History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  The forgery failed in its original object. The Tsar was not deceived, writing on the document: ‘A worthy cause is not defended by evil means.’ The police then planted it in various quarters and in 1905 it first attained published form as an additional chapter in Serge Nilus’ book The Great in Little. But it aroused little interest. It was the Bolshevist triumph in 1917 which gave the Protocols a second, and far more successful, birth. The association of Jews with Lenin’s putsch was widely reported at the time, especially in Britain and France, now in the most desperate phase of a long war which had drained their manhood and resources. Kerensky’s provisional government had done its best to keep Russia actively in the war against Germany. Lenin reversed its policy and sought an immediate peace on almost any terms. This fearful blow to the Allied cause, which led almost immediately to the transfer of German divisions from Russia to the Western Front, revived in some people’s minds the identification of the Jews with Germany. There was in Britain, for example, a small but bellicose group of writers, led by Hilaire Belloc and the brothers Cecil and G. K. Chesterton, who had waged a ferocious campaign, with anti-Semitic undertones, against Lloyd George and his Attorney-General, Sir Rufus Isaacs, over the Marconi case (1911). They now seized on the events in Russia to link the Jews with pacifism in Britain. Early in November 1917, in a speech, G. K. Chesterton issued a threat: ‘I would like to add a few words to the Jews…. If they continue to indulge in stupid talk about pacifism, inciting people against the soldiers and their wives and widows, they will learn for the first time what the word anti-Semitism really means.’63

  The rapid circulation of the Protocols in the light of the October Revolution had, for a time, a devastating impact even in Britain, where anti-Semitism was a drawing-room, not a street, phenomenon. Both The Times’ Russian correspondent, Robert Wilton, and the Morning Post’s, Victor Marsden, were fiercely anti-Bolshevik and inclined to be anti-Semitic too. Both accepted the versions of the Protocols they saw as authentic. The Times ran a correspondence under the heading ‘The Jews and Bolshevism’, which included a contribution from ‘Verax’, 27 November 1919: ‘The essence of Judaism…is above all a racial pride, a belief in their superiority, faith in their final victory, the conviction that the Jewish brain is superior to the Christian brain, in short, an attitude corresponding to the innate conviction that the Jews are the Chosen People, fated to become one day the rulers and legislators of mankind.’ The Jewish World commented: ‘Verax’s letter marks the beginning of a new and evil era…. We cannot say any more that there is no anti-Semitism in this country that loved the Bible above everything.’64 Early the next year, the editor of the Morning Post, H. A. Gwynne, wrote an introduction to an unsigned book called The Causes of World Unrest, based on the Protocols. They might or might not be genuine, he wrote. ‘Their chief interest lies in the fact that, while the book which contains them was published in 1905, the Jewish Bolsheviks are today carrying out almost to the letter the programme outlined in the Protocols.’ He noted that ‘over 95 per cent of the present Bolshevik government are Jews’. The publication gave a list of fifty of its members, with their ‘pseudonyms’ and ‘real names’, and claimed that of these only six were Russian, one German and all the rest were Jews.65 The Times published an article, 8 May 1920, entitled ‘The Jewish Peril’, based on the assumption that the Protocols were genuine. Had Britain, it asked, ‘escaped a Pax Germanica to fall into a Pax Judaica?’

  The agitation was continually refuelled by reports of Bolshevik atrocities. Churchill, a lifelong friend of the Jews, had been badly shaken by the murder of the British naval attaché in the Russian capital. The Jews were the most remarkable race on earth, he wrote, and their religious contribution ‘is worth more than all other knowledge and all other doctrines’. But now, he said, ‘this amazing race has created another system of morality and philosophy, this one saturated with as much hatred as Christianity was with love’.66 Victor Marsden, who had been held in a Bolshevik prison, returned with gruesome tales. ‘When we besieged Mr Marsden with questions’, reported the Morning Post, ‘and asked him who was responsible for the persecution he had suffered…he answered with two words: “The Jews.” ’67 Wilton, the Times man, published a book claiming that the Bolsheviks had erected a statue to Judas Iscariot in Moscow.68 Yet in the end it was The Times, in a series of articles published in August 1921, which first demonstrated that the Protocols was a forgery. After that, the wave of British anti-Semitism subsided as quickly as it had risen. Belloc had taken advantage of the scare to produce a book, The Jews, claiming that the Bolshevik outrages had created real anti-Semitism in Britain for the first time. But by the time it appeared, in February 1922, the moment had passed and it was coolly received.

