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Preface

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE TO

The Wandering Jews

T he Wandering Jews shows a side of Joseph Roth that has not yet been seen in English: the essayist, the analyst of contemporary life, the marshaler of arguments (and to a lesser degree, of facts and figures), the rhetorician, the passionate, orderly, and mobile "argufier." Admirers of Roth's fiction may be surprised at the brilliance and forcefulness of the intellect at work here--I know I was. The distinguished German critic Walter Jens described The Wandering Jews as the best book on its subject in German. I am astonished that, in three-quarters of a century, there seems, until now, to have been no English translation of it.

This short book emerges quite straightforwardly from Roth's professional interests and preoccupations and a little more clandestinely from his personal background and experience. The interests first: In the early 1920s, as a young journalist in Vienna and then in Berlin, Roth wrote numerous articles drawing attention to the awful plight of refugees and displaced persons--Jews and others--in the aftermath of World War One, the Russian Revolution, and the redrawing of national frontiers following the Treaty of Versailles (1919). Hundreds of thousands of people--those lucky ones who hadn't been butchered already--found themselves unhoused and persecuted, with no option but to take to the road. They sought shelter in cities and towns where most of them had never been and, unfortunately, where they were made despicably unwelcome. Roth spent a great deal of time visiting their refuges and encampments and ghettoes; he also visited their homelands. In the last five months of 1926, he toured the Soviet Union, where he wrote the final section, "The Condition of the Jews in Soviet Russia." The Wandering Jews was a timely and important book, one that Roth was supremely well qualified to write. That he was aware of this himself is shown by occasional outbreaks of anxiety and statistics (both very unusual in this writer). The Wandering Jews counters the campaigns of fear and disinformation that were mounted by the authorities and media. It shows Roth's lifelong sympathies with "simple people," the dispossessed "guests on this earth" (subtitles of two of his novels), and his antipathy to a selfish, materialistic, and increasingly homogeneous bourgeoisie. It is no accident, I think, that The Wandering Jews begins with a proud and rancorous castigation of that West, which Roth wants no part of: a reverse dedication.

Historically, the survival of the Jews in Europe to that point was largely a matter of happenstance, or, at the most, of enlightened self-interest on the part of whatever country was next prepared to take them in. As one door closed, another--haltingly, opportunely, perhaps--opened. The slightest delay of course spelled instant crisis and tragedy. Roth sensed that the Twenties were such a time of crisis, and that the countries of Europe and beyond ("the land of unlimited opportunity by which of course I mean not America but Germany"), stumbling out of one war and into another, floored by inflation, willing victims of atrocious right-wing propaganda and nationalist rhetoric, would not be hospitable to the Jews who were being turned out of the East. Roth's anger in the opening pages of this book suggests that he already sensed there was little to be hoped for from--or, ten years later, for --the assimilated Jews in Germany, and that the Jews, always living more securely in time than space, would soon be banished to it altogether.

The Wandering Jews does two things: It describes, as Roth says, the human beings who constitute the Jewish problem, and it casts about for a solution to that problem. In the first, it succeeds magnificently. Roth organizes his proteanly diverse subjects, and extends, it seems almost to every one of them, a unique sympathy and warmth. (The only exception being the middle-class, assimilated, denying Jews in the West.) The book is crammed with adoring portraits and analyses--it is an adoring analysis--of individuals and groups that are not merely heterogeneous but almost incompatible. The Jews, it seems to me, are to Roth human beings in their least packaged form. Fissured by history and geography, religiosity and class, ideology and national affiliation, mutual prejudice and the degree of their integration in their respective countries, they are the most anomalous, individual of peoples. And the more improbable, the more Roth loves them: the burly dockworker in Odessa, the elegant Parisiennes, the musical clown from Radziwillow, the young builders of Palestine, the wonder-rabbi's "front of house" man, so bewilderingly up on world affairs, and given such a glowing Noldean portrait.

