History of the Jews (83 page)

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.
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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.’
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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.
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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 Jews. 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.

These confusions, divisions and opacities in the American Jewish community, not least among its intellectuals, help to explain why American Jews, despite the enormous position of power they were beginning to acquire for themselves, were so curiously incapable of affecting events in inter-war Europe, or even of steering opinion in America itself. American anti-Semitism, as revealed by opinion polls, rose steadily throughout the 1930s, peaking in 1944; the polls also showed (in 1938, for instance), that 70-85 per cent of the nation were opposed to raising quotas to help Jewish refugees. The pollster Elmo Roper warned: ‘Anti-Semitism has spread all over the nation and is particularly virulent in urban centres.’
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It is against this background in Europe and America that we must now examine events in Germany. Germany was the strongest economic, military and cultural power in Europe, and its assault on the Jews, from 1933 to 45, is the central event of modern Jewish history. It is still in many respects a mysterious event: not as regards the facts, which have been documented in stupefying quantity, but as regards the causes. Germany was by far the world’s best-educated nation. It was the first to achieve universal adult literacy. Between 1870 and 1933 its universities were the world’s finest, in virtually every discipline. Why did this highly civilized nation turn with colossal, organized yet senseless brutality on the Jews? The identity of the victim deepens the mystery. In the nineteenth century the fate of Germany and the Jews was very much interwoven. As Fritz Stern has pointed out, between 1870 and 1914 the Germans suddenly emerged as an actively powerful nation, just as suddenly as the Jews emerged as an actively powerful race.
⁹⁹
The two helped each other enormously. Among the many things they shared was an almost fanatical devotion to learning. The ablest Jews loved Germany because it was the best place in the world to work in. Modern Jewish culture had an essentially Germanic framework. But in turn, as Weizmann had pointed out in his famous talk with Balfour, the Jews gave all their finest efforts to Germany and helped to make her great. From its inception to 1933, for instance, Germany won more Nobel prizes than any other country, about 30 per cent of the whole; but of Germany’s share, the Jews provided nearly a third and in medicine a half.
¹⁰⁰
For Germany to turn on the Jews was not just mass murder; it was, in a real sense, mass parricide. How did it happen?

Attempts to provide an explanation are already filling whole
libraries, but in the end they always seem inadequate. The greatest crime in history remains, to some extent, baffling. All the same, the chief components can be summarized. The most important, probably, was the First World War. It had the effect of stunning the German nation. They entered it confidently just as their ascent to greatness was reaching its apogee. After fearful sacrifices, they lost it, conclusively. The grief and fury were unhinging; the need for a scapegoat imperative.

The war had a second effect. It transformed the way in which Germany conducted its business. Pre-war Germany was the most law-abiding country in Europe. Civil violence was unheard of, un-German. Anti-Semitism was everywhere, but physical violence to Jews, let alone an anti-Semitic riot, was something which did not, could not, occur in Germany. The war changed all that. It accustomed men to violence everywhere, but in Germany it induced a violence of despair. The 1918 Armistice did not bring peace to central and eastern Europe. It brought a twenty-year interval between two huge, open conflicts, but in those twenty years violence, in varying degrees, was the main arbiter of politics. Both left and right used violence. Lenin and Trotsky set the pattern with their
putsch
in 1917. Their Communist allies and imitators followed suit in Germany, 1918-20. Jews were prominent in all these attempts to overthrow existing order by force. The Communist regime in Bavaria included not only Jewish politicians, like Eisner, but Jewish writers and intellectuals like Gustav Landauer, Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam. The right responded by organizing private armies of veterans, the Freikorps.

In Russia, the arbitration of violence favoured the left, in Germany the right. Jewish extremists like Rosa Luxemburg and Eisner were simply murdered. It ceased to be unusual for Jewish opponents to be ‘dealt with’. In the four years 1919-22 there were 376 political murders in Germany, all but twenty-two of left-wing figures, many of them Jews. One was Walter Rathenau, the Foreign Secretary. The courts dealt lightly with the ex-army thugs. Few were even brought to trial; fewer still sentenced to more than four months.
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When the old and distinguished Jewish writer Maximilian Harden was nearly beaten to death by two anti-Semites in 1922, the court held that his ‘unpatriotic articles’ constituted ‘mitigating circumstances’.

