other districts have been neglected completely.

A second basic cause of the unrest in Iraq and Iran is the failure to have carried out an agrarian reform. Feudal relations prevail with particular effect precisely in those regions which have been neglected by the government. In Kurdistan, for example, the Turks had destroyed the old stratum of Kurdish princes during the nineteenth century by means of exile and murder. They were replaced by tribal chiefs, who have continued to rule as in days past, despite the fact that their tribesmen have long changed from shepherds to settled farmers. The ruling Arab clique will not abolish the feudal agrarian relations of Iraq, because thereby they would chop off the limb on which they sit. For this reason they accept the feudal order among both the Shiites and the Kurds, together with all the dangers involved.

In Iran, to be sure, the previous Shah, Reza Pahlevi, worked toward the establishment of a strong, centralized administration, but he undertook no fundamental social reforms. In Azerbaijan and in other sections, a group of landlords, who are unfailing sources of intrigue and exploitation, is opposed to a group of peasants, suffering from the extreme of poverty and oppression. It is not surprising, therefore, that a tribal chief should be able to transform his local ambitions into a national movement and a matter of international concern, as happened in Kurdistan; or that a foreign power should be able to arouse exploited workers and peasants against their government and place the very existence of the state in question, as happened in Azerbaijan.

History sometimes stages a spectacle of retribution. Iraq and Iran are now paying for the blindness of having staked everything on the exclusive interests of the majority people and upon the thin layer of-the upper class. That class may be useful in making an appearance before the outer world, but it cannot long claim the loyalty of the working mass, which is becoming increasingly evident upon the political arena of these countries, both through an inner development and the growing influence of external” forces.

THERE ARE NO more persistent rebels than the Kurds. At a time when the Arab world was slavishly submissive to the Turks, with only a small group of intellectuals and officials plotting obscurely in secret, the Kurds repeatedly broke out in open rebellion against Turkish rule. From the end of the 13th through the whole of the 19th century, Kurdish princes raised the standard of revolt against the hated Turk. The years 1830, 1842, 1879-80, 1889, were high water marks in these attempts, which deserve to be placed in the same category with the wars of liberation of the Balkan countries. As Christian peoples, living close to the sea upon which Western trade was carried, the Balkan countries found sympathizers and support, and were thus able to achieve what they achieved. The Kurds were Sunnite Moslems, residing in an isolated hill country, and they were beaten down with the systematic ruthlessness characteristic of Turkey. In the middle of the 19th century, the rule of the Kurdish princes was ended; but their descendants continued the warfare, until it 1913 they were completely destroyed and ceased to be a significant force. In their place came the tribal chieftains, cooperating in broad “confederations” like that which carried out the recent revolt in Iran.

World War I was used by the Turks as an excellent opportunity to expel complete tribes and peoples who were troublesome to them. The Kurds suffered no less than the Armenians and the Assyrians – and for their part, the Kurds helped the Turks persecute the neighboring Christian tribes. At the peace conference the Kurds were recognized as a nation with a problem requiring a solution. The treaty of Sevres with Turkey provided for the independence of the Kurds. This treaty was short-lived, owing, among other reasons, to the interest in the oil of the Mosul region, which caused that area to be annexed to Iraq at that time under British rule. From a formal point of view the treaty of Sevres received its death blow by the revolt of Kemal Ataturk, as a result of which it was never ratified. The treaty of Lausanne, which recognized the results of the Kemalist upheaval, did not mention the Kurds or the Kurdish problem.

The signatory powers accepted this, but the Kurds in Turkey did not make peace with it. They rebelled in the years 1925-6, and once again in 1930, and for the third time in the years 1937-8. During the recent rebellion in Iraq, too, there were reports of unrest in Turkish Kurdistan, and on the other hand, of cooperation of the Turkish Army with the Iraqis. If this report was true (for it was never officially confirmed) it would not be an unprecedented fact. One of the few cases of Turko-Persian cooperation was their common action in putting down the Kurdish rebellion of 1880-1883.

It may be that a well-known British officer was exaggerating slightly when he said: “On the day when the national consciousness of the Kurds matures and they become united, the states of Turkey, Persia and Iraq will be shattered to bits.” But one should not expect to find more than a part of the truth in any prophecy, and certainly there is some truth in this one. Even a partial truth of this kind is enough to disturb the rest of the rulers of all these kingdoms, as well as their sponsors and guides.

THE KURDISH-ARABIC MARRIAGE in Iraq has not been a happy union. It is not clear whether the Arab wanted this connection at the start, but the Kurds certainly never dreamed of it. The forty tribal chiefs of Kurdistan who asked that they be attached to Iraq did so hoping to “enjoy British protection.” They asked that a British representative and staff be sent to them “in order to permit the Kurdish people to progress peacefully in the path of civilization under British guidance.” The leader of these tribes asked the British to send them officers to assume top responsibility and to place Kurds, but not Arabs, in the minor posts. In those days the Kurds did not anticipate what was to happen to them, just as the Jews in the days of San Remo never dreamed of the road that was to lead to the anti-immigration patrol off the coast of Palestine.

The Kurds are bitterly resentful of the intervention by the Baghdad rulers in their internal affairs and they firmly oppose every effort to force the Arabic language upon them. As we noted, tribal leaders frequently use the general grievances in the interest of their private ambition.

The core of Kurdish resistance is in the area where Iraq borders upon Turkey and Iran. The confederation of local tribes rose in revolt in 1931-2 and was “pacified” only with difficulty. The rebel leaders were exiled at that time, but one of them, Mullah Mustafa, left his place of exile in 1943 and raised the tribes in renewed outbreaks. This uprising ended in a semi-official truce with the authorities, which lasted until the revolt at the end of 1945. After that was put down, it is understood that the leaders of the rebellion fled to neighboring Persian Azerbaijan, where the Kurdish tribes of Iran reside.

This last rebellion was marked by certain novel features. The Kurds were far better armed than ever before. The rumor is that they were equipped from that part of Iran which has been under Soviet military control since 1941. On the other hand, the Iraqi government brought into play against the rebels for the first time army units that had been especially trained in mountain warfare. These units were created at about the same time that the Arab Legion and Frontier Force in Palestine and the Transjordan began to be expanded and retrained.

The press has reported that the British military adviser in Iraq opposed using these units in emergency action against the Kurds, but it may be assumed that his objections were purely tactical in nature. It is likely that he feared that a defeat might break the prestige of the outfit. Something similar happened in the early days of the Arab Legion, when it was defeated in a clash with a rebellious Transjordan tribe. As a result most of the soldiers of the Legion deserted and the organization was practically dissolved. The British officer in command had very strenuous work cut out for him in trying to reestablish the Legion. It is possible that the British adviser to the Iraqi government was mindful of this experience when he cautiously demanded that the new units should not be sent on a decisive mission until spring. Iraqi officers, however, refused to wait and were successful in carrying out the operation.

It is not clear where the Iraqis got the air force which they needed for that expedition. The possibilities are that the air support was obtained on loan from Britain, or that it was one of the first fruits of the visit of Abdul Illah in Ankara on his way home from London.

It is beyond all doubt that the firm attitude of the Iraqi government towards the Kurds was approved by British advisers. This, too, is something of a novelty. The British had always demanded a moderate and tolerant attitude towards the Kurds in the past. There had always been close relations between the Kurds and British representatives. The conclusion may plausibly be drawn that the expedition against the Kurds at the end of 1945 falls in with a British tendency to stake their policy entirely upon the Arab majority in the Middle East: whether because they have decided to reward the present Baghdad rulers for their services, or they have decided that the Kurds can no longer be relied upon in the international struggles beginning in the Middle East.

