There is no counsel, no consolation, no hope. We need to be clear about the fact that there is no compromising with racism. Millions of plebeians badly need a few hundred thousand wretched Jews to confirm their own superiority. The Hohenzollerns (and with them the whole of German aristocracy) have already kowtowed to the janitors. What can a Jew expect? The masses are unappeasable enough when they gang up and follow their own lawless instincts. What will they be like given a measure of organization? If it’s any comfort to the German Jews, they might reflect that the Hohenzollerns are in the same boat (though admittedly, that house is of much more recent origins than the Jewish race).
Nothing would have damaged the National Socialist regime as much as the prompt and well-organized departure of all Jews and their descendants from Germany. National Socialism loses its coherence the moment it enters any sort of negotiation with the Jews. Its own aims are far distant, and in a direction that does not directly concern the Jews.
National Socialism may say “Jerusalem,” but what it really means is: “Jerusalem and Rome.”
8.
Only a very small, select minority of devout Christians have understood that — for the first time in the long and shameful history of Jewish persecution — the plight of the Jews is identical to that of the Christians. They beat up Moritz Finkelstein from Wroclaw, but the intended victim is Jesus of Nazareth. They take away the license of a Jewish livestock dealer from Fürth or Nuremberg, but on their minds is the shepherd in Rome who pastures his devout flock. Clearly it’s not enough to defame and torment a few hundred thousand people who share a common origin. The sons of the tide-waiters§ demand vengeance for the expulsion of the customs men. That’s the real “voice of blood.” You can hear it shouting from every loudspeaker.
Admittedly many of the Christian faith — among them, many high Church dignitaries — are impervious to this insight. The goings on in the Third Reich will teach them. In their deludedness, these Christians are almost like German Jews. They will one day understand that the banal witticism applied to the Jews—“You can’t baptize it out of them”—really applies to the Third Reich.
Not even by concordats.
9.
In all probability only a small proportion of the Jews still living in Germany today will be able to — and will want to — emigrate. After a century of emancipation, and the semblance of equal rights for the past fifty years, these Jews may not have the divine grace of suffering that their pious brothers do. But they do have an extraordinary capacity to endure indescribable things. So they will stay, they will marry, they will procreate, they will pass on their glooms and their bitternesses — all in the hope that one day “it will all be different.”
One day — and well before the thousand years are up — things will indeed be different in Germany. But neither Jews nor Christians nor indeed civilized Europeans will have any joy with the generation currently in the Hitler Youth. They are Jason’s brood, sown from dragon’s teeth. It will take a whole army of missionaries to baptize the coming generations of German heathens. So long as the Germans are not Christianized, Jews will have little to hope for at their hands.
It therefore seems probable that the Jews will keep their pariah status in German society for many years to come. It seems unduly optimistic to hope that Europe might recover its conscience, that a widely accepted law might overturn the mistaken principle of “noninvolvement,” which merely amplifies the vulgar proverb: “You sweep outside your own door.” This janitorial philosophy has now governed history for the last few decades. Instead, everyone ought to sweep outside one another’s door. It cannot be wrong for me to barge into my neighbor’s house if my neighbor is just about to take an ax to his children. There can be no European or European-Christian morality so long as the principle of “noninvolvement” is respected. What is it that allows European states to go spreading civilization and ethics in foreign parts but not at home? Centuries of civilization are no guarantee that a European people, by some ghastly curse of fate, will not revert to barbarism. Even among the peoples of Africa, which today require the protection¶ of civilized peoples, there must have been some whose millennial civilization one day — or, one century, one might say — was suddenly and inexplicably destroyed. European scholarship tells us as much.
People are forever talking about a “European family of nations.” But if there is to be any truth in those words: Have you ever seen a brother fail to restrain his brother’s hand when he’s about to perpetrate some heinous or idiotic act? Am I really only permitted to teach morality to the black headhunter, and not the white? A chilly sort of family, this “family of nations”!. The father is quite set on only sweeping outside his own door, while the stench from his son’s room rises to high heaven.
10.
I wish I had the grace and the insight to suggest some way out of our present difficulties. But honesty, one of the often unsung muses of the writer, forces me to bring this second foreword of mine to a pessimistic conclusion:
1. Zionism can bring only a partial solution to the Jewish question.
2. Jews will only attain complete equality, and the dignity of external freedom, once their “hostnations” have attained their own inner freedom, as well as the dignity conferred by sympathy for the plight of others.
3. It is — failing some divine intervention — hardly possible to believe that the “host-nations” will find such freedom and such dignity.
Pious Jews may be left with the consolation of the here-after.
As for the rest, it’s “vae victis.”
*Now Poznan.
†An identification card for stateless persons, introduced in 1922 by the Norwegian polar explorer and civil rights campaigner Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that same year.
‡The Nuremberg Laws were two measures designed by Hitler and approved by the Nazi Party Conference in September 1935. The first stripped Jews of German citizenship, making them “subjects of the state”; the second forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and Aryans. They were followed by further enactments.
§A customs inspector who boards ships and monitors the landing of goods.
¶An ironic reference to Abyssinia, invaded by Italy.
CREDITS
p. iv
Courtesy of Leo Baeck Institute, New York.
p. x
Courtesy of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, New York.
p. xxii
Courtesy of Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch archive.
p.4
Courtesy of Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin.
p. 24
Courtesy of Documentation Photographique Roger-Viollet, Paris.
p. 54
Courtesy of Documentation Photographique Roger-Viollet, Paris.
p. 92
Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library Limited, London.
p. 104
Courtesy of Österreichische Nationalbilbliothek, Vienna.
p. 116
Photograph by Lothar Weil.
p. 120
Photograph by Lothar Weil.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Roth was born Moses Joseph Roth to Jewish parents on September 2, 1894, in Brody in Galicia, in the extreme east of the then Hapsburg Empire; he died on May 27, 1939, in Paris. He never saw his father — who disappeared before he was born and later died insane — but grew up with his mother and her relatives. After completing school in Brody, he matriculated at the University of Lemberg (variously Lvov or Lviv), before transferring to the University of Vienna in 1914. He served for a year or two with the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Eastern Front — though possibly only as an army journalist or censor. Later he was to write: “My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.”