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104 The Holocaust and Its Lessons

wealth in the service of the “Young Turks.” It was Parvus who, in common counsel with the Kaiser’s government, arranged Lenin’s transfer in a sealed railroad car from exile into Russia in order to bring down the detested czarist regime at any price, l.ater on, however, Lenin contemptuously spurned his advice to install a socialist market economy in Soviet Russia. One may say that Parvus foresaw the economic destruction of the Soviet Union and the price that the Bolshevik venture would claim.19

Trebitsch was a different case: a lapsed Hungarian Jew from a rabbinical home who had converted, emigrated to Canada as a missionary, and made his way to England, where he was elected to Parliament as a member of the Liberal faction under the name of Lincoln. He was quickly exposed as a charlatan. Afterwards, he hired himself out to the Kaiser and labored in America to thwart the latter’s entry into World War I in support of the British, thereby causing the British a great deal of harm. In due course, Britain had him extradited and placed in prison for several years. In the 1920s, he acted on behalf of the White International (an organization of unseated European nobility). He died in Shanghai in the early 1940s while serving as a German intelligence agent in the guise of a Buddhist monk. The archives of the Western security services are packed with material about Trebitsch. Several leading officials in these services, at the time and in the future, were excessively suspicion about Jews and developed the idea that they had had a lot to do with the ascendancy of Bolshevism.20

A Smaller Than Average BrainEven though the head of American military intelligence, Colonel Dunn, dismissed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery that probably originated in Germany, at the same time he said that a similar Jewish world conspiracy was true in principle. Thus, the allegations that the Protocols had inspired refused to die. Inquirers who turned to American intelligence, as stated, compared excerpts of the Protocols with excerpts of the writings of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, and concluded that Zionism exuded an antidemocratic and an anti-Christian spirit. They attributed enormous political power to Zionism, blaming it for having brought on the surrender of Lord Balfour, the British aristocrat who had sealed his own country’s borders to the Jews but had given them the Balfour Declaration, that is, permission to steal the Holy Land from Christendom.

Although the ostensible theft of Palestine from the Arabs had not become the main problem - not yet, at any rate - the U.S. Departments of State and War quickly began to speak in a conflated anti-Zionist and antisemitic tone of voice, viewing the Arab problem and the Muslim response to Zionism as an issue that was only growing worse and worse. On November 17, 1920, pursuant to the anti-Jewish Arab violence in

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the Jews the Balfour Declaration), which was willing to bring on a war of two million Jews against a hundred million Muslims. American Jews, the consul opined, were not about to go to Palestine; they were living well in America. Palestine would be settled by Russian, Polish, and Romanian Jews, the “scum,” as he put it, of the Jewish race. Consequently, the Jewish Bolsheviks were creating a Bolshevik state with England’s unwitting complicity. Russian Jews were accustomed to revolution, and their willingness to endure any hardship made them good soldiers, the consul averred. The only way to keep them from transforming their Jewish state into a Bolshevik one, he counseled, was to destroy Bolshevism from the root. Otherwise, Jewish Bolshevism would join forces with local national movements and spread to Egypt, India, and so forth.21

These remarks contained quite a few points of prophecy. Indeed, the left flank of the radical Zionist faction known as the Stern Gang, Lehi in Hebrew, which included Jews of Polish origin such as Nathan Friedman-Yellin, would eventually dream of linking Zionism and radical liberation movements in the Arab world into an anti-Western nationalist endeavor.