So far as offering "solutions" to the "problem," that is a different matter. For all the admiration and sympathy advanced to all the various individuals and groups, it's not easy to think of one that is endorsed as the way forward: not Zionism, not ever-Westward migration, not the social experiment of the Soviet Union, and, least of all, not the abandonment of Jewishness. And yet, as Roth must have realized, the Jewish shtetl can hardly still have existed in 1926. The optimistic section on Paris frays into smaller notes on other places and ends with the desperate jab at "humanism." Even the wonderfully droll, actually rather Kafkaesque chapter on America ends with the Jew still excluded, still staring at Liberty through prison bars. It seems then that Roth moves Zeno-ishly between a past that is already over and a future that never eventuates. What is left for Roth--and this is not a solution at all--is the destiny of the wanderer ("no home anywhere, but their graves may be found in every cemetery"). In short The Wandering Jews describes a problem that is not really a problem at all--more a blessing--and to which there is no solution. As one reads the 1937 Preface, one senses that all Roth is able to hope for--and this is simultaneously a cause of his greatest despair--is conditions for Jews getting steadily and bearably worse. What happened instead was the Holocaust.

I used the word "clandestinely" a while ago, and some readers may wonder: Where in all this is Joseph Roth? The answer is everywhere and nowhere, chiefly nowhere. We see him and feel him as an investigator, a "roving reporter," a trustworthy and opinionated guide--but the book rigorously excludes anything avowedly personal. We don't know that the little cruciform town in the swampy plains (described here for the first time, though it will appear later in Job, Weights and Measures, The Leviathan , and elsewhere) is Roth's birthplace, the town of Brody in Galicia; that the Westward momentum of the book (and again, of much of Roth's fiction) was also that of his life; that he had himself been through Vienna and Berlin, and at the time of writing, was in Paris (where he felt happiest); that his father-in-law was an installment seller in Vienna, his uncle a tailor, and his grandfather a rabbi. Finally, nowhere does he even say he is a Jew! I don't know why. Perhaps it was due to apprehension, or to leave himself the greatest possible freedom as he discussed the great variety of Jews, or simply because he was too proud to put his own vita , like a feather, on the scales. The temper of the times was not as mindlessly autobiographical as ours. Also, Roth, who loved mystification, had many different versions of himself to keep in the air. Whatever it is, the effect of so much passion and sympathy and insight being channeled through the third person is extremely odd. But it might help explain why the book seems to alternate between running freely and at times almost feeling blocked by so many things to say. There is something grimly appropriate that a book about the Jews in Europe should not accommodate its author.

Roth's friend Bruno Frei, reviewing Flight Without End , contended that Roth had one flaw: He only saw, he was unable to believe. That would have been in 1927. In the last twelve years of his life, it seems to me that Roth was twice able to invest things with belief. One was Judaism, in the sense of a somewhat separate presence of Jews within and throughout and inspiriting Europe; the other, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Both were instances of something supranational, something that contained multitudes, something not exclusive and not ideal, and therefore free from bigotry and better and broader than the run of human institutions; something whose time was--or was almost--gone. With and from these, Roth made the tragically beautiful emblematic images of his great books. I would like to give two of these.

The first is not in a book, but is a story that David Bronsen, Roth's biographer, informs us Roth liked to tell. An old caftaned Jewish refugee, sitting in a train compartment, shows his ticket to the inspector. The inspector, suspicious, thinking that perhaps he is hiding a child in his caftan to save the price of a ticket, asks the Jew what he has in there. The Jew produces a framed portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph. The second is a little scene from Job , the 1930 novel in which Roth takes on the subject matter he first explores in The Wandering Jews : "Mendel Singer was silent. He sat by the roadside, next to Sameshkin. For the first time in his life, Mendel Singer sat on the naked earth, in the middle of the wild night, beside a peasant. [...] Suddenly Mendel began to sob. Mendel wept, in the midst of the strange night, next to Sameshkin. The peasant pressed his fists in his eyes, because he felt that he too would weep. Then he laid his arm around the thin shoulder of the Jew and said softly: "Sleep, dear Jew! Have a good sleep!"

