History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  The outstanding example, however, was the movie industry, which was almost entirely put together by Jews. It is a matter of argument, indeed, whether or not it was their greatest contribution to shaping the modern age. For if Einstein created the cosmology of the twentieth century and Freud its characteristic mental assumptions, it was the cinema which provided its universal popular culture. Yet there were ironies in this. Jews did not invent the cinema. Thomas Edison, who developed the first effective cinecamera, the kinetoscope, in 1888, did not design it for entertainment. It was to be, he said, ‘the foremost instrument of reason’, designed for an enlightened democracy, to show the world as it is and to display the moral force of realism as opposed to ‘the occult lore of the east’.79 Such an exercise in rationalism might well have appealed to Jewish pioneers. In fact they turned it into something quite different. For Edison’s vision of the cinema did not work. The educated middle class ignored it. It made little progress in its first decade.

  Then, at the end of the 1890s, poor, immigrant Jews married the cinema to another institution they were creating for people like themselves, the amusement arcade. In 1890 there was not a single arcade in New York. By 1900 there were over 1,000, and fifty of them already contained nickelodeons. Eight years later there were 400 nickelodeons in New York alone and they were spreading all over the northern cities. They cost five cents and appealed to the poorest of the urban poor. The hundreds of movie shorts now being made for them were silent. That was an advantage. Most of the patrons knew little or no English. It was entirely an immigrant art-form. So it was the ideal setting for Jewish enterprise.

  At first the Jews were not involved on the inventive and creative side. They owned the nickelodeons, the arcades, the theatres. Most of the processes and early shorts were made by American-born Protestants. An exception was Sigmund Lublin, operating from the great Jewish centre of Philadelphia, which he might have turned into the capital of the industry. But when the theatre-owners began to go into production, to make the shorts their immigrant patrons wanted, Lublin joined with the other patent-owners to form the giant Patent Company, and extract full dues out of the movie-makers. It was then that the Jews led the industry on a new Exodus, from the ‘Egypt’ of the Wasp-dominated north-east, to the promised land of California. Los Angeles had sun, easy laws, and a quick escape into Mexico from the Patent Company lawyers.80 Once in California, the Jewish skill at rationalization went into effect. There were more than one hundred small production firms in 1912. They were quickly amalgamated into eight big ones. Of these, Universal, Twentieth-Century-Fox, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Columbia were essentially Jewish creations, and Jews played a major role in the other two, United Artists and RKO Radio Pictures.81

  Nearly all these Jewish movie men conformed to a pattern. They were immigrants or of immediate immigrant stock. They were poor, some desperately poor. Many came from families of twelve or more children. Carl Laemmle (1867-1939), the first of them, was an immigrant from Laupheim, the tenth of thirteen children. He worked in clerical jobs, as a bookkeeper and a clothing-store manager, before opening a nickelodeon, turning it into a chain, creating a movie-distribution business, and then founding Universal, the first big studio, in 1912. Marcus Loew (1872-1927) was born in the Lower East Side, the son of an immigrant waiter. He sold papers at six, left school at twelve to work in printing, then furs, was an independent fur-broker at eighteen, had been twice bankrupted by the age of thirty, founded a theatre-chain and put together Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. William Fox (1879-1952) was born in Hungary, one of twelve children, and came through New York’s Castle Garden Immigrant Station as a child. He left school at eleven for the garment industry, set up his own shrinking business, then progressed through Brooklyn penny-arcades to a movie-chain. Louis B. Mayer (1885-1957) was born in Russia, the son of a Hebrew scholar, and also came through Castle Garden as a child, went into the junk trade at the age of eight, had his own junk-business by nineteen, a theatre-chain by twenty-two, and in 1915 made the first big adult movie, Birth of a Nation. The Warner Brothers were among the nine children of a poor cobbler from Poland. They worked selling meat and ice-cream, repairing bicycles, as fairground barkers and travelling showmen. In 1904 they bought a film-projector and ran their own show, with their sister Rose playing the piano and twelve-year-old Jack singing treble. In Hollywood they made the breakthrough into sound. Joseph Schenck, co-founder of United Artists, ran an amusement park. Sam Goldwyn worked as a blacksmith’s assistant and a glove salesman. Harry Cohn, another Lower East Sider, was a trolley conductor, then in Vaudeville. Jesse Lasky was a cornet player. Sam Katz was a messenger boy but owned three nickelodeons in his teens. Dore Schary worked as a waiter in a Jewish holiday-camp. Adolph Zukor, from a family of rabbis, worked as a fur salesman. So did Darryl Zanuck, who made his first money with a new fur-clasp. Not all the pioneers kept the fortunes and studios they created. Some went bankrupt; Fox and Schenck even went to gaol. But Zukor summed up for them all: ‘I arrived from Hungary an orphan boy of sixteen with a few dollars sewn inside my vest. I was thrilled to breathe the fresh strong air of freedom, and America has been good to me.’82

