There are two rooms, occupied by a family of

THE SLAVIC HOME IN HUNGARY A peaceful, little village surrounded by fields of poppies and maize.
THE SLAVIC HOME IN HUNGARY
A peaceful, little village surrounded by fields of poppies and maize.

THE SLAVIC HOME ON WHISKEY HILL Flanked by culm piles, breakers and mines.
THE SLAVIC HOME ON WHISKEY HILL
Flanked by culm piles, breakers and mines.

five, and four boarders. I know the home of this woman in Hungary, and the very village from which she comes. I know the clean, straw-thatched cottage, the broad, dusty street, and the waving poppy-field back of the house; and I ask, “How are you getting along on Whiskey Hill?” This is the woman’s reply: “Chvala Bohu dobre.” Thank God, very well. I have never seen a more beautiful and grateful smile pass over a face, and have never heard a sentence which more fully suggested “Friedsam”; but suddenly her face grows dark; she hears the noise of hurrying horses and the beating of wheels against the rocky street. “The ambulance! O Virgin Mother, protect me!” she cries; for the ambulance stops at her door, and they bring in the mangled body of her husband.

He went out a few hours ago and she was “Naomi”—now he is brought home, and she is “Marah.” Bitter, very bitter.

What happens next on Whiskey Hill? Do people grow excited? Do the neighbours come rushing in? Do the newspapers in the town at the foot of Whiskey Hill take notice how this “Hunkey” came to his death? No, indeed. Nothing happens. The woman laments alone, even as another Marah laments alone in a similar row on another ridge. There are ten women anything but “Friedsam”; for on a neighbouring hill their husbands were slain together, by the fall of one huge rock or the same powder blast. “And nothing happens?” Yes, something happens. The coroner’s jury is summoned, and brings in the verdict; the same verdict always, with slight variations, rendered ever since the great companies absorbed the anthracite industry. This is it:

“Martin Horvat, aged forty-two, came to his death by a fall of rock in Mine No. 2 on Whiskey Hill, January 30, 1908. The jury finds that the company should have provided the deceased a safe place to work in. It was not the duty of the deceased to pass on the safety of the roof. The deceased is not to blame.” (What a comfort!) “We further find that the place in which the deceased worked should have been properly timbered” (which it was not when the accident occurred), “but we do not find that the company was to blame.”

Who was to blame? The deceased was not, the company was not. I have it—the rock was to blame. Somebody in Wilkes-Barre said, in answer to my query; “These Hungarians are so ignorant.” I see now—ignorance was to blame.

Every day there are funerals on Whiskey Hill, and after the funeral a feast, and after the feast a glorious spree. Whiskey Hill has earned its name, although it might be called Beer Hill just as appropriately. The saloons not only outnumber the churches; they outnumber the stores, schools, churches, undertakers’ shops, and culm hills combined, and a man might make a living by picking up the empty beer barrels that lie in the ravines. There are enough empty bottles lying in the runs, to clog the flow of the creek in the spring, when the current becomes strong enough to make its way through the ooze and slime.

Ignorance and beer are to blame—and avarice, especially avarice. For the first two the miner is to blame, but only in part. This ignorance is an inheritance, often a condition arising from the fact that he is in a strange country, to whose language he is deaf and dumb. The drinking, too, is an inheritance, and often also a condition arising from the circumstances under which he must live and work.

Granting, however, that he is ignorant and intemperate, up here on Whiskey Hill and on hundreds of other hills no attempt is being made by any one to dispel this ignorance. Neither his masters nor his priests are doing it. His priests, perhaps, are more content with his ignorance than his masters, for to the master he might be worth more if he knew more. The priest is sure of the opposite result as far as he is concerned. No one on Whiskey Hill tries to curb intemperance by teaching the “Hunkey” the hurt of it to his bank account, to his body, to his chances of coming alive out of the mine. His priest usually drinks freely, and many a saloon license in Pennsylvania bears the signature of the priest as one of the petitioners.

Even those people who are eager to make laws to curb or prohibit the sale of liquor, ignore entirely the education of the “Hunkey,” although he is now, and more and more will be, a great factor in the political and social life of the state.

Avarice is to my mind the basic fault in all the history of accidents in the mines of Pennsylvania. It is an avarice which thinks human life cheaper than timber, and considers it easier to pay funeral expenses than to support schools and pay teachers. It corrupts politicians to the degree that there is seemingly nothing more to corrupt; and if half the charges are true that are made openly by the newspapers in the coal regions, against the mine inspectors, they certainly are hopelessly debased.

Of the one thousand people slain annually in the anthracite coal region, two-thirds are chargeable to one of three causes: ignorance, intemperance, and avarice. Inasmuch as these causes could in a large degree be removed by the people of Pennsylvania, it follows that the people are to blame.