The Department of War also turned its attention to a cable from Switzerland, dated December 6,19 20, which mentioned indications of blatantly hostile Jewish activity against non-Jewish economic systems around the world and a Jewish intention of destroying Christian property everywhere. Three organizations were specifically accused of this: (1) the Zionists, that is, the general Zionists or the non-Socialist majority in the Zionist Movement at the time, led by Dr. Chaim Weizmann among others; (2) Po’alei Zion, the variegated Socialist-Zionist organization to which Ben-Gurion belonged, a few of whose members had embraced Marxist ideology; and (3) the Bund, a Jewish Socialist mass movement that urged the Jewish proletariat to join the various local Socialist movements, take their interests into account, and integrate with them wherever they lived while maintaining their separate, Jewish identity. The Zionists, the author of the cable reported, had a pronouncedly national and anti-Bolshevik outlook. The British government had recently forced Weiz-mann, the head of the “Jewish government” (i.e., president of the World Zionist Organization) in London, to reveal publicly where the Zionists stood on the question of Bolshevism. Po’alei Zion and the Bund confined most of their activities to Eastern Europe. Their political organizations, the cable continued, were much less important than their numerous economic organizations, which pursued financial interests in the main. The Jews’ political interests and their economic interests were one and the same. The Jewish idea, the cable advised, was to establish worldwide Jewish economic hegemony; hence the Jews’ economic institutions should be considered political, which would spell the destruction of Christian property. The result was a confluence of interests between the Bolsheviks and the Jews, thereby explaining why the Jewish organizations threw their support behind the Bolshevik movement. Collectively speaking, the

io6 The Holocaust and Its Lessons

Another MID document, dated April 14, 1923, described the “intense anti- Zionist feeling” among the Arabs of Palestine due to political, economic, and cultural reasons, including the “Jewish attitude to women,” which would unify the Arabs of the whole area to create a “United Arab State.” The Zionists would be massacred or expelled in due course, with all possible foreign support. Thus, “Americans are frequently asked if it is true that Henry Ford will probably be the next President of the United States.”

The U.S. intelligence files from the early 1920s reveal a substantive-looking research study on “Jewry from psychologic, environmental, physical, and racial points of view.”25 Whoever it was that commissioned this report was probably influenced, among other things, by the copious popular literature of the time, as described by Leonard Dinnerstein, which concerned itself with the Jews’ special capabilities and traits. Many also seem to have been influenced by a thesis published in 1919 (sometime before the study at issue) by Thorstein Veblen, one of the founders of modern American social science, claiming that the Jews actually were intellectually superior to others. Some in the American defense establishment deemed this thesis worthy of systematic examination.14 We do not know who instigated this “study,” which spanned some eighty pages and was based in part on Jewish sources, and how it found its way into the files of American military intelligence. One may surmise, however, that MID itself took an interest in the matter, since no other federal authority undertook to debate these issues at the time. MID also appeared to be a convenient and safe place to probe so delicate a topic, given the slick and sensitive nature of the object being investigated. It is very likely that the results of the investigation served the aims of the American nativists and politicians who had long wanted to shut the gates of the United States to “undesirable aliens,” including Jews. Indeed, in 1921, shortly after the study was completed, Congress initiated a legislative process that, once concluded in 1924, banned Jewish, Asian, and Eastern European immigration altogether. The seal became virtually hermetic in 1929, four years before Hitler’s rise to power, when a very rigid quota of immigration visas was introduced. By then, however, the de facto injunction against Jewish immigration had been in place for nearly a decade.

Once this legislation was enacted, the United States had seemingly washed its hands of the Jewish problem. However, Hitler’s rise brought it back in full fury and made its victims into a political issue of the highest order. In due course, Congress threatened to reduce the immigration quotas that it itself had approved, which were stingy to begin with, if Roosevelt were to allow the entrance of Jews in such numbers as would exhaust the quotas.2S