  These men were underdogs, creating for underdogs. It was a long time before the New York banks would look at them. Their first big backer was a fellow California immigrant, A. P. Giannini, whose Bank of Italy eventually became the Bank of America, the world’s biggest. They had centuries of deprivation behind them, and they looked it. They were small in stature. As the film historian Philip French puts it: ‘One could have swung a scythe five and a half feet off the ground at a gathering of movie moguls without endangering many lives: several would scarcely have heard the swish.’83 They were impelled by a strong desire to carry the poor with them in their upward ascent, both materially and culturally. Zukor would boast of turning the proletarian arcades into middle-class palaces: ‘Who swept out your dirty nickelodeons? Who put in your plush seats?’ he would demand. Goldwyn defined his cultural aim as to make ‘pictures built upon the strong foundation of art and refinement’. Their new cinema-culture was not without traditional Jewish characteristics, especially in critical humour. The Marx Brothers provided an underdog view of the conventional world, rather in the way Jews had always seen majority society. Whether examining Wasp society in Animal Crackers, culture in A Night at the Opera, the campus in Horse Feathers, commerce in The Big Store or politics in Duck Soup, they represented a disconcerting intrusion on established institutions. They disturbed the peace and plunged ‘normal’ people into confusion.84

  In general, however, the Hollywood rulers did not wish to disturb. When they gave a haven in the 1930s to the Jewish diaspora from the German movie industry, they tried to impose on it a spirit of conformity. It was their own form of assimilationism. Like the Jews who rationalized the retail trade in the eighteenth century and created the first big stores in the nineteenth, they served the customer. ‘If the audience don’t like a picture’, Goldwyn said, ‘they have a good reason. The public is never wrong.’85 Hence they maximized the market. There was an irony here too. The movie was the first cultural form since the days of classical Greece which presented itself to an entire population. Just as all who lived in the polis could fit into the stadium, the theatre, the lyceum or the odeon, so now all Americans could see movies more or less at the same time. A study of Muncie, Indiana, in 1929 found that weekly attendance at its nine cinemas was three times the entire population.86 The movie, which became the pattern for TV later, was thus a giant step towards the consumer society of the late twentieth century. More urgently than any other institution, it brought to ordinary workers the vision of a better existence. Hence, contrary to what Attorney-General Palmer and Madison Grant had imagined, it was Jews, from Hollywood, who stylized, polished and popularized the concept of the American Way of Life.

  Naturally, that American way had its darker sides. Between the wars, American Jews began to approximate to the national profile. They became part of its
more repellent features too. As with the Broadway musical and the Hollywood movie, crime and especially new and expanding kinds of crime were areas where enterprising Jews could get in at the beginning without meeting formal gentile barriers. In Europe, Jews had often been associated with certain kinds of poverty-related crimes, such as receiving, pickpocketing and minor fraud. They also developed criminal patterns requiring a high degree of organization and distant networks, such as the white slave-trade. In the late nineteenth century this reached from eastern Europe, with its colossal Jewish birth rate, to Latin America. It was marked by strong Jewish characteristics. A surprising number of Jewish prostitutes observed the Sabbath, Jewish holidays and dietary laws. In Argentina they even had their own synagogue. Moreover, precisely because Jews were prominent in the trade, legitimate Jewish institutions fought to destroy it, all over the world, and created special bodies for this purpose.87 In New York, Jewish criminals, besides the usual Jewish types of crime, concentrated on protection rackets, arson and horse poisoning. Here again, Jewish society responded with crime-prevention campaigns, including reformatory schools.88 Such efforts were remarkably effective with small-time Jewish crime. Indeed it is possible that, without prohibition, the Jewish criminal community could have been reduced to a tiny group by the end of the 1920s.

