Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 1 September 1944 — Page 10

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THE JEWISH POST

Friday, September 1, 1944

IN SERIAL FORM-

a guide for the bedevilled BEN HECHT’S NEW BOOK-

SOME ALL TOO FEW SENTENCES ON PREJUDICE There is a lie in Voltaire deeper than any of his Jewish confusions. It is not a single lie but a whole process of thought. Voltaire examined ideas and never their human origins. Like many philosophers, who are usually journalists in quest of abstract scandals, the Frenchman investigated crimes against reason as if they were misarrangements of words or lapses in logic. He did not know, as Shakespeare knew, that the ideas of men are the debris of an inner battle fought out of sight of the mind. He had no eye for the forces of passion, greed, terror, and insufficiency that throw’ our thinking at us.. He visualized reason as the vestments of mathematics. It is not that. It is a vestige rescued from mania. He would have written of Dostoievsky, had he been able to read him, that the Russian was an industrious reporter full of useless tidings from chaos. Shakespeare he did read and of him he wrote— “He would have been a perfect poet had he lived in the time of Addison. Addison is, perhaps of all English writers, the one who best knew how to guide genius with taste. ... I find it somewhat extraordinary that (Shakespeare’s) buffoonery and drunkenness count among the beauties of the tragic stage.” (I have rearranged the sequence of this quotation so as to make both my and Voltaire’s point more obvious.) He seems to have found it extraordinary that buffoonery and disorder also existed on the human stage. Consequently, he wrote— and this is the great lie behind his thinking — “Prejudice is opinion

without judgment.” It is a statement worth examining, for in it lies not only Voltaire’s, but half of the world’s misunderstanding of itself. This statement says that our souls can be purged of evile by the attentions of the schoolmaster. It says that we are unreasonable because we have not been exposed to enlightenment. It says that our passions can be arranged into tasty, Addisonian order by the application of external logic—knowledge. It says that error exists because truth has not been offered in exchange. It says that the prejudices which fling us into stup'd, silly, or barbarous behaviors are no more than an absence of judgment. This is a misconception so deep and so tall that, in making it, Voltaire divorces himself, not only from Shakespeare and all the poets, but from all psychology as well. And without psychology there is no truth any more than there is history without bloodshed. It is this misconception, of what prejudice is—of what unreason is —that made Voltaire an antiSemite. He thought that truth lay in the exposure of some Jewish and Christian “miracles.” He had no eye for the maladjustments of his own Europeans—that made their persecution of the Jew a thousandfold more unsavory than the latter’s worst intellectual lapses and a thousandfold more important in the study of human unreason. It ic this preference for playing solitaire with ideas—as if that little deck held all the faces of mankind—that makes philosophers often anti-human, or at least anti-social. Voltaire’s sentence that “Preju-

dice is opinion without judgment” is not a sentence, but a credo. It is a religion that misunderstands, not God, but man. In this sentence there is, even on the surface, a glaring contradiction that should have been obvious to the logician— Voltaire. He should have seen that his credo presupposed fantastically that the mass of humanity was fit for the exercise of judgment. He himself knew better than this. He knew that the history of Europe revealed that no more than a handful of men in a generation were capable of thinking and acting as rational men. And ht knew—no one better—that even this handful of enlightened ones remained as full of prejudices as a cow’s tail is of fleas. The study of anti-Semitism is no more than a sidelong look at the human genius for prejudice. I do not mean our superficial prejudices—the ones that are formed by the many wanton winds that blow our personalities together. Our external minds are of minor importance in our own or in the world’s destiny. They are dressed mainly out of journalistic dust storms. Those loose fittings that we call our political beliefs or social tenets are not prejudices at all. They seldom array us against reason or send us gallivanting through a vacuum. They do no more than add a touch of eccentricity to our cliches. True prejudice is not opinion at all and cannot be influenced by the things that make up opinion, knowledge, or sanity. True prejudice is an inner unreason as necessary to us as our outer reasonableness; that is, as necessary to our continuation as buffoons and drunkards of life. Evolution—the same evolution that changes with godlike slowness our bones and tissues—is its only schoolmaster. Until we are straightened from our Simian mental stoop, prejudice will remain our shield against illness, our buckler against matters otherwise insufferable to our ego. Prejudice is the bandage that protects a sore segment of the brain. Judgment can neither unwrap it nor enlightenment pluck, it away. Prejudice is our method of transferring our own sickness to others. It is our ruse for disliking others rather than ourselves. We find absolution in our prejudices. We find also in them an enemy made to order rather than inimical forces out of our control. By our prejudices we pardon ourselves; we excuse our defeats, we increase our stature, we utilize our ignorance which is our major equipment. Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind, clambers and paddles to safety. The human ocean bottoms where prejudices are formed are too deep for the educators or the precept bringers. There no light can shine. It is into this dark place that the word Jew has fallen. It has become a word, not of historical or religious meaning, but a symbol of obsession—one of the mystic forces by which men are able to outwit their insufficiencies. The word Jew has in tw’O thousand years been promoted from the name of a people to the name of a symptom. Along with the many hoarier complexes and phobias that disturb and, at the same time, protect the human soul from disintegration stands this new’ magician in the subconscious—the Jew complex.