The aforementioned study accounts for some of the background of this

"Not Truly a Nation” and the Question of Chosenness 107

The study begins by expressing truths that any Socialist Zionist from the Sccond Aliyah - raised on criticism of Diaspora Jewry as voiccd by the writer Mendele Mocher Seforim, Berdyczewski, and Bialik - could agree with in some parts and dispute angrily in others. It takes only a superficial observation, the author of the study said, to show that the Jew seems to have superior and, in any event, above-average intellectual capabilities. However, he continued, painstaking study and examination has elicited the interesting fact that, when all is said and done, this exceptional capacity might not originate in hereditary intellectual development, racial singularity, or uncommon talent, but rather in the experience of oppression and discrimination, which forced Jews to live by their wits for generations .26 Ghetto life in the Middle Ages and the special restrictions that had been imposed on Jewish education, coupled with the hostile environment, had fostered among Jews an ineradicable predisposition to commerce, financial legerdemain, speculation, and so on. Since “the Jew” had been forced to concentrate on these domains, he was assured of developing for his race the intellectual ability, cleverness, and enterprise that they required. However, physiological examination of his brain revealed no exceptional properties, in contrast to the legend of his exceptional brain size. In fact, the Jewish brain was found to be slightly lighter in weight than the average European brain .27

The authors of the study were loath to endorse biological antisemitism. However, their contention about the Jews led them in a very grave direction. As they put it, Jews were oblivious to the limits and dangers of power; they lacked the basic tools to understand Anglo-American civilization and its overarching concepts - the rules of fair play and the need to apply self-restraint and caution in the use of social and economic power. The Jews, the authors said, are a singular group with very high pretensions that always revolve around their own utility - a radical element that stirs ferment, a revolutionary collective that demands of others what it never honors itself.

“Not Truly a Nation” and the Question of Chosenness

From the national standpoint, according to the authors of the American study, the Jews’ efforts to maintain racial unity have met with immense difficulties due to the lack of a national language. For this reason, they do not have a national mind. By implication, the Jews are not a nation in the positive modern sense of the word. They are not a state that lives by dint of its hard work and a natural division of labor among its members. They amount to a race, a religion, a historical culture that has multilingual manifestations, a culture whose language is the ancient dead language of the Bible in which prayers are interpreted and understood in Yiddish and other cultures’ national vernaculars. This, however, captured the very revolution that Berdyczewski, Ahad Ha’am, Bialik, and the other spiritual patriarchs of Zionism had long wished to bring about, each in his own way. It also pointed to the process that their

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disciples - Katznelson, Ben-Gurion, and the other leaders of the Labor Movement - had begun to bring about in the decade preceding the American study, which placed such strong emphasis on the bizarre, threatening, and menacing situation of the stateless Jews for the very reason of their statelessness. Indeed, Jews knew nothing about the essence and meaning of a statehood of their own.

Even though its researchers were basing their evaluation on Mendele Mocher Seforim and Berdyczewki, the American MID at the time knew nothing about Bialik, Weizmann and his modus operandi, and Jabotinsky, not to mention Ben- Gurion and Katznelson. However, Socialist Zionism was indeed an attempt to return the Jews to their place in history as a sovereign people. Instead of surrendering the singularity and pretensions of Jewishness, it sought to fill them with real content as reflected in the outlook of its various factions - content that had a connection with universal values. The envisioned unity was no longer a matter of “race,” religion, or historical culture, but rather a product of the latter two and of contributions from the non-Jewish surroundings that combined with the crisis that had struck nineteenth-century traditional East European Jewish society like a bolt of lightning.

Since Gentiles continued to view Jews monolithically, the authors of the American study described the Jew’s characteristics in a specific way after concluding their discussion of the volume of the Jewish brain. Physiologically, they said, Jews display horrific concern and anxiety over trifling illnesses and indulge in hysterical sobbing and excessive grief when death occurs. These, however, are acquired traits that can be modified by adjusting the surroundings. In that case, Jews will take on characteristics of the local race. In other words, Jews can be changed and “fixed.” Once they learn the customs of “fair play” that American culture ostensibly practices, as well as other American values such as the ability to suffer and sacrifice a son for the homeland and the maturity to assume the burdens that originate in membership in a real nation (and, within this generality, to endure wartime losses in a manner worthy of a society that had lost 2 percent of its population in a civil war), they will be accepted. The problem of the Jews, however, was not only a matter of behavioral psychology that could be ameliorated by enrolling them in the host culture’s “school.” It was a problem of “behavioral philosophy,” anchored in the idea of chosenness and a covenant with God.