Twenty-three thousand lives have been sacrificed in the coal-mining industry in the United States in about ten years! Read it again! Twenty-three thousand people had to give up their lives for the light and heat and speed which we enjoyed in the last ten years. Twenty-three thousand men! Almost I envy the Brothers Daniel and Gabriel and the Sisters Iphigenia and Anastasia the time in which they lived, when the waters of the Cocalico turned their wheels, when they printed books and illumined letters, when they could do their share in pushing this world forward without sacrificing the lives of an army of men to what we call progress.

That time will never return, in spite of Rousseau and Ruskin and Tolstoy; but we must have a time, and have it soon, when we shall be able to do all that we are doing without such slaughter. Nothing is worth doing and nothing is worth having unless, like Conrad Beisel, we have a “new name in the Lord.” For myself, if I lived in Pennsylvania, it should not be “Friedsam” but “Streitsam”—not the peaceful one, but the fighter.

XVII

FROM THE LOVCZIN TO GUINEA HILL

Meekly enough, the men stood in the aisle, glad of the privilege of standing in the car, which carried them from the scene of their labours to the distant city where the signora and the bambini awaited them. I made room for one of the men, and for a time employed all my senses to discover if possible the reason for their receiving such treatment. I smelled neither garlic nor whiskey, although I was soon engaged in conversation with my neighbour and thus had a good chance to detect either.

He wore blue jeans overalls, which, while not stylish garments, are certainly honest clothing. There was no crease down the middle, but they had creases all over. His hands were not unclean; although the soil of honest labour was upon them.

In no way was he different from the American working man of the same class, except that he did not chew tobacco and therefore did not indulge in the practice which usually accompanies that accomplishment.

In order to ascertain what chances there were for English conversation, I addressed him in that language, and his answers in broken English were certainly more entertaining than the abrupt “yes” or “no” which one often receives from the native fellow traveller, to whom it is usually a matter of indifference whether or not the time hangs heavily on one’s hands.

At the next station the smoking-car was relieved of its surplus passengers, and my neighbour with all his countrymen was driven into it with rough gestures. I am very proud of the courage I displayed by turning in my seat and addressing the man who sat behind me. “Won’t you please tell me,” I said, hesitatingly, “why you wouldn’t share your seat with one of those men?” I fully expected him to say, “It’s none of your business,” but his stern face relaxed for a moment as he replied, with a rising inflection, “Dagos,” and then looked as stern as before.

I was not satisfied by that answer and said so. This opened the way for an argument, and conversation was soon in full swing.

“What right have those Dagos to come to this country, anyway?” he retorted, when I pleaded that those men had paid their fares and had the same right that he had, to a seat. I soon discovered that neither logic nor ethics was his strong point; so I thought I would try him on history.

“Do you know,” I asked, “who was the first ‘Dago’ that came to this country?” For a moment he put his thinking apparatus to work; then he said, and I am quoting his words exactly:

“I suppose it was somebody by the name of Macaroni, who sold bananas when he landed in New York, and talked an outlandish gibberish.”

“No,” I replied, “his name was Christopher Columbus, and if it had not been for that ‘Dago’ you would still be undiscovered.”

I had great difficulty in making my fellow traveller believe that there are cities in Italy more beautiful than Pittsburg; but when I told him that a “Dago” built the largest church in the world, his materialistic sense was touched and he began to listen respectfully to what I said.

“The same ‘Dago’ who built that church carved statuary so beautiful that whenever any man wishes to free the ‘imprisoned splendour of the stone’ (I did not quote Michael Angelo to him, however), he has to go to see what that ‘Dago’ has done.

“And that same man,” I continued, “painted a ceiling which is one of the great art wonders of the world. His name is Michael Angelo.”

“I never heard of him.”

“I know of another ‘Dago’” I continued, emphasizing “Dago,” “who painted a picture for which even you might be willing to pay $500.”

“I’d like to see it!”

When I mentioned Raphael and the Sistine Madonna, he did have some vague idea of what I was trying to convey to him; for these were fairly familiar names.

Then he fell upon me savagely. “But you don’t mean to say that these ‘Dagos’ that come over here are anything like Michael Angelo or Raphael!” To which I replied: “No, they are not; but neither are you anything like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.” Then I returned to the perusal of my newspaper.

That man was an average American of the middle class, a representative of the bulk of our population, and he, in common with many of his countrymen, is criminally ignorant of the people who will soon have his weal and woe in their hands.

The Italian, the Greek, and the Syrian are usually called by the classic names “Dago,” “Roundhead,” or “Guinea,” and the Slavs, be they Poles, Servians, Slovaks, or Montenegrins, are called “Hunyaks,” “Hunkies,” and “Slabs”; and I once heard the owner of a great industrial establishment call them “Bohunks.” It was not an ignorant or malicious friend of mine who said of a Jew, a man of scholarly attainment and a common acquaintance, “He is a pretty decent Sheeny.”

