HOW ABOUT THE JEWS?
Hankins, Frank H.
Last Of A Series On Racialism In A Democracy How About The Jews? By FRANK H. HANKINS IN this brief discussion of racial issues we have kept steadily in mind the psycho-social reactions of the...
...However, one cannot brand an entire group with the faults of a few...
...This view helps one to understand why the Jew has so often been the scapegoat...
...they formed compact communities within communities...
...He can escape this common human evil only by merging himself in the community so completely that he is no longer distinguishable...
...We have here an almost perfect explanation of Jewish traits...
...notes that the Jew has been a city dweller for 2,000 years and has thus undergone the selective effects of a special environment...
...It helps to explain the fact that Jewish crime is largely intel-lectualistic and urban in nature...
...This is not the view of the common man...
...750) And yet Fischer sold out to the Nazis and quarreled with other scientific renegades as to who was the rightful head of the Nordic cult...
...Moreover, even if some Jews are guilty—due in part to incomplete cultural assimilation and in part to a severe struggle for existence in a more or less hostile community—one cannot overlook the fact that in total we have a vastly greater amount of this shaving of ethical standards by good Christians themselves...
...One cannot eat fish on Friday...
...This fact is not particularly important where his numbers are small, but becomes crucial where his numbers permit the maintenance of a strong sense of community life...
...One must look for a more general cause...
...By the common illogicality of the popular mind these innocent differences become the basis of debasing racial and cultist stereotypes, the semi-mythical basis of group animosities...
...These are the things that sustain the individual sense of worth and make life purposeful, and every group seeks to preserve them...
...If one questions its validity, let him reflect on the Know Nothings, the Ku Klux Klan, and similar aspects of our history...
...They then turned to the Japanese whom they learned to hate in turn...
...This is a social mechanism of wide implications...
...They thus set the stage for loosing the typical reactions toward the stranger...
...But no...
...The early manifestations of anti-Semitism seem to have been due primarily to the fact that the Jew segregated himself in order to avoid contamination by the common and unclean in the surrounding culture...
...Urban Character Of Jews For the Jew this clearly raises a dilemma...
...I find this in the psychology toward the stranger, the rmreasoning fear, suspicions, and hate everywhere manifested toward those who are not clearly identified with the prevailing sense of community...
...Both Christian and Mohammedan owe much to the Jew as the fountain-head of their religious inspiration...
...Anti-Semitism declined during the expansive and hence liberalistic era of the last century...
...Among us this is explained as due to the crucifixion, or to the myths of ritual murders, or the infamous Protocols, but these do not explain the same phenomena in other cultures...
...and that our future prosperity will depend largely on still further expansions therein...
...Whether one attributes his slow amalgamation to his racial-cultism or to anti-Semitism, the fact remains that the development of a sense of communality between Jew and non-Jew is impeded by restricted intermarriage...
...Jews Remain Unassimilable These patterns are those psycho-social mechanisms universally manifested toward the stranger...
...Anti-Semitism once lodged in a culture thus becomes a sort of lightning-rod drawing down on the Jew a thousand and one unmerited complaints...
...the other cannot lift a finger on the Sabbath...
...This I take it is the main reason why anti-Semitism has grown in this country while the former attitudes of suspicion and hate toward other alien elements coming to this country have generally lessened...
...The only possible exception is the suspected but unverified increase of suspicion toward Catholics in some parts of the country...
...Closely related to the foregoing are those sources of anti-Semitism arising from the essentially urban character of certain Jewish traits,' plus the reactions of Jews to discrimination against them...
...The most distingushed German work on human biology (Bauer, Fischer, Lenz Menschliche Erblehre) says: "If the most gifted one per cent of the German population should be singled out, this group would, of course, be predominantly Jewish intellectuals...
...The cunning and unscrupulous political leader arouses the latent animosities of the mass for personal aggrandizement and directs their reaction toward a plausible object...
...This also accounts, together with legal restrictions on his ownership of landed property, for his devotion to mercantile pursuits...
...and finds the truth in this view to be that we should afford every opportunity for talent to rise in all racial categories...
...Little or no distinction is made between what is due to genes and what to culture...
...Just as the Negro seems likely to be deeply affected by future invention and economic development affecting the number of jobs and the nature of opportunity, so anti-Semitism seems more likely to be affected by economic prosperity or adversity than by the teachings of the schools or the exhortations of press and pulpit...
...Among Nobel Prize winners Jews have numbered about 10 per cent, or many times their proportion...
...This can be shown by striking statistics for numerous countries...