  In France, however, it was a different matter, for there anti-Semitism had deep roots, a national culture of its own, and was to yield bitter fruits. The great victory in the Dreyfus case had given French Jews a false sense of final acceptance, reflected in the extraordinarily small number of legal requests by French Jews to change their names: a mere 377 in the entire period 1803-1942.69 Leaders of Jewish opinion in France argued strongly that hatred of the Jews was a foreign, German, import: ‘Racism and anti-Semitism are a treasonable work,’ argued a pamphlet put out by Jewish ex-soldiers. ‘They come from abroad. They are imported by those who want civil war and are hoping for a return of foreign war.’70 In 1906, at the height of the Dreyfus triumph, the Union Israélite pronounced anti-Semitism ‘dead’. Yet it was only two years later that Maurras’ Action Française and an equally anti-Semitic group, Les Camelots du Roi, came into existence. In 1911, the Camelots organized a violent demonstration against the play Après Moi at the Comédie Française; it was written by Henri Bernstein, an army deserter in his youth, and it had to be abandoned as a result of the rioting.71 In France, unlike Britain, there seems to have been a natural constituency for anti-Semitic agitators. They seized eagerly on the Bolshevik scare and the mythology promoted by the Protocols, which went into many French editions. The focus of French anti-Semitism switched from the Jews as ‘money power’ to Jews as social subversives.

  Jewish socialists, like Léon Blum, made no attempt to refute the notion. Blum gloried in the messianic role of Jews as social revolutionaries. The ‘collective impulse’ of the Jews, he wrote, ‘leads them towards revolution; their critical powers (and I use the words in their highest sense) drive them to destroy every idea, every traditional form which does not agree with the facts or cannot be justified by reason.’ In the long, sorrowful history of the Jews, he argued, ‘the idea of inevitable justice’ had sustained them, the belief that the world would be one day ‘ordered according to reason, one rule prevail over all men, so that everyone gets their due. Is that not the spirit of socialism? It is the ancient spirit of the race.’72 Blum wrote these words in 1901. In the post-war context they became more dangerous. Yet Blum, by far the most notable figure in French Jewry between the wars, continued to insist that it was the role of Jews to lead the march of socialism. He seems to have thought that even rich Jews would join it. In fact, while the anti-Semitic right saw Blum as the personification of Jewish radicalism, there were many on the left who abused him as the covert agent of the Jewish bourgeoisie. One-third of the Paris bankers were Jews, and it was a favourite assertion on the left that Jews controlled government finance whoever was in power. ‘Their long association with banking and commerce’, said Jean Jaurès, ‘has made them peculiarly adept in the ways of capitalist criminality.’73 When, in the post-war years, the socialist left became the French Communist Party, an anti-Semitic element, albeit coded, became part of its bristling armoury of abuse, much of which was directed at Blum personally. The fact that Blum, along with most leading French Jews, consistently underestimated French anti-Semitism, whether from right or left, did not help matters.