  The illegal liquor trade, however, offered irresistible opportunities for clever Jews to rationalize and organize it. Jewish criminals rarely used violence. As Arthur Ruppin, the leading authority on Jewish sociology put it, ‘Christians commit crimes with their hands, the Jews use their reason.’ A typical Jewish big-time criminal was Jacob ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzik (1887-1956), who was Al Capone’s bookkeeper and treasurer. Another was Arnold Rothstein (1882-1928), the pioneer of big business crime, who is portrayed as ‘The Brain’ in Damon Runyon’s stories, and by Scott Fitzgerald as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. Then there was Meyer Lansky, who created and lost a gambling empire and had his application for Israeli citizenship turned down in 1971.

  But as these upwardly mobile Jewish criminals rose, they found themselves practising violence too. It was Louis Lepke Buchalter (1897-1944), known as ‘The Judge’ and called by the FBI ‘the most dangerous criminal in the United States’, who helped to organize the Syndicate, or Murder Incorporated, in 1944, and who was executed for murder in Sing Sing in 1944. On Buchalter’s instructions, Syndicate killers murdered Arthur ‘Dutch Schultz’ Flegenheimer (1900-35), the numbers racketeer who tried, against its orders, to kill Thomas E. Dewey; and the Syndicate was also responsible for the death of Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel (1905-47), who organized Las Vegas for it, then broke with it. Finally Jews, led by Samuel ‘Sammie Purple’ Cohen, organized the notorious Detroit Purple Gang which ran the city’s East Side until the Mafia took over. Yet attempts to compare Jewish and Italian crime in the United States fail. A surprising number of notorious Jewish criminals had Orthodox funerals, but organized Jewish crime, unlike the Mafia in Sicily, was not a response to specific social conditions and never enjoyed the slightest communal sanction. Hence it has proved to be a temporary phenomenon.89

  If the Jewish community reacted to Jewish crime, especially white slavery, with shame and horror, and did all in its power to re-educate the criminal element in its midst, there were many American Jews who disliked the idea of any Jewish propensities, good or bad, and did their best to reject Jewish particularism completely. It was not merely a matter of ceasing to attend synagogue and observing the Law, it was also a conscious effort to stop thinking oneself Jewish. Even Brandeis, as late as 1910, attacked ‘habits of living or of thought which tend to keep alive differences of origin’ as undesirable and ‘inconsistent with the American ideal of brotherhood’. To stress Jewishness was ‘disloyal’.90 But such efforts, as in Brandeis’ case, tended to collapse under the sudden impact of an anti-Semitic experience. He ended by going to the opposite extreme: ‘To be good Americans’, he said, ‘we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews we must become Zionists.’91 Some Jews drifted uneasily between the two poles. A notable example was Bernard Baruch (1870-1965), a figure in the Joseph mould. He advised successive presidents and was reputed, incorrectly as we now know, to have made a fortune in the 1929 crash by selling out just before the market turned down.92 Father Charles Coughlin, the Jew-baiting Detroit radio priest, used to call him ‘Acting President of the United States, the Uncrowned King of Wall Street’. Baruch did his best to escape from the Jewish image. Thanks to his wife’s Protestant pull, he got into the Social Register at a time when it still banned the Schiffs, Guggenheims, Seligmans and Warburgs. He took vacations in a gentile Adirondack colony. But at any moment there was liable to be a twitch on the thread, telling him: thus far, no further. He was mortified, in 1912, when his daughter Belle was mysteriously refused admission to the Brearley School in Manhattan, though she had passed the entrance exam: ‘That really was the bitterest blow of my life,’ he wrote, ‘because it hurt my child and embittered my whole life for many years afterwards.’ He himself had a tremendous struggle to secure election to the fashionable Oakland Golf Club and, though a prominent horse-breeder, to get admittance to the track enclosure at Belmont Park. He never got into the University Club or the Metropolitan.93 Even in America, a Jew, however rich, influential and well connected he might be, could be pushed back into line; and it was this more than anything else which kept the community together.

  Yet some ultra-assimilationists did manage to fight off their Jewishness, at least to their own satisfaction. Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), the newspaper seer, as influential as Baruch in his day, spent his entire life merging with the scenery. His parents, rich clothing manufacturers from Germany, sent him to the upper-class Sachs School for Boys. The family attended the Emanu-El synagogue. They refused to admit they knew Yiddish. Their aim was to avoid being ‘oriental’, as they put it. The hordes of Ostjuden immigrants terrified them. The American Hebrew, which voiced their fears, wrote: ‘All of us should be sensible of what we owe not only to those…co-religionists but to ourselves who will be looked upon by our Gentile neighbours as the natural sponsors for these, our brethren.’ At Harvard, exclusion from the famous ‘Gold Coast’ clubs made Lippmann briefly a socialist. But he soon decided that anti-Semitism was to a large extent a punishment the Jews invited, by making themselves ‘conspicuous’, his favourite term of criticism. ‘My personal attitude’, he wrote, ‘is to be far severer upon the faults of the Jews than of other people.’94 He attacked the Zionists for their ‘dual allegiance’ and the ‘rich, vulgar and pretentious Jews of our big American cities’ as ‘perhaps the greatest misfortune which has ever befallen the Jewish people’.95

  Lippmann was a liberal and civilized man who simply (as he saw it) wanted to avoid Jewish categorization. He could not bring himself to endorse anti-Jewish quotas at Harvard since there should be ‘no test of admission based on race, creed, colour, class or section’. On the other hand he agreed that for Jews to exceed 15 per cent of the intake would be ‘disastrous’. He thought the solution was for Massachusetts Jews to have a university of their own and for Harvard to draw its students from a wider area, thus diluting the Jewish content. ‘I do not regard the Jews as innocent victims,’ he wrote. They had ‘many distressing personal and social habits, which were selected by a bitter history and intensified by a pharisaical theology’. The ‘personal manners and physical habits’ of the gentiles were ‘distinctly superior to the prevailing manners and habits of the Jews’.96 This Jewish self-hatred was embittered by the fact that Lippmann could not secure all the social prizes he esteemed. He joined the River in New York and the Metropolitan in Washington, but he could not get into the Links or the Knickerbocker.

  Perhaps the most tragic aspect of those Jews who denied their identity, or suppressed the feelings which naturally arose from it, was the almost wilful blindness they thereby inflicted upon themselves. For half a century, Lippmann was perhaps the wisest of all American commentators—on everything except issues affecting Je
ws. Like Blum in France, he dismissed the anti-Semitic side of Hitler as unimportant and classified him as a German nationalist. After the Nazi burning of Jewish books in May 1933, he said that persecuting the Jews, ‘by satisfying the lust of the Nazis who feel they must conquer somebody…is a kind of lightning rod which protects Europe’. Germany could not be judged by Nazi anti-Semitism, any more than France by its Terror, Protestantism by the Ku-Klux Klan or, for that matter, ‘the Jews by their parvenus’. He called one Hitler speech ‘statesmanlike’, the ‘authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people’.97 But after these two comments on the Nazis and the Jews, he fell silent on the subject for the next twelve calamitous years and never mentioned the death camps at all. Another form of blindness was the Rosa Luxemburg solution adopted by the brilliant playwright Lillian Hellman (1905-84), whose plays The Children’s Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes (1939) were the great Broadway success-scandals of the decade. She tortured her Jewish humanitarianism to fit the prevailing Stalinist mode (as did many thousands of Jewish intellectuals) so that her anti-Nazi play, Watch on the Rhine (1941), gives a weird view of the Jewish predicament in the light of later events. She would not allow her love of justice to find its natural expression in outraged protest at the fate of her race. So it was perverted into a hard-faced ideological orthodoxy defended with rabbinical tenacity. The need to avert the face from the Jewish facts led her to doctor truth with fiction. As late as 1955 she was associated with a dramatization of the Diary of Anne Frank which virtually eliminated the Jewish element in the tragedy.