...he boasts that he thus serves both God and man...
...They have, in fact, been one of the most dynamic elements in the vast material advances of the past century...
...The Decisive Factor Thus, if one surveys the great names in the various fields of science, medicine, psychiatry, music, literature, philosophy, and kindred achievements of the human mind, he must be struck with the truly magnificent contributions to all of them of the relatively small number of Jews...
...The early Sephardim [Jews who are descendants of the former Jews of Spain and Portugal] immigration to this country caused no marked opposition...
...3, 1945...
...It has been this preservation of a core of orthodoxy that has preserved the Jews as an ethnic group throughout the Diaspora...
...Thus, emotion triumphs over reason...
...This, however, does not solve the above dilemma...
...The Gentile pushes with might and main into these fields and sacrifices to push his children into them...
...the believer everywhere cherishes his ancient dogmas as his most sacred possessions...
...By FRANK H. HANKINS IN this brief discussion of racial issues we have kept steadily in mind the psycho-social reactions of the common man...
...They are an exaggerated form of urban traits in general...
...their numbers were small and they were the equals of the natives in culture and skills...
...Prof...
...The intellectual, professional, and artistic fields of endeavor are considered worthy of special esteem, partly because it takes talent to succeed in them and partly because they are the crowning achievements of civilization...
...but according to deep-seated American tradition cultivated by the typical success story, this should be to their credit...
...It is beyond doubt that some Jews have been guilty of these things...
...it has flared up anew under the increasing pressures of our revolutionary age...
...Whether one prefers genes or environment, this viewpoint helps to explain both physical and mental characteristics : the inferiority in physical strength, resistance to tuberculosis, superior capacity for formal, logical, abstract, and mathematical thought, unusual powers of rationalization, high nervous tension, energy, emotionality (opposite of rural passivity and phlegmatic unresponsiveness), and activity...
...In such a case, especially if such a group also practices a cult different from that of the majority and thus sets themselves apart as a more or less clannish community, they will be viewed by the populace as a more or less separate breed and on them will center all the characteristic patterns of racial suspicion...
...and so long as that dilemma is not solved through amalgamation, like causes seem likely to produce like effects...
...They are charged with sharp business practices, undercutting the ethical standards of the professions (advertising doctors and dentists, ambulance chasers), practising usury, promoting pornography, advocating radicalisms of various sorts, monopolizing certain business, or even owning the country...
...Colin Clark (The Conditions of Economic Progress) finds that a basic distinction between high and low standard countries is the proportion of persons engaged in these fields...
...He has so often been the one obvious and helpless minority...
...The Jew became the city dweller par excellence...
...nor is it likely to become so...
...If Jews are conspicuous leaders of social reform movements, this is doubtless due in large part to their struggle for equal rights, fair treatment, and a social order free from racial animus...
...Whereas non-Jews had death rates in cities in excess of birth rates well into the 19th Century, the Jew had long since adapted to urban life...
...Catholicism thus prevents the infiltration of modernism in large masses of American Irish, Italians, and Poles...
...and just now they are learning to hate the Negro...
...and until this sense of identification through communal solidarity is developed there can be only its opposite, a sense of difference and estrangement...
...This is not peculiar to anti-Semitism...
...In social relations a race exists whenever considerable numbers of any group are visibly distinguishable by inherited physical traits...
...This is one instance in thousands here, while evidences of anti-Semitism have constituted an appalling section of the news from abroad for years...
...But this would mean the destruction of himself as Jewish...
...They have more recently developed suspicion and contempt for their more recent Mexican importees...
...The mass immigration of Askenasim Jews after 1895 altered the picture...
...Firm adherence to traditional cultural elements, especially language and religion, serves as an insulating and protective device against group dissolution...
...The Jew As A Scapegoat I noted above that massing of numbers is an important factor...
...These are the "realities" in such matters rather than the sophisticated findings of the arm-chair philosopher or laboratory scientist, especially when the latter turn propagandist...
...The Jew has thus been, largely of his own purpose, relatively unassimilable...
...Thus, when one looks into the history of Jewry, he finds it viewed in much the same manner by Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, by Turks, by Arabs, by ancient Romans, and even by unbelievers of various shades of opinion...
...This observation applies also to the Jewish problem, which seems on many evidences to get more acute, especially in this country...
...The Jew, however, always expresses surprise at what he has experienced a thousand times, and projects the explanation outward as though he in no way had given cause...
...An angry, frustrated, or defeated individual or public tends to projeet its pent-up animosity onto some readily available object...