The rebellion having been put down, Iraqi leadership is now in a position to try to develop friendly relations directly with the Kurdish peasants. It is doubtful whether they are capable of such a policy, since the Baghdad clique does not serve the true interests of even the Arab peasants in their immediate vicinity. The more probable effect will be an intensified campaign of Arabization of the Kurds, with respect to culture as well as economic and social affairs. The Kurds would deny their long history and act contrary to their nature if they accepted this submissively.

THERE IS A STORY told in Palestine that during the 1936 outbreaks a woman was riding in a bus that was being fired upon. “All I need, with my weak heart,” she protested, “is a bullet in my head.” The rebellion in Azerbaijan could easily become such a bullet in the head for a Persia suffering so badly from a weak heart. This unhappy country has long been divided into spheres of influence of the major powers. After the Russian Revolution, international competition in this country ceased for a while, but the Iranians did not show the energy and capacity for utilizing this respite to bring about a national revival.

To be sure, the tyrannical rule of Reza Pahlevi followed closely in the footsteps of the Kemalist revolution in Turkey. The influence of the clergy was greatly curbed, child-marriage was abolished, and women were allowed to abandon the veil. Theoretically, compulsory education was instituted. The railway network was expanded and local industries were developed. All this was accomplished, however, by the repression of all opposition, the exile of dissident leaders, and general disregard for civil rights. At the same time, German influence, which had been quite strong before World War I, again became noticeable.

The pro-German attitude of the Shah and his coterie was much more a matter of hostility to certain other powers than of sympathy with the Germans. Germany appeared to be a remote country, and there was no fear of the consequences of accepting financial and other economic aid from it as there was in connection with strengthening relations with Britain or initiating relations with the Soviet Union. Intelligent Persians, who are concerned with the welfare of their country, would prefer today, on more or less the same grounds, that the United States take over the position previously occupied by Germany. In 1941, after British and Soviet troops entered Iran, the government requested President Roosevelt to send advisers for its various departments, and for a certain time, the Iranian government was practically conducted by American officials and officers. This was a transient phenomenon because the United States did not wish to become too much involved in Iran, and because American officials speedily encountered difficulties in administering a state which was to all intents and purposes divided into two separate occupation zones, one of them completely sealed off.

The border dividing the Soviet zone from the British also cuts off the fertile grain fields of Northern Iran from the region of poverty and starvation in the south. The Iranian government has been prevented from exercising any significant influence in the northern region. It could not appoint even a single policeman without Russian approval. The Soviet refusal n permit Persian soldiers to be sent to the north was not without precedent. This had been the situation for close to four years.

The government which came into office after the downfall of Shah Reza was discredited in the eyes of the people from the very beginning. The foreign armies occupying Iran inevitably brought about an enormous inflation and a rise in the cost of living which aggravated the poverty of the masses. The old regime had not left behind it any parliamentary parties capable of educating the people and guiding its will in constructive channels. Corruption was widespread in the ranks of Iranian officials. The Persian Parliament, the Majlis, had no parties except the small “Tudeh” party, which was founded with the support of the Russians and constituted the only organized political grouping in Iran, and particularly in the northern part of Iran. This should not be surprising. The intrigues of foreign powers in the past, the tyrannical rule of Reza Pahlevi, the intervention of occupying powers during the past war, the poverty, disease, and general neglect of the country – all these have left their mark.

The pro-Russian Tudeh movement did, of course, benefit from Soviet support, but it was also the fruit of local conditions. Whereas the neighbors of the Soviet Union on its European frontiers enjoy a standard of living superior to that of the U.S.S.R. (Red Army soldiers became convinced of this to their own great surprise, and Kalinin found it necessary to warn them against drawing hasty conclusions from this fact), on its Asiatic frontiers the U.S.S.R. appears to many of the citizens of neighboring countries as the bearer of the promise of cultural autonomy and material advancement. As a result, movements of rebellion across the Soviet border tend to take on a separatist character, with some inclination towards the Soviet Union.

SUCH AN INCLINATION was obvious in the development of the Tudeh Party, but it was checked and suppressed upon the appearance of the Democratic Party, the new incarnation of the pro-Soviet group in Iran. This party calls for a reform in government policy over the whole of Iran and for autonomy in Azerbaijan, but it does not demand the union of this part of Iran with Soviet Azerbaijan. The assistance it is receiving from the Soviet Union is not concealed. What then can be the purpose of the Soviet Union in supporting such a movement?

One suggestion that is made in answer to this question is that oil is the major consideration. The Soviet periodical War and the Working Class carried an article on the oil problem at the beginning of 1945. It contends that the question of oil was not raised in Persia until British and American companies began to operate there. Russia had a concession in Persia, which the Bolsheviks gave up officially in 1921, on condition that it should not be given to any other power.

There is probably considerable truth in this version. The Russians would certainly not agree to the establishment of a British or American oil concession at their very frontier. The Iranian government’s reply to this argument, that it will not grant any additional concessions in, Iran to any power so long as it continues to be occupied, is immaterial to the issue. The only possible solution, if there be one, would be an agreement for the division of oil rights among the various powers. In reply to the article cited above, the London Economist suggested that Great Britain and the United States retain the right to exploit the oil fields in the south of Persia, and give up altogether any attempt to operate in the north.

A second problem in Iran is the Soviet drive to set up security zones around its frontiers. This plan has become quite obvious in Eastern and Central Europe. The old system of the cordon sanitaire has I been reversed and pointed against the West. But the Soviet Union is sensitive not only in regard to its western frontiers. In the last years before World War II, great industrial developments were begun in Asiatic Russia. These projects were accelerated and expanded during the war through the transfer of many industries from the war zone. Not all such plants were reestablished in their original homes after the war.

Just as the Ukraine and the Great Russian Republic need buffers against the outside, so the oil fields and industries of Transcaucasia and the new industries of Turkestan and Central and Eastern Siberia need security. It seems likely that the Soviet Union will try to set up a buffer zone with its western anchor in Azerbaijan and its eastern anchor in Northern Korea, which like Azerbaijan is divided between a Soviet and Anglo-Saxon occupation zone, with the former hermetically sealed off from the latter. In this huge area belong Northern Iran, the province of Sin-kiang in China, Outer Mongolia and Manchuria. It will be sufficient for Soviet needs if these territories are under the rule of governments friendly to the U.S.S.R. If an attempt should be made to set up a regime too dependent upon another power or hostile to the Soviet Union, one may anticipate the outgrowth from time to time of separatist movements in this area.

It may be, however, that there is a third explanation for current Soviet policy. Skobelev, the Russian military commander who pushed the frontiers of Russian Turkestan southward in the 1880’s, once said: “The stronger Russia becomes in Central Asia, the weaker England will become in India, and the more it will be inclined to compromise in Europe.” The Soviet Union is trying to take advantage of the present transition stage in the relations between the great powers to secure good bargaining positions. What is happening in Azerbaijan may prove as useful to the Soviet Union in the future as, to cite an example in quite a different field, the victory of the Communist Party in France.

Suggested Reading

Cohen, Ben, “Western Powers Must Protect Kurds, Urges Iraqi Jew Escorted to Freedom by Masoud Barzani”, Algemeiner, November 6, 2017

Kedar, Mordechai, Lt. Col. (res.), “The U.S. Betrayal of Kurdistan Is a Warning Sign for Israel”, BESA Center, November 22, 2017

Warner, Rex (translator), Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War, Penguin Books, New York, N.Y., 1954 (1980 edition)

Jewish Coalition for Kurdistan

A Chronicle of The Chronicle : The Jewish Chronicle of England, A Mid-Century View (Revised content – July, 2018)

A primary source of information for many of the posts that have appeared on this blog (let alone those that have yet to appear…!) has been The Jewish Chronicle. Similarly, numerous posts pertaining to Jewish military service in the First World War have presented the full text of items published in the Chronicle.