  It was in the United States, however, that the Bolshevik takeover, and its association with radical Jews, had the most serious consequences. In France, Jews might
be assailed from right and left, but the country continued to be generous in receiving Jewish refugees throughout the 1920s and even during the 1930s. In America, however, the Bolshevik scare effectively ended the policy of unrestricted immigration which had been the salvation of east European Jewry in the period 1881-1914, and which had enabled the great American Jewry to come into existence. There had been efforts to impose immigrant quotas even before the war, successfully resisted by the American Jewish Committee, founded in 1906 to combat this and other threats. But the war ended the ultra-liberal phase of American democratic expansion. Indeed it introduced a phase of xenophobia which was to last a decade. In 1915 the Ku-Klux Klan was refounded to control minority groups, including Jews, who (it claimed) challenged American social and moral norms. The same year a book called The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant, achieved instant notoriety by its claims that America’s superior racial stock was being destroyed by unrestricted immigration, not least of east European Jews. America’s intervention in the war was followed by the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918), which had the effect of associating aliens with treason.

  The Bolshevization of Russia put the capstone on this new edifice of fear. The result was the ‘Red Scare’ of 1919-20, led by the Democratic Attorney-General, Mitchell Palmer, against what he called ‘foreign-born subversives and agitators’. He claimed there were ‘60,000 of these organized agitators of the Trozky doctrine in the US’, ‘Trozky’ himself being ‘a disreputable alien…this lowest of all types known to New York City’. Much of the material circulated by Mitchell and his allies was anti-Semitic. One list showed that, of thirty-one top Soviet leaders, all but Lenin were Jews; another analysed the members of the Petrograd Soviet, showing that only sixteen out of 388 were Russians, the rest being Jews, of whom 265 came from New York’s East Side. A third document showed that the decision to overthrow the Tsar’s government was actually taken on 14 February 1916 by a group of New York Jews including the millionaire Jacob Schiff.74

  The result was the 1921 Quota Act, providing that the number of immigrants admitted in any one year was not to exceed 3 per cent of their existing ethnic stock in the US in 1910. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act cut the figure to 2 per cent and pushed the base-date back to 1890. The net effect was to cut total immigration to 154,000 yearly, and reduce the Polish, Russian and Rumanian quotas, almost entirely of Jews, to a total of 8,879. It was effectively the end of mass Jewish immigration to the US. Thereafter the Jewish organizations had to fight hard to prevent these quotas from being scrapped completely. They considered it a triumph that in the nine difficult years 1933-41 they managed to get 157,000 German Jews into the US, about the same number as entered in the single year 1906.

  Not that the Jewish community in inter-war America should be seen as embattled. Numbering over four and a half million by 1925 it was in the rapid process of becoming the largest, richest and most influential Jewish community in the world. Judaism was America’s third religion. The Jews were not merely accepted, they were becoming part of the American core and already making decisive contributions to shaping the American matrix. They never had the financial leverage which, from time to time, they secured in some European countries, because by the 1920s the American economy was so enormous that no one group, however large, could become dominant in it. But in banking, stockbroking, real estate, retail, distribution and entertainment, the Jews occupied positions of strength. More important, perhaps, was the growing Jewish success in the professions, made possible by the enthusiasm with which Jewish families seized on the opportunities open to them in America to secure a higher education for their children. Some colleges, especially in the Ivy League, ran Jewish quota limitations. But in practice there were no numerical restraints on the expansion of Jewish higher education. By the early 1930s, nearly 50 per cent of all college students in New York City were Jewish, and their national total, 105,000, was over 9 per cent of the entire college enrolment.

  Hence for the first time since antiquity, Jews were able to deploy, for the benefit of general society, the creative lawmaking talents they had nurtured for so long through the rabbinical tradition. In 1916, after a four-month confirmation battle, Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) became the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court. He was another prodigy, the youngest child of a family of Jewish liberals from Prague. At Harvard Law School he achieved the highest grades so far recorded there, and by the age of forty his practice had brought him a fortune of over $2 million. It was a characteristic of American Jewry that its establishment figures always felt secure enough to embrace Zionism, as soon as they saw it was viable, and Brandeis became the leading US Zionist. But more important was his effort to change the direction of American jurisprudence. Even before he joined the Court, he wrote ‘the Brandeis brief’ in Muller v. Oregon (1908), in which he defended a state law limiting the working hours of women. In this he relied not primarily on legal precedents but on general moral and social arguments as to the law’s desirability, including over a thousand pages of statistics. This reflected both the creative interpretative philosophy of the liberal cathedocrats, and the industrious energy with which they backed it.