The authors continued: Since the Jews had created a theocratic state at the dawn of history, and since they had been forcibly dislodged from their place of origin and hurled into the wide world, rejecting any other affiliation and seeking only a place to lay their heads, they continued to believe that they would proliferate like the proverbial sand on the shore and rise to world domination. This argument against Jewish chosenness was widely held among Western liberal circles, of all places, and had been a fundamental tenet of secular antisemitism since Voltaire’s time. Voltaire was the first among liberals to have expressed this claim against

ZIONISM VERSUS BOLSHEVISM

great country for help, advice and guidance - for help in men and money.70

Weizmann was able to turn the fact that ‘Jewish’ Bolshevism had come to power in Russia to his short-term advantage. It might have been thought that this very circumstance proved the whole policy of ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’ bankrupt, both as far as the British and the Zionists were concerned. On the contrary the notion became even more entrenched. Churchill’s article on the subject appeared at the beginning of 1920, in the midst of the Civil War. Exactly a year earlier, Weizmann had made this statement to the Paris peace conference:

The solution proposed by the Zionist Organisation [i.e. the creation of a Jewish National Home in Palestine] was the only one which would in the long-run ... transform Jewish energy into a constructive force instead of its being dissipated in destructive tendencies.71

Such remarks anticipated, to a remarkable degree, the words employed by Churchill. Later, before the Twelfth Zionist Congress in 1921, Weizmann invoked a similar metaphor:

Britain with her political farsightedness, understood sooner and better than any other nation ... that the Jewish question, which hangs like a shadow over the world, may become a gigantic force of construction or a mighty instrument of destruction.72

In common with the British government, he still genuinely believed that he could influence events in Russia through the Zionist movement there. Not only in Russia, indeed, but in Poland too:

Polish Jewry if driven to despair might form a bridge between Germanism and Bolshevism which were at present separated by it and this would be a danger to the whole world: Mr Balfour seemed to see the force of this argument and expressed the opinion that the Zionist solution must be supported if only to avoid this grave danger which would otherwise threaten.

Weizmann added an NB to this memo:

Made a point of this.73

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BOLSHEVIKS AND BRITISH JEWS

Hard on the heels of the Declaration - and of the Bolshevik Revolution — he wired to Rosov in Petrograd: ‘Your sacred duty now to strengthen pro-British sympathies in Russian Jewry and counteract powerfully all adverse influences. Remember providential coincidence of British and Jewish interests.’” He intended to follow this up with the despatch of a delegation consisting of Sokolov, Tschlenov and Jabotinsky to Russia ‘to promote the joint aims of the Zionist Organisation and the Allied Powers’.75 A similar mission, headed by Aaron Aaronsohn, was to go to the United States. This plan, with regard to Russia at least, proved impracticable, owing to the October coup d’etat. By February 1918, Weizmann was beginning to realise the limitations of his policy - and that, perhaps, his expectations had been too great:

The total effect of this [Zionist] propaganda in Russia has been considerable though perhaps hardly as much as had been hoped. The Revolution occupied most of the attention of the Russian Jews and the consolidation of their newly-won liberty was their main object. The general feeling among them was far from friendly to Great Britain.

He nevertheless arrived at the same conclusion as some Foreign Office officials ‘that had the Declaration come sooner the course of the Revolution might have been affected’.7*

Weizmann certainly did not share the illusory belief entertained by less well-informed elements in the Foreign Office that somehow the ‘Jewish’ Bolsheviks could be made more amenable to the Allied cause through the machinations of the Russian Zionists. Indeed, he had scant sympathy for Bolshevism to which ‘99 per cent of the Jewish people’ were ‘deadly enemies’.77 Nor did he subscribe to the opposite notion that Russian Zionists were capable of mobilising the whole of Russian Jewry against the Bolsheviks in conjunction with the antisemitic White Russian generals. He did, however, share the Foreign Office’s faith in the efficacy of Zionism as an antidote to the spread of German influence in the Ukraine. The German advance in the east and the concomitant possibility of a separate peace there was the primary danger to British - and therefore to Jewish - interests in the winter of 1917—18. Weizmann therefore gave Whitehall his full cooperation in their attempts to avoid such an eventuality.