...and these in turn account for his internationalism and his freedom from the barbaric excesses of tribalistic nationalism...
...Our viewpoint is expressed by Howard Mumford Jones in his review of Black Boy by Richard Wright (Saturday Revieiv of Literature, Mar...
...The fact is that Jews constitute a far larger proportion of those engaged in intellectual pursuits than their percentage in the population...
...A derogatory stereotype develops, attaching the traits of some to all...
...That was long before the ghetto was imposed by outside pressure...
...14) reports the fracas at Harvard over the granting of a scholarship in chemistry to a non-Jew although a Jew ranked first in the competition therefor...
...Albert S. Coolidge, speaking before a legislative committee considering an anti-discrimination bill, stated that discrimination in education was depriving scientific fields of outstanding students...
...Karl Kautsky (Are the Jews a Race...
...The explanation is partly biological and partly cultural...
...but the Jew has adhered with almost fanatical tenacity to his own ancient revelations...
...Is one to conclude that the Jews could win esteem by remaining poor, ignorant, and unskilled...
...Or, let him picture in imagination what would have been the result of the settlement among us in relatively compact communities of large numbers of Mohammedans, with their mosques, mullahs, and muezzins, their dietary laws, their Koran, and their peculiar rituals...
...The Jew is proud of his race and culture...
...Moreover, while radicalism may be offensive to those in power, it is an essential condition of social progress...
...One might suppose that the Jew would at least win esteem by serving his fellow men likewise...
...We now come to the supreme absurdity of anti-Semitism, namely, that one of the basic tragedies of the Jew is his success...
...Nor need it be a matter of wonder that the strongest animosity toward the Jew is shown in Catholic strongholds where 2 strong and intolerant authoritarianisms meet...
...By long tradition city dwellers, they came after, the frontier was gone...
...Here is a complex of charges that the discriminating mind knows how to evaluate...
...He neglects the fact that there is no anti-Semitism where there are no Jews, but that it arises wherever they assemble in large numbers...
...The foregoing should be viewed only as a partial effort at an explanation of anti-Semitism in broad general terms of common human reaction patterns...
...Nor can one find anywhere an important Jewish monopoly, whether in any line of business, or press, or movies...
...A man may vent his spleen due to any number of possible frustrations in daily life on his wife, his children, his dog, or even his golf club...
...Such a group becomes a ready victim of compensatory animosities due to the various frustrations of life, both private and public...
...And when one recalls that civilization has always been a phenomenon of urban life, it helps to explain the remarkable contributions of Jews to western culture...
...Thus, partly by internal volition and partly by external compulsion, the Jew has remained Jewish...
...Volga Germans thus preserved themselves for centuries...
...Kacialism rests on elemental psycho-social traits...
...The February Fortune reported that anti-Negro sentiment is running high in Seattle with only 3,000 to 4,000 of them in the city, while in Portland "where there are 15,000 it is proportionately higher...
...Not a few have done this, but when I hear the local rabbi exhorting his brethren to adhere to elements of a ritual that is at once the most ancient and in some respects the most fantastic from our cultural orientation to be found anywhere in the West, I know that is not a solution the orthodox will approve...
...He takes note of the contention that our race problems would be solved if only the cultivated leaders of different races got together...
...In such a situation we should have another set of racial-cultist myths, absurd exaggerations, and other mental trappings of popular suspicions...
...Cali-fornians imported Chinese laborers until they became numerous and then secured Chinese exclusion...
...The devices are everywhere much the same: special religious and language instruction, separate schools, strenuous opposition to out-marriages, the cultivation of a special mysticism, both racial and sacred, together with the inevitable sense of superior virtue necessary to the maintenance of separatism...
...it is even probable that some of them have been conspicuous offenders, for the Jew works hard and often cleverly at what he undertakes...
...the popular mind notes differences regardless of their basis...
...Jewish orthodoxy has been the most impermeable of all those flourishing in the western world...
...No doubt many of them have met with great success...
...This morning's New York Times (Mar...
...his very success arouses fear and jealousy...
...It is not likely to be deeply affected by scientific anthropology...
...It helps to understand why the Jew has so often in many Christian and Mohammedan countries been suspect...
...Reaction against the brutalities and injustices of racialism have produced the futile propaganda to the effect that there is no such thing as race, or at least that the Jews are not a race...
...However, as a factual interpretation, it is profoundly false, for the reason that it is with the mass of half-educated whites that the mass of half-educated Negroes comes chiefly into contact...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 17