It existed in one of its more evil guises in the texture of a man who is called one of the greatest minds of the race. Voltaire, in his antipathy for the “wretched little Jews,” proved himself, if proof be needed, that prejudice is independent of judgment. For he was a man of excellent judgment. He revealed, to the contrary, that the prejudice of anti-Semitism is a symptom that can thrive as virulently in the most acute and enlightened of minds as it can in the darkened thought of fools. Enter Senor Pinto I met him in a history book. He is a tall, handsome man with an imperious eye but an unhappy mouth. He is a Portuguese Jew of distinction, and lives in elegance in the city of Bordeaux, France; time, 1763. The Senor owns a few sailing vessels, trades with the people of the Indies, has a carriage with four horses, pomades his hair, takes snuff, carries an ivory-handl-ed cane, and reads the latest works of the new’ French Freemason, Arouet de Voltaire. These are admirable works but they, nonetheless, disturb Senor Pinto, for there is much in them that is unpalatable to a Jew. The merchant of Bordeaux calls in some of his friends. They arrive in velvet carriages drawn by happy horses. They discuss the matter of this Jewish calumny of Monsieur Voltaire over tall bottles of wine. The Jews must strike back at this Freemason. And who is there better fitted than Pinto, so rich, so well read, so talented? Thus, by acclamation, Senor Pinto is declared champion of the Jews. He seizes his quill, produces in five weeks a fine volume of rebuttal, and takes this volume to Paris to hurl at Voltaire. The rebuttal says that Voltaire is a fool in assailing Jews as if they were all alike. Senor Pinto points out indignantly that the Portuguese Jews, who “are all practicaly aristocrats,” despise German and Russian Jews as deeply as do any of their other despisers. All Voltaire has to say against the Israelites, cries the Senor from Bordeaux, might well be true of these same uncouth German and Russian varieties. But it is in no way applicable to the fine, highclass Semites only recently driven out of Portugal. I shake hands with Pinto. He soothes me. He reveals that neither Voltaire nor any anti-Semites have a corner on intolerance. It is not good for a people to be too much in the right, too noble, too flawless. It would unbalance them. They would become then like a badly wTitten character in a play —the one w’ho has nothing to do but recite all the long, dull ‘speeches on goodness and honor. The Jew is no such bore. I applaud Senor Pinto and bring him to the footlights for a bow— at the end of Act Two. He looks around with imperious eye, takes a> pinch of snuff and smiles with the arrogance of a Cardinal. But Senor Pinto’s distaste for all Jews but his own brocaded variety has an unhappy Act Three. Attracted by this dandy’s boasts, Christendom looks on the towns of Bordeaux and Avignon and is shocked to see Jews living in such high estate, Jews with ivoryhandled canes and velvet .rapes and large 'sailing vessels full of spices and gold plate. Unlike the Epicurean Pinto, the Gentiles are unable to savor the distinction between

Portuguese and German Semites. They launch themselves at once into the bedevilment of Pinto’s own people. The Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux are stripped again of their dignity and treasures and sent packing into ghettos. Another reason I admire Pinto is that he permits me to say, here is one Jew who was victim only of his own stupidity. I imagine there are many such, but Pinto stands in a spotlight. There is a certain relaxation in beholding the Jew as a villain, even if it is only himself he outiages. There is also a historic lesson in Pinto, for he reveals that when the Jew’ plays villain, there are always better villains around to steal the part from him. Senor Pinto also helps me to understand many Jews of today who have come to high estate in varb ous lands. These elegant ones are ever ready to repudiate all Jews without ivory-handled canes, collections of fine paintings, or the ear of an archbishop. No more than poor Pinto will these Jewish Fortunatuses know that, in the eyes of anti-Semites, Jews are as inseparable and identical as Siamese twins. No more than Pinto will they learn that even espousing so un-Jewish a cause as anti-Semi-tism never makes a Jew less a Jew. But Senor Pinto is not entirely a villain nor yet a fool. He is more the victim of a certain logic that the world refuses to share with him. This often troubles Jews more than the calumnies of their enemies. The logic in their own heads informs them they are not Jews at all, judged by any Jewish standards they know. They are cynics, philosopher’s, sophisticates, and even atheists. They care no more for Jews than for Patagonians. Put there comes a morning when they always wake up—Jews. History stands outside their windows and, in a voice that seems truly that of an idiot, bids them attend a massacre being held for Jews only. At such a time the Pintos and the near Pintos beat their bosoms and catch a look at the true meaning of the Jew. He is part of a game the world plays. Although it devote itself eagerly to his extermination, it cannot afford the loss of his Jewishness. This Jewishness is not essential to the Jew, who may outgrow and outwit it. But it is to his enemy, who refuses to outgrow a panacea so soothing, so enriching, so ego-in-flating as anti-Semitism. (Continued Next Week)

20 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK Tty ,Tf»wisb Tcleifraplilct Atronry BERLIN—“I was too mild an anti-Semite,” declared Adolf Hitler, defeated leader of the Bavarian Beer Revolution, now’ imprisoned in Lapdeberg, w’hen he commented upon the information submitted to him of the reports circulated in the Jewish press that he had renounced anti Semitism. “It is ridiculous,” he stated. “To the contrary, I was rather too mild an anti Semite. I am now engaged in writing a book which I consider to be the work of my life in w’hieh T will prove that only through a sharp campaign against the Jews, will the world be saved from the Jewish disease.”

A group of 1,500 Jews who succeeded in escaping from the Nazis and are now hiding in Yugoslavia, are in dire need of assistance, the Yugoslav Red Cross has informed the Rome authorities.