Sometimes, however, it’s intriguing to learn the history, behind the history.

Such is the nature of this post: A discussion, from the Jewish Frontier of June, 1954, of the news coverage, content, format, and especially the editorial policies of the Chronicle, in terms of the periodical’s cultural, literary, and political centrality within British – and not just British – Jewry. As such, the Frontier’s article, by English writer and poet Herbert Howarth, offers a fascinating mid-twentieth century perspective of the Chronicle, and indirectly, British Jewry.

But, who was Herbert Howarth? Born on April 26, 1917, he studied at Oxford University, and became a translator of Arabic poetry. He served as assistant Public Information Officer for the British Government in Tel Aviv from 1943 through 1945, from which position he resigned in December of 1945, in protest of Great Britain’s “palestine” policy. (The Nebraska State Journal, February 9, 1946)

Subsequently, Mr. Howarth served for a one-year-appointment as a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, having been brought to that University by Chancellor Edward H. Litchfield in support of the University’s new Humanities Division. The head of Britain’s National Book League for five years, he, “…became a leading figure in the study of modernism and a visiting professor at many American universities.” Apparently, he was subsequently a member the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he chaired 15 Doctoral Dissertations which were completed between 1966 and 1972.

His books include The Irish Writers (1959), Notes on Some Figures Behind T.S. Eliot (1966), and The Tiger’s Heart (1969).

A search of the database of the National Library of Israel reveals other items by or about Mr. Howarth, which appeared in The Palestine Post:

Mr. Howarth’s Resignation (Reader’s Letters) – (From Ester Frankenstein, Kfar Ganim, December 18, 1945) – December 26, 1945

Background to Resignation – January 6, 1946

A Gentile’s Approach to Zionism – January 15, 1946

Koestler’s First Play – February 22, 1946

Lawrence of Arabia – March 15, 1946

India and the British Conscience – March 29, 1946

An Age Has Passed – September 6, 1946

Year After Bournemouth: A Message to My Friends in Palestine – November 13, 1946

Anti-Semitism in Britain – February 16, 1947

Mr. Howarth’s literary oeuvre includes these additional works, published in Commentary:

Culture & Civilization / Literature / Memoir: An Evening with Israel’s Poets: Creative Voices in a Time of Trouble
Nov. 1, 1949

Art / Culture & Civilization / Judaism: Jewish Art and the Fear of the Image: The Escape from an Age-Old Inhibition
Feb. 1, 1950

Culture & Civilization / Israel / Literature: Israel’s Modern Poetry: New Voices, New Modes of Speech
Aug. 1, 1950

Culture & Civilization / Literature: Flecker: The Poet and His East: “Shall I Never Be Home . . .?”
May 1, 1951

Law, Government & Society / Media/Politics & Ideas: Behind Winston Churchill’s Grand Style: Britain’s Prophet of Doom and Defiance
June 1, 1951

Israel/Law, Government & Society / Terrorism: The Revolt: Story of the Irgun, by Menachem Begin
Dec. 1, 1951

Israel/Literature / Military: Unambo, by Max Brod
May 1, 1952

Literature: Poet Out of Israel: The Odyssey of Pinhas Sadeh
Aug. 1, 1956

Religion: Bible and Sword, by Barbara W. Tuchman
Apr. 1, 1957

Culture & Civilization: Discords in the Music of Time
Jan. 1, 1972

Herbert Howarth died at the very young age of 54, on July 5, 1971. Strangely, it seems that no obituary ever appeared announcing his passing; at least, no such news item was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Whether his passing was announced in The Jewish Exponent (of Philadelphia) is unknown, for microfilm copies of that periodical from early July of 1971 are unavailable.

However, notice of his passing did appear in the Fall, 1971, issue of the James Joyce Quarterly:

In Memoriam

HERBERT HOWARTH, 1917-1971

James Joyce Quarterly
Volume 9, Number 1 (Fall, 1971)

Herbert Howarth, who served as advisory editor to the James Joyce Quarterly since its inception, died on July 5, 1971 after a long illness. A distinguished scholar and teacher, Professor Howarth was highly esteemed by his colleagues, students, and friends.

A native of Blackpool, England, Professor Howarth attended Christ Church, Oxford, graduating B.A. with first class honors in 1939 and receiving his Master of Arts degree in 1944. His academic career in the United States began at the University of Michigan in 1955. Thenceforth he taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Montana State University, the University of Manitoba, and finally, beginning in 1963, at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Howarth’s primary fields of interest were contemporary British and Shakespearean literature. He authored numerous articles in these fields, and also published the following books: The Irish Writers 1880-1940 (1958); Some Figures behind T.S. Eliot (1964); and The Tiger’s Heart: Eight Essays on Shakespeare (1970). Two other books were in preparation at the time of his death.

Herbert Howarth was a gentle, wise, and generous man, and we mourn his passing.

______________________________

Herbert Howarth is buried at Har Jehuda Cemetery, in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. The inscription on his matzeva is transliterated as “Tzadikim bemitatam nikrain khayim” (“The righteous, in death, are called living”). An explanation of this expression is given in Berakhot 18a, in the Talmud:

Namely, “Why, though, are the righteous called “living” if they are actually dead? When a person uses the opportunity of life correctly, it still serves him after he has passed from this world, as if he is still alive. He leaves a positive legacy based upon his past good deeds, deeds that still impact the world after he has died.”

In reading about (and by) Herbert Howarth, one is reminded of Orde Charles Wingate, John Henry Patterson, and George Frederick Beurling. Utterly disparate as were their personalities, let alone the very courses of their lives, it would seem that the words of Rick Beurling, George’s brother, were common to all: “Even though he wasn’t Jewish, he had a Jewish heart.”

Photo by author.

______________________________

To place the history of the Chronicle in a deeper perspective, this post also includes a synopsis of the history of the publication from 1841 to 1941, transcribed from the Chronicle of November 14, 1941.

References

University of Pittsburgh – History of the Department of English – 1950s Faculty (at University of Pittsburgh)

Herbert Howarth Biography (at University of Pennsylvania)

______________________________

__________________________________________________

______________________________

The Jewish Chronicle of England
by Herbert Howarth

Jewish Frontier
June, 1954

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY in England perfectly well fulfills that favorite Jewish paying: “Two Jews – three opinions,” and its natural extension into “Two Jews – three political parties.” But to one phase of its corporate existence no charge of plurality can apply. It has only one newspaper.

In the course of more than a century – throughout the period, that is, in which the community has formed like a coral reef through successive immigrations – other papers have risen, but they have also fallen. The Jewish Chronicle, surmounting challenges from outside and the internal problems that come with changes of ownership or editors, has remained. There is only one Jewish Chronicle, and it is the recognized common bond of the community. When a new front-page heading was established in 1937 (the designer for it being the distinguished young typographer, Berthold Wolpe), the claim “The Organ of British Jewry” was inserted, to become a regular part of it; and that claim is valid.

The Chronicle (or rather as it is referred to colloquially as the J.C.) is a weekly. In its postwar form it is normally made up of 32 pages, and is published every Friday at sixpence. In many typical households it is briefly read on Friday evening, then on Saturday passed ground and read intensively by every man, woman, and alert growing child. What are the contents, or what their characteristics, that they compel the loyal and devoted reading that this fact implies?