  As a Supreme Court Justice, Brandeis was able to push the doctrine of ‘sociological jurisprudence’ to the centre of America’s federal philosophy of law, and thus to turn the Court, under the Constitution, into a creative lawmaking body. As a liberal Jew with a classical education, who saw the American public spirit as a blend of Athens and Jerusalem—a modern Philo, indeed!—he thought that the Court should uphold plurality not just of religions but of economic systems, and still more of opinion. He held it to be true, he ruled in Whitney v. California (1927), ‘that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope or imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil councils is good ones.’75

  In 1939 he was joined on the Court by an important follower, Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965), who had immigrated to the Lower East Side at twelve, progressed upwards through the City of New York College to Harvard, and spent most of his professional life debating, in a modern secular context, one of the central problems of Judaic law—how to balance the demands of individual freedom against communal necessities. It was a comforting reflection of the maturity of American Jewry, as a part of the Commonwealth, that Frankfurter sided with the state against a dissenting minority (Jehovah’s Witnesses) in the question of saluting the flag: ‘One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedom guaranteed by our Constitution…. But as Judges we are neither Jew nor gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic…. As a member of this Court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them.’76

  Jews in America, however, were engaged not merely in fundamentally modifying existing institutions, like jurisprudence, but in introducing and transporting new ones. In Paris and Vienna Jewish musicians, ranging from Halévy through Offenbach to the Strausses, had created new ranges of musical spectacles for the stage, and the theatres, opera-houses and orchestras which made them possible. The same combination of talents soon established itself in New York. Oscar Hammerstein I (1847-1919) arrived there in 1863, working first (like countless other Jews) in a cigar factory. Twenty years later his son Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960) went on to play a major part, as librettist, in making the American ‘musical play’ a new form of integrated drama. From Rose Marie (1924) and the Desert Song (1926), he joined Jerome Kern (1885-1945), another New Yorker, to create the quintessential American musical, Show Boat (1927), and then from the early forties he joined with Richard Rodgers (1902-79) to raise the genre, perhaps the most characteristic of all American art-forms, to a new peak, with Oklahoma (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951) and The
Sound of Music (1959). These American musical writers came to composition by diverse routes. Rodgers studied at Columbia and the Institute of Musical Art. Irving Berlin (b. 1888), the son of a Russian cantor, came to New York in 1893 and got a job as a singing waiter, had no musical training and never learned to read music. George Gershwin (1898-1937) started as a hack pianist in a musical publishing firm. What they all had in common was ferocious industry and completely new ideas. Kern wrote over 1,000 songs, including ‘Ol’ Man River’ and ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, for 104 stage-shows and films. Berlin produced over 1,000 songs too, and scores ranging from Top Hat to Annie Get Your Gun. His ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ (1911) effectively opened the jazz era. Thirteen years later, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, performed by the Paul Whiteman orchestra, made jazz respectable. Frederick Loewe’s My Fair Lady, Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls, Harold Arlen’s Wizard of Oz and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story were in the same tradition of perpetual innovation within strict box-office conventions.77

  American Jews brought the same show-business talents of ideas and organization to the new technologies as they developed. In 1926 David Sarnoff (1891-1971) created the first radio chain, the National Broadcasting System, as the service-arm of the Radio Corporation of America, of which he became president in 1930. At the same time, William Paley (b. 1901) was putting together the rival Colombia Broadcasting System. In due course these two introduced black-and-white television, then colour. Jews also supplied much of the first generation of performing talent for these innovatory media—Sid Caesar and Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Al Jolson and Jack Benny, Walter Winchell and David Susskind.78 The Broadway musical, radio and TV were all examples of a fundamental principle in Jewish diaspora history: Jews opening up a completely new field in business and culture, a tabula rasa on which to set their mark, before other interests had a chance to take possession, erect guild or professional fortifications and deny them entry.