--Michael Hofmann

March 2000

Chapter One

EASTERN EUROPEAN

JEWS IN THE WEST

The Eastern Jew in his homeland knows nothing of the social injustice of the West; nothing of the habitual bias that governs the actions, decisions, and opinions of the average Western European; nothing of the narrowness of the Western perspective, jagged with factory smokestacks and framed by power plants; nothing of the sheer hatred that, like a life-prolonging (though lethal) drug, is so powerful that it is tended like a sort of Eternal Flame, at which these selfish people and nations warm themselves. The Eastern Jew looks to the West with a longing that it really doesn't merit. To the Eastern Jew, the West signifies freedom, justice, civilization, and the possibility to work and develop his talents. The West exports engineers, automobiles, books, and poems to the East. It sends propaganda soaps and hygiene, useful and elevating things, all of them beguiling and come-hitherish to the East. To the Eastern Jew, Germany, for example, remains the land of Goethe and Schiller, of the German poets, with whom every keen Jewish youth is far more conversant than our own swastika'd secondary school pupils. In the course of the War the Eastern Jew was lucky enough to come across the general who issued a high-sounding proclamation to the Polish Yids--drafted for him by his press department--not that other general who never read a single work of literature but managed to lose the war, just the same.

And so, conversely, the Eastern Jew sees none of the advantages of his own homeland. He sees nothing of the boundless horizon, nothing of the quality of the people, in whom simplicity can produce holy men and murderers, melodies of melancholy, grandeur, and obsessive passion. He fails to see the goodness of the Slav people, whose coarseness remains more decent than the housetrained animality of the Western European, his secretive perversions, his cringing before the law, with his well-bred hat in his apprehensive hand.

The Eastern Jew fails to see the beauty of the East. He has not been allowed to live in villages or in big cities. Here Jews live in dirty streets and collapsing houses. Their Christian neighbor threatens them. The local squire beats them. The official has them locked up. The army officer fires his gun at them with impunity. The dog barks at them, because their garb seems to provoke animals and primitive people alike. They are brought up in dark heders . The painful perspectivelessness of the Jewish prayer is something they are made acquainted with in early childhood; the passionate wrangling with a God who is more a vengeful God than a loving God, who condemns pleasure as much as sin; the strict compulsion to study and pursue abstractions with young eyes that have never really seen.

For the most part, Eastern Jews experience the countryside only as beggars or vagrants. The majority don't understand the soil that feeds them. The Eastern Jew feels apprehensive in unfamiliar villages and forests. He is a case apart, partly from choice, partly by force. He has obligations and no rights, except on paper, where they count for nothing. Newspapers, books, and optimistic emigrants all tell him what a paradise the West is. In Western Europe there is legal protection from pogroms. In Western Europe Jews may become government ministers or even viceroys. Many Eastern European dwellings have pictures of Moses Montefiore, who dined regularly at the table of the king of England. The great wealth of the Rothschilds is exaggerated to fairy-tale proportions in the East. From time to time an emigrant will send word home, pointing out all the advantages of the new life abroad. Most Jewish emigrants are too proud to write when things are going badly for them, and most are eager to play up the new home at the expense of the old. They have the naive desire of the small-town boy to cut a dash in front of his erstwhile fellows. In a small town in the East, a letter from an émigré creates a huge stir. All the young people in the place--and not a few of the old--are overcome by itchy feet. They want to leave the country where a war might break out from one year to the next, and from one week to the next, a pogrom. And so they leave, on foot, by train, on board ship, for Western countries where a different, somewhat reformed though no less dismal, ghetto offers its own brand of darkness to the newcomers who have barely managed to escape the clutches of the concentration camp.

When I referred just now to Jews who are completely alienated from the earth that nourishes them, I was referring to the majority of Jews: those who live by the old laws and customs of their Jewish faith. Of course there are also Jews who fear neither the dog nor his master, neither the policeman nor the army officer, who don't live in a ghetto, who have adopted the culture and the language of their host-nation. They are similar to Western Jews, but are actually more likely than Western Jews to enjoy social equality; and yet they are still kept from freely developing their talents unless they convert from Judaism, and even then things are far from easy Because each fortunate assimilant will inevitably keep a thoroughly Jewish set of relatives, and it would be a rare judge or attorney or general practitioner of Jewish extraction who didn't have, say, a cousin, uncle, or grandfather whose mere physical appearance might not put an end to a promising career or at least do him social damage.