He telegraphed Brandeis in Washington thus:

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Information received that Germans contemplate during Armistice to establish purchasing companies South Russia ... and to obtain produce and petrol which would render our blockade ineffective ... we think that Jews of South Russia who control trade could effectively counteract German and Bolshevik manoeuvres in alliance with Ukraine. We have telegraphed to our friends Petrograd, Rostov, Kiev, Odessa, and beg you to do the same, appealing to them on behalf of Allied and Palestinian cause ... Jews have now splendid opportunity to show their gratitude England and America.7*

Weizmann counted not merely on the cooperation of the international Zionist ‘network’, but on Jewish financial power (‘Jews of South Russia who control trade’). Somewhat prematurely in February 1918, he gave guarded testimony to what he considered to be the success of this policy:

Even now in the question[s] of economic control the support of the Jews of South Russia is of fundamental importance and this undoubtedly appears to have been secured. The connections between Russian and German Jews makes the Jews the natural channel for the exploitation of Russian resources by the Central Powers. This channel has now been to some extent interrupted and this negative result may compensate for the small influence which has hitherto been obtained in the political sphere.”

It is certainly the case that Jews played a major role in Ukrainian commerce. Weizmann was none the less, like some Foreign Office officials, guilty of exaggerating the strength of Jewish financial power in Russia. The fact remains that the Jew is as susceptible to myths about the character of his own community as any Gentile. The Germans and the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, and this opened the way for German economic exploitation of the Ukraine.

•ENGLISH ZIONISTS VERSUS BRITISH JEWS’: THE IMPACT OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION UPON THE DEBATE WITHIN ANGLO-JEWRY

What was the future for Zionism in the new Russia? Would the cause of Jewish nationalism be strengthened in a free society which, for the

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time being at least, invited open political debate? Or would it, by contrast, succumb to the competing lure of assimilation? What about the other alternatives confronting Russian Jewry, such as the Bundist solution of ‘National Cultural Autonomy’ within the borders of the transformed state, or renewed emigration to the west? Indeed, was Zionism still relevant now that Russian Jewry had gained their emancipation? These were just some of the questions which proponents and opponents of Zionism within the Anglo-Jewish community had to address in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. During 1917, a pamphlet war was waged within - and without - that community, in which these issues were central to the arguments of both sides. This public war mirrored the parallel - almost symbolic - struggle taking place within the government - between the Zionist Herbert Samuel and his anti-Zionist cousin Edwin Montagu.

Anti-Zionists and the Revolution

I regard with perfect equanimity whatever treatment the Jews receive in Russia.

Edwin Montagu to Sir Eric Drummond, Earl of Perth, 3 August 1916'°

If Russian Jews obtained freedom in November, there would be no more Zionists in December.

attributed to Lucien Wolf, c. 1916

Zionism, Wolf maintained, was founded upon antisemitism. It enjoyed no independent existence of its own; it was rather a wholly negative reaction to antisemitism, and one which held out an entirely illusory hope of escape from persecution in eastern Europe. It was, in short, merely a formula arising out of ‘the political exigencies of the times’." Proof of this lay in the fact that Jewish nationalism drew its leadership and popular support principally from the Pale of Settlement and not from west European and American Jewry, who had already achieved civil and political emancipation. It followed, therefore, that the case for Zionism collapsed with the dawn of emancipation in the east - that is, with the coming of the Russian Revolution. Now Russian Jewry would tread the same path towards individual freedom and legal equality in a