The front page selects from the main worldwide events of the week those which relate directly to Jewish life, and reports them objectively, generally under the by-line “From our own correspondent.” Whatever is of predominant interest each week in Israel’s affairs will most frequently take the chief position, but news from Germany, and sometimes from elsewhere in Europe, is often prominent at this time; and not infrequently there are reports from U.S.A. The headlines and presentation are as markedly free from color as the paragraphs of reportage below them. It might be said with much appearance of truth that the editor has modelled himself on The Times in an effort to avoid tendentiousness, or even any emphasis at all, in the style and wording of the first page with its master-news.

One should only add, in order to give the feeling of it in full, that the editor usually allocates one column on this page to a piece of British community news. Sometimes the community item has more or less comparable weight with the international news around it – as when, for instance, Sir Hartley Shawcross made a political speech at a British dinner in aid of the Haifa Technion and was duly reported in the first column. But when an item linked with international matters is not available, then the editor quite candidly finds a place on the front page for whatever seems to him of “splashable” community interest that week, whether it be a debase in the Council of the United Synagogues or a rally of Jewish ex-servicemen. Similarly a photograph of prominent community personalities is often chosen to go on the front page among those of Moshe Sharett, Abba Eban, General Bennike, Dag Hammarskjold, or whoever of international size may naturally figure there in the current week.

THERE IS LITTLE in what has been described so far to explain why the Jewish Chronicle is such an effective, compelling, and deeply-rooted family paper. But turn it over, and pages two and three supply the answer. These are the most-studied parts: they are solidly made up of “Small Advertisements,” announcing births, bar-mitzvahs, engagements, deaths. Page four contains small ads of a more commercial sort, offering houses for sale and rooms to let. Page seven, the star page in this class, consists of advertisements much more expensive and accordingly printed as if they were news, under the heading “Social and Personal.” Here, by paying four pounds for the first 45 words, a further pound for each nine words thereafter, the more fortunate families tell each other of the felicity of their children.

“With rejoicing, with envy, with delight, malice, and anger, these pages are analyzed by the women of the community at the weekend. The tumults of emotion and the corresponding comments that they elicit are a theme for Israel Zangwill’s pen rather than mine. In Grandchildren of the Ghetto, dealing with those families that have grown to love grandeur and lost touch with the piety that was part of the ghetto’s poverty, he has indicated what he might say were he still here to say it. But as regards the stability and magnetism of The Jewish Chronicle, there is no doubt that at present – I would like to underline these words and to return to them shortly – they are bound up with the regular recurrence and accumulated prestige of these pages.

These small notices provide an all-over faithful readership: and in return they assure, I would assume, a strong array of applicants for the larger general advertisement space; and so in turn they enable the J.C. to support correspondents all over the world and to buy excellent reporting and distinguished features; and so in turn to appeal by these latter to a different, possibly less numerous, more discerning class of reader who cares not much for the matrimonial union of houses.

To which pages then, do readers of the more discerning kind turn? Above all, to the middle spread. On the left hand page they find the responsible emphasis on literacy in the community – a book review. On the right hand page they have the main feature articles. There can be no question of the steady merit of the features in The Jewish Chronicle. The writers of the newspaper’s history (a centenary volume, or sefer zikaron, which the war delayed, but which was successfully published in 1949 under the firm’s own imprint) stress that the earliest nineteenth-century editor set a high standard in seeking serious and scholarly contributors; at no time has that tradition lapsed very far; and it is well in evidence today. Similarly, wherever a reader looks in the paper he is likely to find, even in these overtly bourgeois surroundings, the same concern for tarbuth that one finds in Israel and notably in Israel’s kibbutzim. The work of Jewish musicians, writers, artists, and the work of non-Jews where it becomes contingent on Jewish interests, is brought before him: the latest book of Edmund Fleg, shall we say; the controversy over Sholem Asch; the history of Jewry in a city like Mantua; a new television symbol designed by Mr. Games; the researches of a palaeographer. All matters of these or analogous kinds are well covered.

NOT SUCH DECISIVE praise can be paid to the editorials. At first reading they may appear imposing. They are well-groomed in style; they are reasoned and reasonable; they are careful and moderate. Sometimes they strike a fine and positively inspiring note; an editorial that definitely did so was that on Mr. Ben Gurion’s withdrawal from public life to the soil: “Amid all the extraordinary vicissitudes which have overwhelmed the Land of Israel he has displayed pre-eminent gifts of statesmanship and has become the foremost architect of the new State. Yet, as is eloquently attested by his private and public life, he has never lost the common touch nor failed to preserve his warm-hearted sympathies with ordinary folk.” It was not hard, however, to be editorially appreciative of Mr. Ben Gurion’s striking action; even The Times, (the editorials of which, by the way, are recently more vigorous than they were, also more unpredictable, being sometimes greatly humane, sometimes otherwise) succeeded in commending the Premier’s retirement in warm terms, likening him to Cincinnatus.

To write a tribute in noble form, then, is natural and easy to The Jewish Chronicle. And on the other hand, it knows its metier when it comes to writing a straightforward, factually-based condemnation of, say, Dr. Adenauer’s recruitment of Nazis for a new Cabinet. But is there ever a word in the editorial matter of the J.C. which will come as a surprise to the readers? To strike out a new thought, to speak in a ringing voice, to precipitate its readers into a state of salutary shock – the J.C. of today is unlikely to venture into these.

This is nearly enough in keeping with that comfortable condition in the community which once incensed, and is still apt to incense, visitors from Israel, who are accustomed to more spirit and to a rhythm of pioneering which inevitably calls for unconventional ideas and an eternal readiness to make ventures. “Nothing venture, nothing win” is an old proverb here. But it has not a very great appeal for the Chronicle’s able team of managers-and writers.

If he chances to read these remarks, the editor might well reply “What does Mr. Howarth (who in any case has no particular business to interfere) want us to do? Can he point to a single editorial in which we have failed in our duty? Can he tell us anything that we clearly ought to have said, that we have nevertheless omitted to say?”- Such a retort would be fair and would leave me, and any others who may think as I do, silent. But it would not erase the feeling, so strong, that the J.C. breathes an air of satisfaction with its own reticence and rectitude, and reclines beatifically , on the knowledge that it is “the organ of British Jewry,” as if the fixed audience for it “smalls” and its “Social and Personal” were purely land simply the seal of success. The fact is; that the huge and devoted audience records the success of previous generations of editors, and for the present generation it should really mean a responsibility and an opportunity.

Yes, that was the point I had in mind when hinting a little way back that the relationship between the standing of the paper and its social attractiveness may be a phenomenon of the present only, not a permanency like Mount Sinai on which the managing-board can count forever. The courage and when necessary the aggressiveness, of previous editors made the paper a powerful and influential one, and thus assured the readership that now sustains it as a medium for the social panoply of pre-nuptials and post-nuptials. But if the paper becomes shot throughout with the vanity of social esteem, and if, whether as a result of that circumstance or for any other reason, the lead to the community should cease to be a challenging one, then the readership may falter, turn, and decline. The One newspaper might even cease to be the One.

THE YOUNG PEOPLE are impatient, some of them at least, with the family-ideology in which they are reared in this country. Like Raphael Leon in Grandchildren of the Ghetto, they conceive of more invigorating things. As no enduring rival to the J.C. has yet come along, they eventually settle down to the old dispensation, unless they pack up and go to Israel or to the U.S.A.

It might do the Jewish Chronicle good if a rival became strong enough to force its pace. At the moment Jon Kimche’s Jewish Observer is attracting interest, but it remains to be seen whether or how quickly it can grow, or whether, like others before it, it may in the end quit the field.