It was from this background of radical ex-servicemen’s violence that Adolf Hitler emerged. He was an Austrian, born on the Austro-Bavarian border in 1889, the son of a petty official. He lived in Linz and then in Karl Lueger’s Vienna. He had a distinguished war record and was badly gassed. Hitler later declared in
Mein Kampf
(written in
1924) that he was a young man before he became aware of the ‘Jewish problem’, but the evidence is clear that his father was an anti-Semite and that he was exposed to anti-Semitic notions all his childhood and youth. The Jews became, and remained, his lifelong obsession. His personal passion, and still more his colossal willpower, were central to Germany’s war against the Jews. It could not have taken place without him. On the other hand, he could have done little damage without the destructive elements within Germany which he found to hand. He had unusual skill in creating political dynamism by fusing together two sources of power and making the result greater than the sum of its parts. Thus, he married a small socialist group, the German Workers’ Party, to an ex-service strongarm squad, gave it an anti-Semitic platform, and turned it into a mass party, the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazis) with its military wing of stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung or
SA
. The
SA
protected his own meetings and broke up his opponents’. Next, he brought together the two consequences of the war, the need for a scapegoat and the cult of violence, focussing the result on the Jews: ‘If at the beginning of the war, and during the war, 12,000 or 15,000 of these Hebrew defilers had been put under poison gas as hundreds of thousands of our very best workers from all walks of life had to endure at the front, then the sacrifice of millions would not have been in vain.’
¹⁰²

Hitler’s anti-Semitism was composed of all the conventional elements, from the Christian
Judensau
to pseudo-scientific race theory. But it was distinctive in two respects. First, it was to him a complete explanation of the world, a
Weltanschauung
, a world outlook. Other political groups in Germany dabbled in anti-Semitism or even gave it prominence, but the Nazis made it the centre and end of their programme (though they varied the emphasis according to their audience). Second, Hitler was an Austrian by birth but a pan-German by choice, who joined the German, not the Austrian, army in 1914; and his anti-Semitism was a marriage of the German and Austrian models. From Germany, he took the huge and growing fear of ‘Jewish-Bolshevist Russia’ and the proliferating mythology of the
Protocols of Zion
. Post-war Germany swarmed with Russian refugees of German origin, German Balts, and former members of old Tsarist anti-Semitic groups such as the Black Hundreds, the Yellow Shirts and the Union of the Russian People. All of them stressed the Jewish-Bolshevist connection, which became a central part of Hitler’s ideology. Alfred Rosenberg, a German Balt, became the Nazis’ chief theorist. The Russian Gertrude von Seidlitz enabled Hitler to acquire (1920) the
Völkischer Beobachter
and turn it into an anti-Semitic
daily.
¹⁰³
In modern times, Germany, and especially Prussia, had been more afraid of the Russian threat than any other. Hitler was now able to place the threat in a plausible anti-Semitic context. But he blended it with the kind of anti-Semitism he had absorbed in Vienna. This concentrated on fear of the
Ostjuden
, a dark and inferior race corrupting the Germanic blood. Hitler was particularly interested in two topics, both of which he connected with
Ostjuden
: the white slave-trade, centred in Vienna and run by Jews—or so the moral reformers asserted—and the spread of syphilis, for which as yet there was no antibiotic cure. Hitler believed and taught that there was not only a direct political and military threat to Germany from Jewish Bolshevism but a deeper, biological threat from any contact, but especially sexual congress, with members of the Jewish race.
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The sexual-medical aspect of Hitler’s anti-Semitism was probably the most important, especially among his own followers. It turned the merely prejudiced into fanatics, capable of any course of action, however irrational and cruel. Rather as the medieval anti-Semite saw the Jew as non-human, a devil or a sort of animal (hence the
Judensau
), the Nazi extremist absorbed Hitler’s sub-scientific phraseology and came to regard Jews as bacilli or a particularly dangerous kind of vermin. Apart from anything else, this approach enabled all Jews to be lumped together, irrespective of their circumstances or views. A Jew who held a professorial chair, who wrote impeccable German, who had served throughout the war and won the Iron Cross, was just as dangerous a racial polluter as a Jewish-Bolshevik commissar. An assimilated Jew carried the bacillus just as certainly as an old rabbi in a kaftan and was more of a threat, since he was more likely to infect, or ‘desecrate’ as Hitler put it, an Aryan woman. The extent to which he indoctrinated his followers can be seen by a letter written to him, in April 1943, by his Minister of Justice, Thierack:

 

A full Jewess, after the birth of her child, sold her mother’s milk to a woman doctor and concealed the fact that she was a Jewess. With this milk, infants of German blood were fed in a clinic. The accused is charged with fraud. The purchasers of the milk have suffered damage, because the milk of a Jewess cannot be considered food for German children…. However, there has been no formal indictment in order to spare the parents, who do not know the facts, unnecessary worry. I will discuss the race-hygienic aspects of the case with the Reich Health Chief.
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If it be asked: how could such nonsense be widely believed in a highly educated nation like Germany, the answer is that Hitler never found any difficulty in acquiring intellectual backing, albeit sometimes oblique, for his views. The ‘scandal’ of Freud and his teachings was an
important collateral proof of the Nazi case, since (it was argued) they removed moral guilt from sexual promiscuity and so increased it. Thus Freud enabled Jews to gain greater access to Aryan women. Here, Jung was able to come to Hitler’s assistance by drawing a distinction between Freudian-Jewish psychiatry and the rest: