A Jew of standing, Dr. Oscar Levy, well known in English literary circles and a lover of his people, has had the honesty and the wisdom to meet the Jewish Question with truth and candor. His remarks are printed in this article as an example of the methods by which Jewry can be saved in the estimation of Twentieth Century Civilization.
The circumstances were these: George Pitt-Rivers, of Worcester College, Oxford, wrote a most illuminating brochure entitled, “The World Significance of the Russian Revolution,” which is published and sold for two shillings by Basil Blackwell, Oxford. The book is the result of unprejudiced observation and study and agrees with the statements made in THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT about the personnel of Bolshevism. The manuscript was sent to Dr. Oscar Levy, as a representative Jew, and Dr. Levy’s letter was subsequently published as a preface to the book.
That the reader may understand the tenor of Mr. Pitt-Rivers’s book, section XVI, pp. 39-41, is herewith given in full, and is followed by Dr. Levy’s comments. The italics throughout are intended to remind the reader of remarks on similar lines made in this series:
It is not unnaturally claimed by Western Jews that Russian Jewry, as a whole, is most bitterly opposed to Bolshevism. Now although there is a great measure of truth in this claim, since the prominent Bolsheviks, who are preponderantly Jewish, do not belong to the orthodox Jewish Church, it is yet possible, without laying oneself open to the charge of anti-Semitism, to point to the obvious fact that Jewry, as a whole, has, consciously or unconsciously, worked for and promoted an international economic, material despotism which, with Puritanism as an ally, has tended in an ever-increasing degree to crush national and spiritual values out of existence and substitute the ugly and deadening machinery of finance and factory. It is also a fact that Jewry, as a whole, strove every nerve to secure and heartily approved of the overthrow of the Russian monarchy, which they regarded as their most formidable obstacle in the path of their ambitions and business pursuits. All this may be admitted, as well as the plea that, individually or collectively, most Jews may heartily detest the Bolshevik régime, yet it is still true that the whole weight of Jewry was in the revolutionary scales against the czar’s government. It is true their apostate brethren, who are now riding in the seat of power, may have exceeded their orders; that is disconcerting, but it does not alter the fact. It may be that the Jews, often the victims of their own idealism, have always been instrumental in bringing about the events they most heartily disapprove of; that perhaps is the curse of the Wandering Jew.
Certainly it is from the Jews themselves that we learn most about the Jews. It is possible that only a Jew can understand a Jew. Nay, more, it may be that only a Jew can save us from the Jews, a Jew who is great enough, strong enough—for greater racial purity is a source of strength in the rare and the great—and inspired enough to overcome in himself the life-destructive vices of his own race. It was a Jew who said, “Wars are the Jews’ harvest”; but no harvest so rich as civil wars. A Jew reminds us that the French Revolution brought civil emancipation for the Jews in Western Europe. Was it a Jew who inspired Rousseau with the eighteenth century idea of the sameness of man according to nature? Dr. Kallen, a Zionist author, writes: “Suffering for 1,000 years from the assertion of their difference from the rest of mankind, they accepted eagerly the escape from suffering which the eighteenth century assertion of the sameness of all men opened to them . . . . They threw themselves with passion into the republican emancipating movements of their fellow subjects of other stocks.” It was a Jew, Ricardo, who gave us the nineteenth century ideal of the sameness of man according to machinery. And without the Ricardian gospel of international capitalism, we could not have had the international gospel of Karl Marx. Moses Hess and Disraeli remind us of the particularly conspicuous part played by Jews in the Polish and Hungarian rebellions, and in the republican uprising in Germany of ’48. Even more conspicuous were they in the new internationalism logically deducible from the philosophy of Socialism. This we were taught by the Jew Marx, and the Jew Ferdinand Lasalle, and they but developed the doctrine of the Jew David Ricardo.