It is hard to avoid such a fate. And so, instead of running away from it, many decide to do the opposite. They throw themselves into fate's arms, not only by not denying their Jewishness but by emphasizing it at every turn and proclaiming their allegiance to a "Jewish nation" whose existence has for several decades now been indisputable, and whose "right to exist" is similarly unarguable. The will of several million people is already enough to form a "nation," even if it has not existed before.

The idea of a Jewish nationalism is very much alive in the East. Even people who themselves have little truck with the language, culture, and religion of their forefathers claim membership of the "Jewish nation" on the basis of their will and their race. They constitute a "national minority" in a foreign country, striving for their rights as citizens and nationals. Some look toward a future in Palestine, and some, rightly believing that the earth belongs to everyone who treats it with respect, have no national aspirations. (But in either case they are unable to extinguish the primitive hatred that burns so corrosively in their host-people for what seem to them a dangerous number of foreigners.) These Jews no longer live in the ghetto either, nor even in their warm and true traditions. They are deracinated as their assimilated brothers are, sometimes to the point of heroism, because they are the willing victims of an idea--even if it's nothing better than the idea of a nation....

Both the nationalists and the assimilated Jews tend to remain in the East. The former because they want to fight for rights where they are, the latter because they imagine they are already in possession of such rights, or because they love the country as much as the Christian population does. The ones who emigrate are those who have wearied of the petty but unremitting struggle, and who either know or feel or merely guess that a different set of problems presents itself in the West; that the national squabbles there are just a hollow echo of yesterday's; that the West has a vision of Europe, which, maybe one day, not before time and not without suffering, will ripen into a vision of the world. These Jews prefer to live in countries where questions of race and nationality may still excite the interest of large and even powerful sections of the population, but these sections are already a little behind the times. There is a faint but unignorable whiff of mold, blood, and low intelligence about them, and for all their efforts, a few, more progressive minds are already grappling with the problems of tomorrow. (These emigrants, be it noted, come from the Russian borderlands, not from Russia itself.) Others may emigrate because they have lost--or have never been able to find--work and a means of support. They are seekers after bread, proletarians, albeit not always with a proletarian consciousness. Others have fled the War and the Revolution. They are "refugees," generally middle class or lower middle, implacable enemies of the Revolution, and more deeply conservative than any landowning aristocrat could ever be.

Many are wanderers by instinct, not really knowing why. They follow a vague call from elsewhere or a specific one from some relocated relative, the desire to see something of the world and escape the supposed constraints of home, the will to work and make something of themselves.

Many return. Many more remain by the wayside. Eastern Jews have no home anywhere, but their graves may be found in every cemetery. Many grow rich. Many achieve fame. Many make outstanding contributions to foreign cultures. Many lose both themselves and the world. Many remain in the ghetto, and it is only their children who will leave it. Most give the West at least as much as it takes from them. Some give it more than it gives them. The right to live in the West belongs to anyone who sacrifices himself by going to look for it.

Anyone deserves the West who arrives with fresh energy to break up the deadly, antiseptic boredom of its civilization, prepared to undergo the quarantine that we prescribe for immigrants. We do not realize that our whole life has become a quarantine, and that all our countries have become barracks and concentration camps, admittedly with all the modern conveniences. The immigrants--alas!--do not assimilate too slowly, as they are accused of doing, but if anything much too quickly to our sorry way of living. Yes, they go on to become diplomats and journalists, mayors and dignitaries, police inspectors and bank managers, as much pillars of the community as any of the natives. Only a very few are revolutionaries. Many are socialists from personal necessity. In the type of society that socialism would bring about, the oppression of a race is impossible. Many see anti-Semitism as an expression of the capitalist economy, though that isn't what makes them socialists. They are socialists because they are oppressed.

The majority are working class or lower-middle class, without proletarian consciousness. Many are instinctively reactionary, from love of property and tradition, but also from the not unjustified apprehension that change would not necessarily improve things for the Jews. There is a historical feeling, based on plentiful experience, that the Jews will be the first victims in the event of a bloodbath.