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parliamentary democracy as its counterparts in the west. As Laurie Magnus, Philip’s son, put it:

The star of freedom has risen in New Russia, and Prussian kultur, which reinvented antisemitism, is setting in baths of blood. The Jewish problem to Jewish eyes in 1902 was how to escape per-secution. Theodore Herzl was a desperate man. Jewish conditions under Francis Joseph were intolerable, and the situation was even worse in Roumania and Russia. Today this despair is lifted ... Imperial Russia is finding her own soul. The remedies devised by the new Zionists to cure the evils they could not bear, disappear with the evils that engendered them.*2

The Jewish anti-Zionists were irrepressibly confident that emancipation could ultimately be achieved everywhere. Basing themselves on the premiss, formulated by the German Reform School, that ‘Jewish’ identity was a purely religious and not a national characteristic, they rejected the Zionist argument that the Jews formed a distinct political and national entity which required a territorial centre. The struggle for equal rights was thus a cardinal principle of the anti-Zionist creed. The ‘Jewish liberal compromise’ was applicable to both west and east. The Jewish struggle was part of the general battle for liberty taking place in Europe and, as such, was bound up with universalist tendencies in the Jewish religion. To embrace Zionism was a denial of the Jewish Mission to Mankind in favour of a narrow nationalism. In relation to Russia it meant an abdication of political responsibility. Philip Magnus wrote:

In the recent Revolution ... the Jews are known to have taken an active part: but they did so, not with a view to the restoration of Jewish nationality in Palestine, but in the endeavour to secure for the Russian people, as a whole... freedom... It has been said that the Revolution will prove to be the deathblow to the general acceptance by Russian Jews of the idea of National Zionism, and so it should be, for the Jews in Russia, as loyal subjects of the present Provisional Government, should devote their energies, their well-known organising abilities, and their intellectual efforts to the building up of a new and free Russia, occupying a foremost place among the civilising nations of the world.13

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Laurie Magnus concurred:We used to hear about Little Englanders. Surely Little Jews is the right term for the neo-Zionists, bred in persecution ... [who] urged the remedy of flight ... But the ... moral purpose [has] always lain in the direction of an improvement of Jewish conditions from within. Russian Jews, by remaining in Russia will help Russia to become a modern state.*4

Such high-mindedness apart, the anti-Zionists had another, far more prosaic concern: the spread of Jewish nationalism could undermine the process of emancipation in Russia at just that moment when it was being achieved — by conjuring up the spectre of ‘dual loyalties’. Lucien Wolf summed up the dilemma:

The Zionists say that the Jews are a nation. Most eagerly is this false and foolish assertion laid hold of by antisemites who are always eager and sympathetic Zionists. For, if the Jews are a nation, how can they be citizens of other nations? A man cannot belong to two nations. If he is a Jew by nationality, he can’t be a true Russian or Englishman.

Zionism could thus inspire antisemitism, rather than provide a solution to it. To Wolf the Zionist programme amounted to a unilateral declaration, by a section of Jewry, that the Jewish masses were ‘in a state of homelessness’ throughout the world. This was without doubt a ‘deplorable’ declaration which ‘may be calculated to wreck whatever chances of liberty and happiness there may be at the present moment for the seven millions of unhappy Jews in eastern Europe’.*5

In his sermon for Shavuos (Pentecost) 1917, which was appropriately entitled The Mission of the Jew, Rev. Ephraim Levene of the New West End synagogue said:

A few weeks ago the world was ringing with the glad tidings of the Revolution in Russia. Jews were devoutly thankful that the era of liberation had dawned for our Russian brethren. The nationalist aspirants almost went beyond themselves in their enthusiasm. They were clamouring at the Board of Deputies because that body had not been impetuous enough to send telegrams to Russia and acclaim the happy event. ‘The greatest event in Jewish history’, they proclaimed. The emancipation of millions

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