There is, of course, more than a possibility that those in whose hands the direction of The Jewish Chronicle lies feel that they should take thought not only for the manner in which they influence the community, but also for the immediate repercussions and the long-term influence of their treatment of problems on the listening non-Jewish, public, particularly the Government. In the official sefer zikaron, referred to above, there is reproduced a postcard of 1877 from Mr. Gladstone to Dr. Benisch, then editor of The Jewish Chronicle: it is symbolic of the tradition by which this organ mediates, either actually or potentially, between politicians or other leaders of the nation and the community which it represents. In the light of this consideration it may be felt that a judicious tone is of all desiderata the most desirable. Such a viewpoint could well be understood; yet even so, it might, as construed in practice, be mistaken. For the Chronicle could possibly be more vigorous without abandoning its virtues of rationality and good taste. By and large, the newspaper that is to be a light to the Gentile will begin by being a flame to its own community.

If in the preceding paragraphs I have allowed expression to a feeling that The Jewish Chronicle is not the active force it once was and deserves always to be, I would not have anyone suppose that, for want of being perfect, it is not good, and very good at that. Sound, solid – it definitely has these qualities, to which I have above ventured to attach the out-of-date adjective of “bourgeois.”

And it is in fact more than that. It is rich in information. It carries the living annals of the Jewish people not only in these islands but also throughout the world. This consideration alone would justify, and more than justify, its existence. Yet again and conversely, the Chronicle is one of those instruments which can rightly be said to justify themselves by continuing to exist – in the sense that if ever need arises, they will be there to serve; they will be there to convey the message that the hour occasions, and their public will be there to serve as the hour requires.

Having survived its first century, and enjoying the devotion of a reading public unequalled by almost any other Jewish publication in the world, the Jewish Chronicle of England has become the envied model (as well as an enigma) for many an editor of a Jewish periodical who would like to find out the secret of its longevity and success and emulate them. In the following article Herbert Howarth, noted English writer, describes what makes the J.C. go round.

______________________________

The Jewish Chronicle
November 14, 1941

1841 – 1941

A Chronological Synopsis

1841, November 12
“The Jewish Chronicle” is founded as a weekly by Isaac Valentine, under the leadership of Moses Angel and David Meldola, whose names however do not figure until later on. It is a quarto, of four pages; the editorial offices are at 132, Houndsditch, London; the price is 2d.

1842, May 6
“New Series” begins, an octavo of 16 pp.

1842, May 20
Last number of the new series” appears; publication is suspended for a year and a half.

1842, October 18
Publication by Joseph Mitchell as “Proprietor” in collaboration with Isaac Valentine of the first number of “The Jewish Chronicle (new series) and Working Man’s Friend.” The paper is now a fortnightly consisting of eight quarto pages, and the price is 2d. The sub-title “and Working Man’s Friend” is omitted after the twentieth issue.

1846, April
Offices removed to 24, Houndsditch.

1847, October 8
“The Jewish Chronicle” becomes a weekly, and remains a weekly henceforth.

1848, October 4
Marcus Heymann Bresslau, who had assisted Mitchell at the beginning but subsequently quarreled with him, formally becomes Editor.

1850, October 11
Beginning of the publication of an “enlarged series” in folio size priced at 3d. a copy.

1854, June-August
On Mitchell’s death, Bresslau becomes Proprietor as well as Editor

1854, December 22
Title changed, with the premature beginning of volume xi, to “The Jewish Chronicle and Hebrew Observer,” having been amalgamated with “The Hebrew Observer” founded by Dr. Abraham Benisch at the beginning of 1853. The size is enlarged to double demy. The offices are moved to 7, Bevis Marks.

1855, January
Benisch becomes Editor and Proprietor.

1865, February
The offices are moved to 11, Castle Street, Houndsditch.

1868, July 3
Sixth “new series” begins, in newspaper folio, an abridged penny edition being published simultaneously to meet cheap competition.

1869, April 2
Control having been acquired from Benisch by L.L. Cohen, S. Montagu, and L. Van Oven, a further (and final) “new series” begins under the editorship of Michael Henry, the words “and Hebrew Observer” being omitted from the title henceforth. The Penny Edition is discontinued, and the price of the Main Edition reduced from 3d. to 2d. The size is again reduced to the former measurement, and the number of pages (generally sixteen or twenty-four) is no longer fixed.

1870, March
The offices are moved to 43, Finsbury Square.

1875, June
On Henry’s death, Benisch resumes control and editorship.

1878, July
On Benisch’s death, he leaves “The Jewish Chronicle” to the Anglo-Jewish Association, from which it is purchased by Israel Davis, Sydney Montagu Samuel, and Asher Myers, the last of whom becomes Editor.

1880, June
The offices are moved to 2, Finsbury Square.

1891-1892, July
Publication of “Darkest Russia” as monthly supplement.

1902, May
On the death of Asher Myers (who had been predeceased by S.M. Samuel) Israel Davis becomes proprietor and henceforth controls the publication, Morris Duparc being the working editor.

1907, January
“The Jewish Chronicle” passes into the control of L.J. Greenberg, who becomes Editor. It is subsequently turned into a Limited Company. “Young Israel,” the children’s supplement, is introduced. The Company acquires the “Jewish Year Book,” up to then the property of L.J. Greenberg, who founded it.

1913, April
“The Jewish Chronicle” buys up the “Jewish World” (founded in 1873) which is published henceforth from the same offices and is also edited by L.J. Greenberg.

1916, July
Price increased to 3d.

1918, March
Priced increased to 4d.

1921, January 28
Beginning of the publication of the monthly “Jewish Chronicle Supplement,” which continued until August, 1939.

1931, November 15
Death of L.J. Greenberg.

1932, January 1
J.M. Rich becomes Editor.

1934, February 9
The “Jewish World” is incorporated with “The Jewish Chronicle” and ceases separate publication.

1935, July
The offices are moved to 47-49, Moor Lane. Mechanical type composition replaces the hand-setting which had been employed up to this date.

1936, December
Ivan M. Greenberg, son of L.J. Greenberg, succeeds J.M. Rich as Editor.

1937, February 26
The “Jewish Chronicle Supplement” issued in new format and pinned separately.

1937, November 12
Typography of the paper altered to the new Times Roman.

1939, September
Owing to war conditions, the format is changed, the cover being abandoned, and emergency offices are taken over in High Wycombe.

1940, December 29
The London offices in Moor Lane are totally destroyed with all contents and records in the course of a German air raid on London. The temporary offices subsequently occupied in Mansion House Chambers, Queen Victoria Street, are similarly destroyed on the night of May 10, 1941, fresh offices being taken at 88, Chancery Lane.

1941, November 12
“THE JEWISH CHRONICLE” ATTAINS ITS CENTENARY.

Thoughts from The Frontier: Reflections on the Jewish Situation, Part VI: Faith and Form, by Ludwig Lewisohn (Jewish Frontier, July, 1950)

Reflections on the Jewish Situation

PART VI – FAITH AND FORM

by Ludwig Lewisohn

Jewish Frontier
August, 1950

IT MAY BE well at this point to recall some of the insights at which we have arrived. For from now on we will have to confront the contemporary mind with difficult decisions. Several generations have been alienated from the true life of man. A distorted Utopia, reaching into the past, stretching out into the future, has been substituted for a realistic picture of what man is and of what his life and destiny are. So college students, both Christians and Jews (for this thing, this blight, is universal), rightly desiring answers to the eternal questions: What is Man? What must he do? How are we to attain integrity, hope, tranquility, redemption – college students, the children of this year and date, elect to study the so-called “social sciences”. They still hope that by tinkering with techniques, institutions, statistics, they can achieve the inner tranquility and joy which they seek. They have forgotten that literature alone paints a true picture of man, that philosophy alone can introduce them to the realms of meaning and value for which, without knowing it, they ache; that religion alone can lead them into an harmonious acceptance of man’s destiny. The parents of these children have nearly all grown up with the notion that man can ]act differently without being different and that life can be more nobly shaped by the same blind and unredeemed will. So-called Christians and so-called Jews agree on these melancholy and hopeless notions. It is at this crucial point that further reasoning must start. And so it is at this point that we may first sum up what we have found to be more in agreement with reality.

We found, first, that the old Emancipation of Jews is bankrupt. And this is so because both the emancipators and the emancipated misunderstood the nature of the problem. Both hoped that the Jewish people would disappear or dwindle to a mere sect. Both innocently enough strove after this end. A few unteachable people still do so, undeterred by the vast, the tragic, the miraculous answers of history: the mounting fury of anti-Semitism during the height of the emancipatory period; its ineffable culmination in the destruction of one third or the Jewish people; the counter self-emancipation to Jewishness and the triumph of that movement in the establishment of the Third Commonwealth.

We sought and found an explanation for these occurrences, for these events. We found that the Jewish people is one among the peoples of the world, differentiated from the other peoples, as those are from each, other, not by any biological characteristics but by psychological and moral ones. We found, in brief, that people differs from people as personality differs from personality and shares with personality the central trait of the identity of character with destiny. We found, finally, by the irrefutable facts of history that the Jewish people is different from all the other peoples by virtue of its endurance, acknowledged by all Christendom, both friend and foe, as an historic experience, as a matter of direct knowledge. And this endurance across the ages, especially during the ages of dispersion and persecutions; this ability to die a thousand deaths; and achieve a thousand resurrections even to this very hour in history, we found to constitute a uniqueness, a singularity, which necessarily inheres in that original, character of the Jewish people which determines at destiny.

NEXT we came upon another matter of universal experience, namely, that no Jew can understand himself and his station in the world and his fate nor learn how to live a whole integrated life who does not penetrate and make his very own this knowledge of the uniqueness of tie singularity of the Jewish people. Only by accepting this fact, or, rather, not repressing it, for as fact it admits of no dispute, can a Jew understand the failure of the Emancipation, the birth of Israel, his own immediate situation in this world and the necessities of that situation. Only by a constant awareness of this fact within the historic process can a Jew answer that question asked by all Jews everywhere today for themselves and their children: How are we to live? What is our hope? How shall we shape our future? What is our relation to our brothers in the State of Israel and to that state itself?

But we could not proceed to answer these questions at once because the right answers are kept from reaching the Jewish soul by certain fallacies in which Jew and Gentile are alike involved: the fallacies of “modernity” and “modern knowledge” as criteria of thought and action. And so we tried first to paint a picture of this “modern age” and to show that no age so disastrously degraded could be thought of as living by any truth that can help or redeem men to being better and shaping a better life. We found that the quality, the moral quality of this age, invalidates by what it is all the assumptions by which the age has been guided – the assumptions (symbolically speaking) of Darwin and Nietzsche and Marx and of instrumentalism in America. We found, in brief, that materialism and nihilism had demonstrably led to the very brink of chaos and that we need not even examine the premises from which the obvious conclusions as embodied in human life and history are misery of the heart and death of the body, immeasurable cruelty and immeasurable hopelessness.

And finally, because these pages are addressed to the Jews of America, we sought to make clear the history and the present situation of the American Jew. And so we found that, despite many adverse forces, the ideal of a free society is still alive in the United States. Now a free society is evidently not, of all things, a society of an enforced or unenforced uniformity, but one in which individuals and groups are free to seek their redemption upon the path dictated to them by their character and their history. And so we concluded that, since Galuth, since exile means in its evil sense living a false life, an un-Jewish life, a life of subservience to alien and tyrannous force, Jews could rescue America for themselves and their children from the area of the Gola if Jews would take advantage of the blessings of a free society by re-creating here their historic faith and form as their contribution to that society and to its culture.

SO WE come to the deepest and last problem; we come to the ultimate. What are Jews who have re-allied themselves with their people and its unique historic experience – what are they concretely to ask in the realm of thought and action; what are they to seek to believe and to do? And perhaps we can do best by beginning to state the ultimate problem and need of this time in general terms, in terms that apply to all men and then proceed to the specific Jewish embodiment of that problem.

A curious word has recently arisen among us. It is the word “religionist”. The form of the word is analogous to that of physicist, biologist, ichthyologist, one whose special and commonly professional interest is in physics, biology, the study of fishes. The current and conscious implications of the word “religionist” are both farcical and shocking. Just as the famous average man has no special interest in the science of life and can safely leave it to the biologist, so the inference is that that average man, that human being, has no special interest in religion and can leave all that to the religionist. In other words: the average man, running a business, driving a car, owning a television set, casting a vote, is supposed by the implicit premise never to be alone with himself, never to wonder at the meaning of his life, never to have been born or face the destiny of death, never, to know bereavement or guilt or aspiration – never for an instant to be human, but to have sunk, in sober fact, to the level of a tool-using animal. Search all history, search all so-called cultures from the most primitive on. It is doubtful you will come across a definition an implication as degraded as that of the word “religionist.” Through it we have been able to delineate the average man in a mechanized Society. The question arises: how did he get to be the pathetic object that he is?

A new authoritarianism has drained him of his humanity – the authoritarianism of “science” – of science not as the supremely beneficent art of healing, nor as the ingenuity which has produced the intricate and useful machinery of production, locomotion, amusement – but of “science” as it seeks to transcend its proper functions and limitations, and seeks to substitute itself for other forces and for an order of meaning in the domains of human conduct and of human faith.

Its authoritarianism in respect of human conduct has been chiefly in its dealings with society. We have here made the name of Marx the symbol of this aspect of scientific authoritarianism. For that name conspicuously represents the notion, widespread too among non-Marxian sociologists, economists, political scientists, that human society can be re-cast and re-constituted upon premises having nothing to do with man’s spiritual and moral nature – that Utopia can be built according to a blue-print; according to an anterior design into which man must be fitted. Oddly enough the average man in western civilization, though he must be afraid of force and pain, has not been deeply impressed by the overwhelming evidence that the blueprint state has forced its masters to murder all those it could not fit into its iron frame. He seems curiously unaware of the parent fact that both the Fascist and the Communist States have destroyed and are destroying with every circumstance of icy cruelty and fiendish degradation a within their boundaries whose souls still betray the lineaments of freedom and of goodness. Our average man still clings, in the face of this evidence, to the notion that environmental and mechanical changes, devices, techniques, can build of the same unredeemed men a better and adjuster society.

WHY does he cling to that notion? Why does he desire a pre-fabricated Utopia? It is the easiest way. It relieves him of moral responsibilities. Humanity is seeking in him to escape from being human. And he echoes: “Science declares… It has been scientifically demonstrated…” He wants everything for nothing. He wants a good society without being goo; he wants justice without being just; he wants what he thinks righteousness to prevail without having any notion of it. He babbles, among Jews, about prophetic Judaism, and decries the God who bade the trembling and reluctant prophets speak. He refuses to accept life as tragic and man as needing redemption; a cheap and false humanitarianism bids him demand the same-for all, irrespective of the inequalities of nature and of grace which it is his duty to alleviate as part of his moral discipline. He aspires toward a gilded stable. He talks about progress and means murder and gadgets and is undeterred by the terrifying and complete evidence that the scientifically planned state has everywhere immeasurably decreased the sum of human mercy, goodness, dignity and tranquility.