Perhaps that's what makes the Jewish worker so patient and calm. The Jewish intellectual may give the revolutionary movement inspiration and focus with his passionate engagement. The Eastern Jewish laborer, in his love of work, his sober cast of thought, his quiet life, is comparable to the German.

Because they do exist, Eastern Jewish workers--I assume that this still needs saying, in a country where the public prints like to harp on about "the unproductive mass of Eastern immigrants." There are Eastern Jewish workers, Jews who don't know how to dicker, trade, undercut, or "calculate," who don't deal in secondhand clothing, don't go from house to house with their bundles, though they are often forced to take up such sad and humiliating trades because no factory will take them, because here in Western Europe there are laws (ones I'm sure are necessary) to protect native-born workers from the competition of aliens. Even if such laws didn't exist, the prejudices of employers and also of their trade union brethren would make the Jewish worker an impossibility. In the United States he is by no means uncommon. But in Western Europe he is unheard of and his very existence denied.

Similarly denied in the West is the Jewish craftsman. The East has its share of Jewish plumbers, carpenters, cobblers, tailors, furriers, coopers, glaziers, and roofers. The notion of an Eastern Europe in which all the Jews are either wonder-rabbis or traders, and the entire Christian population is made up of peasants who live under one roof with their pigs, and noblemen who do nothing but hunt and drink, is just as ridiculous as the Eastern Jew's dream of the humanistic West. In the East thinkers and poets are actually more commonly met with than wonder-rabbis and traders. Apart from which, it is perfectly possible for wonder-rabbis and even traders to moonlight as thinkers and poets, which is something that seems rather beyond, say, a Western European general.

The War, the Revolution in Russia, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy have all increased the number of Jewish immigrants to the West, who certainly haven't come to spread the plague, the terrors of war, or the (somewhat exaggerated) horrors of the Revolution. They are even less impressed with the hospitality of the West than is the West with the arrival of these unbidden guests. (Eastern Jews received Western troops in quite a different spirit.) Finding themselves, like it or not, in the West, they had to find a way of getting by there. And they found it most readily in trade, which is not an easy profession. They gave themselves up and became traders in the West.

They gave themselves up. They lost themselves. They shed their aura of sad beauty. Instead a dust-gray layer of suffering without meaning and anxiety without tragedy settled on their stooped backs. Contempt clung to them--when previously only stones had been able to reach them. They made compromises. They changed their garb, their beards, their hair, their mode of worship, their Sabbath, their household--they themselves might still observe the traditions, but the traditions loosened themselves a little from them. They became ordinary little middle-class people. The worries of the middle classes became their worries. They paid their taxes, they received police registration forms, they registered, and they assigned themselves to a "nationality" to a "citizenship," which, after many chicanes, was finally "granted" to them. They used the streetcars, the elevators, all the benedictions of modern civilization. They even had a "fatherland."

It is a provisional fatherland. National aspirations are alive in the Eastern Jew, even if he is half-assimilated to the ways and habits of the West. Zionism and nationhood are by their nature Western European ideals, even if what they aspire towards may not be. Only in the East do people live who are unconcerned with their "nationality," in the Western European sense. They speak several languages, are themselves the product of several generations of mixed marriages, and fatherland for them is whichever country happens to conscript them. The Armenians of the Caucasus were for a long time neither Russians nor Armenians; they were Muslims living in the Caucasus, and yet they furnished the czars of Russia with their most loyal bodyguards. Nationality is a Western concept. It was an invention of Western European scholars, who ever since have struggled to explain it. The old Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary gave them, apparently, their best evidence of nationalism in action. In fact, if it had been at all well governed it could just as easily have provided evidence for the opposite. The incompetence of its governments furnished the evidence for a mistaken theory, founded on mistakes and given further credence by mistakes. The cradle of modern Zionism was Austria, was Vienna. It was founded by an Austrian journalist. No one else could have founded it. The Austrian parliament was where the representatives of the various nationalities sat, engaged in fighting for national rights and freedoms that would have been perfectly unremarkable if they had been conceded. The Austrian parliament was like a battlefield for the various competing nationalisms. If the Czechs were promised a new school, the German community in Bohemia felt aggrieved. And if the Poles in East Galicia were given a Polish-speaking governor, then the Ruthenians felt their noses were out of joint. Every nationality within Austria-Hungary pressed its claims on the basis of its "territory." Only the Jews ("soil" was the word used in their case) had no territory of their own. In Galicia the majority of them were neither Poles nor Ruthenian. However, anti-Semitism was to be found equally among Germans and Czechs, Poles and Ruthenians, Magyars and Romanians in Transylvania. They managed to refute the proverb that says that when two quarrel, the third is the winner. The Jews were always the third party, and they always lost. Then they pulled themselves together and came out in favor of a Jewish nation of their own. They compensated for the lack of any "soil" to call their own in Europe by aspiring to a home in Palestine. They had always lived in exile anyway. Now they became a nation in exile. They sent Jewish nationalist representatives to the Austrian parliament and began to agitate for rights and freedoms as a nation before they had been accorded even the most basic ones as humans.

"National self-determination" was the battle cry all over Europe, and the Jews took it up as well. The Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations did all they could to ensure the Jews' right to nationhood. Today the Jews constitute a "national minority" in many countries. They don't have everything they want, but they have a lot: their own schools, the right to their own language, and several other rights of the sort that are supposed to confer happiness in Europe.

But even if the Jews were to succeed in acquiring all the rights of a "national minority" in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in Romania, in the German-speaking part of Austria, it would still beg the great question of whether the Jews are not actually a far bigger thing altogether than a European-style national minority; whether they are not indeed more than a "nation" in the European sense; and whether, in pressing their entitlement to "national rights," they are not renouncing far more important claims.

What bliss to become a "nation," no different from the Germans, the French, or the Italians, having already been a "nation" themselves for over three thousand years and fought "holy wars" and experienced periods of greatness! Having beheaded enemy generals and overcome one's own. The era of "national history" and "patriotic studies" lies way back in the Jewish past. Jews patrolled and defended their own borders; conquered cities; crowned kings; paid taxes; were subjects; had "enemies"; were taken prisoner; dabbled in global politics; brought down cabinet ministers; had a kind of university, with professors and students; a stuck-up caste of priests, wealth and poverty, prostitution, ownership and penury, masters and slaves. Do they want all that again? Can it be that they're envious of European states?

Certainly they want more than merely to safeguard their "national characteristics." They want their rights to life, health, and liberty, rights that in almost every European country they are denied outright or have only in curtailed form. Truly Palestine is witnessing a national rebirth. The young halutzim are brave farmers and workers, and they demonstrate the willingness of the Jew to work and till the fields and become sons of the soil, in spite of having spent hundreds of years among books. Unfortunately the halutzim are also obliged to take up arms, to be soldiers, and to protect the land against the Arabs. Thus the European example has been carried into Palestine. Unfortunately, the young halutz is not only a returnee to the land of his forefathers and a proletarian with the righteous outlook of a workingman; he is also the disseminator of a culture. He is as much a European as he is a Jew. He brings the Arabs electricity, fountain pens, engineers, machine guns, shallow philosophies, and all the other things that come out of England. Of course the Arabs ought to be grateful for the fine new roads. But the instincts of a people close to nature quite rightly rebel against the onslaught of an Anglo-American civilization, all in the honorable name of national rebirth. The Jew has a right to Palestine, not because he once came from there but because no other country will have him. The Arab's fear for his freedom is just as easy to understand as the Jew's genuine intention to play fair by his neighbor. And despite all that, the immigration of young Jews into Palestine increasingly suggests a kind of Jewish Crusade, because, unfortunately, they also shoot.

Even if the Jews reject Europe's bad habits and customs, they aren't quite able to do without them. They are themselves Europeans. The Jewish governor of Palestine is beyond question an Englishman. He's probably even an Englishman first and Jew second. The Jews are either victims or helpless tools of European politics. They are exploited or abused. At any rate it will be difficult for them to become a nation with a completely new, un-European physiognomy. The European mark of Cain won't wash off. It is surely better to be a nation than to be maltreated by one. But it's a painful necessity all the same. Where's the pride for the Jew, who disarmed long ago, in proving once more that he is capable of squad drill!