But indeed the whole notion of the planned master-state and prefabricated Utopia is a kind of moral madness. For its proponents always hold the “scientific” view that man is not made in the image of God nor has free will nor needs redemption but is the product of mechanical genetic forces and environmental pressures. Whence, then, do the planners, the makers of the blue-prints, the sordid dreamers of these sordid Utopias derive their authority? Are they not enmeshed in the same forces? No wonder that their means are the machine-gun, the crematorium, the slave-kennel. A hideous hell has been created on earth by the “scientific” attempt to build a new society. “If man,” Nicolas Berdyaev writes at his profoundest, “is nothing but the product of his social and natural environment, if he is wholly fashioned by society and owes everything to it; if there is no principle within him which raises him above nature and society, one does not grasp whence conies to him the creative power which permits him to master the forces of nature and society and to build anew.” (1) These degrading fallacies have crept even into our free society. They have confounded the realms of nature and of grace. They have cheapened and confused human life. Adequate symbols are those students, those poor bereft children who “go in” for the social sciences” as a means of redemption. For, to quote Berdyaev’s stringent conclusion: “The crisis in civilization can no longer be surmounted by its own means alone, shaken as its very foundations are. It is indispensable to turn to deeper forces.” (2) These deeper forces are the permanent moral and religious forces that have distinguished man from the rest of creation since his appearance on the scene of history. They have been broken and blunted by a mere mechanistic prejudice authoritatively pronounced and ire-iterated – the prejudice, in the words of one of the wittiest and wisest of living Americans, Joseph Wood Krutch, “that everything, including human character and literary greatness can be adequately studied by sociological and psychological methods. That conviction is not itself based – as respectable scientific theory always is – upon the successful prediction of future events. It is primarily a ‘will to believe’. (3) That ‘will to believe’ offers “the reward without the quest, the prize without training for the race, Heaven without probation, wages without work, a master’s prestige without a master’s skill, a trade without an apprenticeship. It has destroyed the moral and the social forms of life; it has gnawed away the sense of responsibility before a transcendent source of good; it has cast aside the truths derived from all earnest experience of human life – Pagan, Jewish, Christian. A powerful counter-current has set in among Gentiles, as is proved by our quotations from two men so different in origin and temper as the critic, Joseph Wood Krutch and the Anglican cleric and educator Bernard Iddings Bell. That current has not yet powerfully enough stirred the waters of Jewish life in America.

III

SCIENTIFIC authoritarianism based on prejudice and a mere will to believe could not, of course, have shattered man’s moral and social life, had it not first attacked the very bases of form and faith. This is the force we have symbolized by the name of Darwin. The use of the symbol is quite fair. Physics, an exact science, dealing with the inorganic, with what is not life or consciousness, has always been prudent or, at least, moderate. In recent years the ascertained fact that what men once thought of as inert matter is far more like what was once called mind, the vision of relations through relativity, of probabilities through the quantum theory as all that the physicist knows actually knows – these discoveries have destroyed the bases of that old false analogy which likened the universe to a machine. Among physicists, too, tough old prejudices remain here and there so that, as Sir Arthur Eddington points out, they will actually use a “fallacious and obsolete view of the nature of observational knowledge” (5), although they know better. He himself declares – and has not been contradicted – that the fundamental laws which operate within the physical universe can be foreseen wholly from epistemological considerations. They correspond to a priori knowledge and are therefore wholly subjective.” (6) Man, by alone knowing the universe and helping to shape it by his knowledge of it, once more stands at the center of things.

It is the authoritarianism of the so-called sciences of life which has attacked and undermined man’s sense of moral responsibility, because it has given a false account of him and his origin. Deliberately in its picture of man and of what he is, it has omitted all those circumstances which differentiate him from all other forms of life: language, music, mathematics, the desire for knowledge; the universal hunger for redemption and for God. It has committed the cardinal sin, according to the strict demands of responsible science, of forming theories which do not include or account for the most salient facts. It is an experience at once farcical and melancholy to read a book, any book, dealing, for instance, with genetics, the science of heredity, upon which all the biological views of man are based. The pages are peppered with recurrent phrases: “There is as yet no positive knowledge” … “it- is strongly suspected” … “it is rash to assume” … “no doubt” … “this will be eventually solved” … “But whether or not”… In every other paragraph the question is begged, that is, to prove a thing the writer assumes it to be so. Analogies of hair-raising variety are used as proofs. The “genes,” of which everyone has heard nowadays, are alike. Yet they function toward great differentiation. Well, why shouldn’t they, says your geneticist. Snow crystals are all made of water, the same water, yet each of the millions of crystals is of its own exquisite pattern; different from all the other myriads. He seems to be explaining one unfathomable mystery of creation by merely likening it to another unfathomable mystery. Even the educated lay-man rarely reads these crabbed and pompous books. He goes to a lecture. The lecturer tells him that man is a primate descended from some branch of the primate family, that he is a higher ape. The layman is helpless. How does he know that the “proofs” are a display of intellectual charlatanism? He assumes that the Darwinian hypothesis of uninterrupted development has been scientifically demonstrated. Sadly or gladly, according to his spiritual temper, he accepts the fiat of science and so a universe empty, without God of hope.

This aspect of scientific authoritarianism has sunk so deep and wrought so much havoc that one more flagrant instant may be adduced.

Our geneticist asserts that the development from a unicellular animal to Plato and Isaiah, to Shakespeare and Beethoven took place by means of “a mechanism for blind-hereditary variations sorted out by the automatic sieve of natural selection. He does not pretend to know quite how it happened, as we have seen from his phraseology. He makes his pompous assertion. He goes further. He makes metaphysical assertions that are plainly impudent. How does he know that the variations are “blind,” seeing that he admits their adaptive function, the aim in view. But there must be no am. For aim would readmit a Creative Power. The notion of purpose or aim in nature is known in philosophy as teleological. Therefore teleological has become bad word among third-rate scientists: Like God. These terms and notions are taboo among them. It is quite like not walking under a ladder or being frightened at a black cat. But our geneticist, whose use of language is hardly of scientific precision gives himself quite away by his glib use of the world “automatic” in the phrase “the automatic sieve of natural selection. Now “automatic” is put together out of two Greek words which mean self and moving. Translate the second word to Latin and you have automobile, which also, means self-moving. But an automatic machine and an automobile drive by themselves only because man’s ingenuity has produced a mechanism which, when started and applied with energy as fuel by man, will continue to function for a limited period and within boundaries set by man and the quality of the material used by man. In brief, man is the autos, the self, the power which causes the machine to move. Therefore by the analogy our genetic himself proposes, a Creator is at work. Heine was quite right in his quip against the silliness of atheism. He said that in Frankfurt-on-the Main he met a watch which did not believe in the existence of watch-makers. He didn’t buy it.

But that is not all. The ordinary variety of biologist assumes that the unfathomable abyss between the inorganic and the organic has been bridged, that it is known how the living developed from the non-living. It is not true. Reputable biologists have advanced theories as fantastic as that the first germ of life was wafted to earth from another planet. (8) We do not know. We have no inkling. We are faced by the utterly inscrutable. Similarly anthropologists assert that we know concerning the birth of language, of the arts, of prayer. It is not so. All men of whom we have knowledge, however antique or “primitive,” whatever that may mean, have language, art, immortal longings. There is no bridge from non-life to life; there is no bridge from the anthropoid ape to man. None. None. According to the most stringent demands of rigorous thought the assumption of a divine and transcendent Creative Force alone explains both what we know and what we do not and cannot know. He who, using both faith and reason, utters the name of God, as the sages of Israel did from age to age, enters the realm of meaning and value, which is man’s dwelling place. He alone explains both the good and the evil that are in the world; he is aware of the character of man’s visible destiny; he alone knows the meaning of human freedom both in the universe and in society. He alone will defy the tyrants who seek to enthrall us more and more – the pseudo-scientific tyrant of the mind, the totalitarian tyrant of both the body and the mind. For these two tyrants are in league with each other and with death against us.

It is often said by those who, in the brilliant definition of Whitehead, are provincials not only in space but in time, (9) that science operates with the human reason, that what is unscientific is irrational. From the point of view of method this is precisely contrary to fact. Modern science in its origin was, as Whitehead pointed out a quarter of a century ago, “through and through an anti-intellectualistic movement.” (10) The human reason, no perfect instrument, had gone to dire extremes in the Middle Ages. An appeal to the humble facts was in order. Thus arose the experimental sciences and the sciences of classification and achieved incomparable triumph after incomparable triumph. But these triumphs, man being what he is, intoxicated the scientists. They applied their methods to realms in which these methods were not applicable. They committed the final sin of which man is capable. They substituted themselves for God and led men into sordid idolatries – the idolatry of science, the idolatry of the master state. The two are one. For no one would have dreamed of consenting to slavery in a slave state, had he not been befuddled into believing that scientific manipulation could build a painless society. The hour has come for an appeal to reason, to order and to faith.

For so soon as we use our, reason we know that even could technical manipulation build a painless society, the painlessness would be only that of the stalled ox. The conscious mysteries of birth and death and bereavement, oft spiritual sorrow, of the passing of love, of the chasms between aspiration and fulfillment, the dread of the soul falling a blinded thing in an unmeaning universe – all these unquenchable sorrows would remain. Religion is man’s way of dealing with these. And they are as sharp, if not, sharper, than the pain of the bodily wants. Homelessness in the universe is a deeper anguish than maladjustment in a transitory social structure. And perhaps we shall be able to build a society in which men will be less alienated and homeless when we have recovered a sense of the universe as not empty and meaningless but as divine and rational.

Reason, supplemented by faith, must once again build significant forms of life, forms within which the things that man is and does have, meaning and sanction. For that is what has been lost – the meaning and the sanction which made of the acts and emotions of man acts and emotions that he could objectify, as man alone does, which he could contemplate with satisfaction and with hope. Without that there is, as we can see, mere abasement, mere degradation. This, as Ortega y Gasset wrote, “is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.” (11) How deep that cleaves! How many people, how many Jews of our time does that delineate! We see them dill about us, restless, afraid, desirous and famished, in mechanized flight from their centre and true being, from their faith and form. But it is also to be observed that the Jew fervent in adherence to the Law and the fervent Zionist escaped that restlessness and abasement. These two had not refused to be what it was their duty to be. They had neither abandoned faith nor shattered form. In an evil age, within confusion and alienation; they asserted the dignity of man and the meaning of life

(1) Nicolas Berdyaev. Au seuil de la nouvelle epoque. 1947.
(2) Berdyaev. Op cit.
(3) The Nation. Dec. 12, 1949.
(4) Bernard Iddings Bell. Crisis in Education. 1949
(5) Arthur Eddington. The Philosophy of Physical Science. 1939.
(6) Op cit.
(7) All these quotations are examples are taken from: Muller, Little and Snyder. Genetics, Medicine and Man. Cornell University Press. 1947.
(8) J.A. Thomson. Concerning Evolution.
(9) A.N. Whitehead. Science and the Modem World. 1921.
(10) Op cit.
(11) Jose Ortega y Gasset. The Revolt of the Masses. 1936.

NOTE: Dr. Lewisohn’s challenging series, “Reflections on the Jewish Situation,” which appeared in recent issues of the JEWISH FRONTIER will be included in his forthcoming book “The American Jew: Character and Destiny”, to be published on November 2, 1950, by Farrar, Strauss & Co. The book will contain new material in addition to the articles which we have been privileged to present to our readers.

______________________________

A PDF version of this interesting exchange of correspondence is available here.

Thoughts from The Frontier: Reflections on the Jewish Situation, by Ludwig Lewisohn: Correspondence with Jack J. Cohen (Jewish Frontier, July, 1950)

Jewish Frontier
July, 1950

Correspondence

TO THE EDITOR:

Mr. Lewisohn’s article in the May issue of the Jewish Frontier contains, in my opinion, some glaring errors of commission and omission.

He reads into the “Program for Jewish Life Today,” published in the Reconstructionist (Vol. 16, No. 1) a conception of adjustment to “modernity” and “modern conditions” which not only is not there but is definitely deprecated in that document. Mr. Lewisohn confines himself to his own arbitrary interpretation of modern life. He assumes that modernism is synonymous with the barbaric and catastrophic totalitarianisms of our day. We are amazed that Mr. Lewisohn should have imputed to Reconstructionists a yielding to the forces that make for totalitarianism. The “Program for Jewish Life Today” states “Judaism demands resistance to any totalitarianism because it necessarily deprives the individual of his freedom to make the most of his own life.” Reconstructionists have consistently championed democracy against every authoritarian encroachment on freedom of conscience and human rights. Adjustment to modern life cannot mean indiscriminate acceptance of all its mutually contradictory elements. It must mean taking cognizance of both the good and the evil in the world today and neither rejecting any good that is not traditional nor condoning any evil that is rooted in tradition.

Even more amazing to me than this misrepresentation of the Reconstructionist attitude to modern life is Mr. Lewisohn’s own failure to recognize the very existence of problems that constitute the crucial issues affecting Jewish life today. Without entering into any lengthy discussion of these issues, let me list just a few of them:

1. How shall Judaism reckon with the necessary conditions resulting from the mechanization of our economic processes

2. Has Judaism anything to learn from science and the scientific method that can make for the spiritual enrichment of Jewish life? Ought not Jewish religion reckon with the experimental method, with the authority of verifiable facts as opposed to that of dogma or tradition and with the willingness, characteristic of science, to reexamine traditional beliefs and theories, when these are challenged by new experience?

3. The struggle of democracy against totalitarian tendencies has heightened our awareness of the need for safeguarding the right to be different. How shall this awareness affect the inner life of the Jewish community, which in the past, insisted on universal conformity with authoritarian codes regulating all the minutiae of human conduct?

These are only a few of the issues of modern life with which any program for Jewish living must reckon. A romantic glorification of the past will not avail. Only by applying human intelligence to the reconstruction of Jewish life can we save Judaism from those dangers that beset it in the modern world.

JACK J. COHEN
Director of the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation

**********

TO THE EDITOR:

I AM SORRY THAT Rabbi Cohen has the impression that I ever dreamed of accusing the Reconstructionist which, with reasonable reservations, I respect and admire, of totalitarian sympathies. The three phrases I quoted from the Reconstructionist program re-iterate the well-known position of the movement that Judaism should be governed by the winds of doctrine of a particular age and make them its criterion. To deny this is not as monstrous as it seems to Rabbi Cohen. It grieves me to see Jews lag behind in better things. In my own humble way I seem to myself to be within Jewry a representative of that powerful current in that Christian world which is connected with the name of the late Nicholas Berdyaev and with the names of Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebhur. If Rabbi Cohen will do me the honor of reading my argument to the end he will see, in the light of this statement, just where I stand.

The three questions he asks show that he has no inkling of my position whatever he may think of it.

1. Of course, the truths of any religion have precisely nothing to do with such things as the “mechanization of economic power” except, perhaps, to sit in judgement on its moral results.

2. No, Judaism has nothing to learn from science. Except in the realm of physics the experimental method has produced nothing but fallacies and chaos. So soon as it touches the phenomena of life, man, history, it has proved itself confusing unveracious and wholly evil in its inferences.

3. Correct. The right to be different is the most precious of democratic rights. Who has deprecated the asher bacharbanu mi-kol ha amin? Who? The Reconstructionists or I who humbly and fervently believe it and who believe that all history, from Sinai to Warsaw and the Medinath Yisrael, has confirmed it irrefutably?

LUDWIG LEWISOHN
Brandeis University
Waltham, Mass.

______________________________

A PDF version of this interesting exchange of correspondence is available here.