Because actually the world isn't made up of "nations" and fatherlands, that want only to preserve their cultural distinctions, and only if it means not sacrificing a single human life. Fatherlands and nations want much more, or much less: They have vested interests that insist on sacrifices. They set up a series of "fronts" in order to secure the "hinterland" that is their real objective. Given all the millennial grief of the Jews, they still had one consolation: the fact that they didn't have such a fatherland. If there can ever be such a thing as a just history, surely the Jews will be given great credit for holding on to their common sense in not having had a fatherland at a time when the whole world launched itself into patriotic madness.

They have no fatherland, the Jews, but every country in which they live and pay their taxes looks to them for patriotic commitment and heroism, and reproaches them for dying without enthusiasm. In these circumstances Zionism is really the only way out: If one must be patriotic, then at least let it be for a country of one's own.

But for as long as Jews continue to live in the countries of others, they are required to live and, unfortunately, also to die for these countries. Yes, there are even some Jews who live and die for these countries with enthusiasm. There are Eastern Jews who have assimilated to the country of their choice, and have completely adopted the local set of values, including "fatherland," "duty," "a hero's death," and "war loans." They have become Western Jews, Western Europeans.

But what makes a "Western Jew"? Is it that he can prove that his ancestors were fortunate enough never to have had to flee from any Western European, not to say German, pogroms, in the Middle Ages or subsequently? Is a Jew from the city of Breslau, long known by its Polish name of Wroclaw, more of a Western Jew than one from Cracow, which is still in Poland today? Is a man a Western Jew if his father has no memories of Posen or Lvov? Almost all Jews were Western before they ever got to Russia or Poland. And all Jews were once "Eastern Jews" before a few of them went West. Half of all the Jews who today speak contemptuously or disparagingly of the East had grandfathers who came from Tarnopol. And if they weren't, then it was by sheer, blind fortune. How easy in the course of a pogrom to end up suddenly in the East, where they hadn't yet begun beating their Jews!

All that makes it unfair to assert that a Jew who came to Germany from the East in 1914 had any lesser understanding of war loans or draft boards than a Jew whose ancestors had lent money or been drafted for the past three hundred years. The more imbecilic the immigrant, the sooner he bought war bonds. Many Jews, Eastern Jews, or the sons and grandsons of Eastern Jews died in the War fighting for one or other of the countries of Europe. I don't say this to exonerate the Eastern Jews. On the contrary: I blame them for it .

They died, suffered, caught typhoid, supplied "spiritual counselors" for the field, even though Jews are allowed to die without a rabbi and stand in even less need of some padre's patriotic rhetoric than their Christian fellows. They fell in with Western abuses and bad habits. They assimilated. They no longer pray in synagogues and prayerhouses, but in boring temples where the worship is as mechanical as it is in the better class of Protestant church. They came to be temple Jews, in other words: well-bred, clean-shaven gentlemen in morning coats and top hats, who wrap their prayer book in the editorial page of the Jewish newspaper in the belief that it will attract less attention that way. Organ sounds are heard in the temple, and the cantor and rabbi wear headgear that might have been borrowed from a Christian minister. Any Protestant blundering into a Jewish temple would have to admit that the difference between Jew and Christian is not that great, and he might even give up his anti-Semitism if it wasn't that he had such keen business competition from the Jews.

Their grandfathers were still engaged in a desperate struggle with Jehovah, bruised their foreheads on the drab walls of the small prayerhouse, called out for their sins to be punished and begged for forgiveness. The grandsons have become Westerners. They need the organ to put them in the mood, their God is a redaction of nature, their prayer a formula. And on top of that they're proud of it! They're lieutenants in the reserve, and their God is a commanding officer, the same God by whose grace the kings sat on their thrones.

And the name for all this is Western civilization. Whoever has it is entitled to despise his cousin who, authentic and uncontaminated, comes from the East. Such an Eastern Jew has within himself more humanity and more divinity than all the preachers can come up with in all the theological colleges of Western Europe. With luck the cousin will have the fortitude not to lapse into assimilation.

In what follows, I will attempt to describe how the Eastern Jew and his kind live, first at home and then abroad.

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The Wandering Jews

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