I have no quarrel with the fact that the average American is ignorant of the historic place which these people hold among the nations, and of the great age-long struggle through which some of them have passed and are still passing, that they may preserve their identity as a people. I am thoroughly incensed, however, that nearly every one of the names applied to them is an expression of contempt, an offhand judgment of inferiority. After all, it is not even that which makes me take up the cudgel for them, because they must and will prove for themselves that they are perfectly human like the rest of us, and that in all essential things they will grow like us as soon as they have the same privileges which we have had, who came after the first “Dago” had discovered the way to this land of opportunity.

What really does burden me and make me cry out is the consequences which result from such ignorance as I have cited, and because of which I was on that train travelling to Guinea Hill.

Guinea Hill differs from Whiskey Hill in that it bears many other fantastic names and in that there are fewer saloons. The beer-kegs do not lie about in such unpicturesque confusion, and the Slavs who live there come from the shores of the Adriatic and the bleak mountains of Montenegro. The huts in which they live on Guinea Hill are even worse than those of the earlier comers from the north of the Slavic world. I am told that they were built some thirty years ago, and no sacrilegious hand has touched them since, to paint them or to change their original primitive, dry-goods-box architecture. They seem to have sunk into the refuse of the mines, and the sociological investigators, who know the housing conditions in Pennsylvania, declare them to be “the worst in the state,” which phrase would be eloquent from meaning were it not so common as to lose its force.

Living in these wretched huts among stunted trees, the leaves of which are shrivelled and blackened by coal dust, I found young men with whom I had walked among the olive groves near Spalato. These young men had rowed me across the Boche de Cattero, easily the most magnificent bay in Southern Europe, and had shared with me the luscious figs which they carried in their shirt bosoms. I saw many a man whom I first knew beneath the deep shadow of the Lovozin, the historic mountain of Montenegro, whence the spirits of departed heroes still call to fight against Christianity’s hereditary foe—the Turk.

When last I saw these youths they wore garments of red and white cloth, richly embroidered, with their belts full of costly weapons of ancient pattern, and their fierce mustachios stretching out defiantly like long, double-pointed daggers. Here on Guinea Hill they all wear the sober garb of miners, their mustachios are shorn of their fierceness, their weapons have disappeared, their shooting is done in the darkness of the mine, and they rarely shed any blood but their own.

I went to Guinea Hill because I am partly responsible for the presence there of some of these Southern Slavs. Many years ago, when I visited their mountain fastness, numbers of them were at the verge of starvation. The crops on their scant fields had failed; fighting the Turk had grown to be a fruitless and profitless occupation; Russia, their ally and the godmother of their little principality, who in the past sent thither what surplus of foodstuffs she possessed, was herself living on borrowed money and charity, so that nothing remained for these warriors except to starve or seek for work.

I suggested to Prince Nicolas that he permit them to go to the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” Not one of them, however, was then willing to leave his rocky cradle home for the unknown fabled land so far away, and they remained on their bleak mountains to take half-rations or none, waiting for the realization of Russia’s Asiatic dream in which lay wrapped their own future. The Japanese war and the subsequent Russian revolution were like the eagles’ stirring the nest, and the young eagles began to flutter in the exaltation of their first flight, as they sought the shores of our far-away country. Four or five thousand of these braves exchanged the hilt of the sword and the butt of the gun for the shovel and the pickax, and the shadow of the towering Lovczin for the shadeless Pennsylvania hills. There I found them digging coal as bravely as they had fought the Turk, but known to their American masters only as “Hunkies” or “Guineas”—no one discovering in their open, honest faces a superior race—every one scenting in them drunkards, brawlers, and incendiaries.

The usual results of such ignorance followed, in that they have been treated with an injustice which makes them quite unconscious of the fact that they have found the land of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” I have verified nearly every complaint which they have made to me, for I know how easy it is for sensitive men to exaggerate their wrongs; but I found that they knew only about half of what they suffered, the other half being mercifully hidden from them by their ignorance of the language and the customs of our country.

After pay-days and feast-days the magistrates of the towns around seek them to arrest them, and the fine they must pay is always twice, three times, and in some cases ten times as great as that imposed upon the American offenders. After trials which make a Russian military court seem fairly decent, they are railroaded into jails and workhouses, and I now soberly confess that as a stranger I would rather fall into the hands of the police of Moscow or St. Petersburg than into those of the protectors of the law in most of our industrial centres in Pennsylvania and out of it.

The citizens of Pennsylvania may be comforted by knowing that Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois, in their lower courts, are as unjust to the stranger as their own state. In one town in Ohio there is, or was, a mayor who is reputed to have made $9,000 a year out of the fines imposed upon foreigners for petty offenses, usually for drunkenness or brawling. This ingenious official arrested alien drunkards under the statute of the state which allowed him to fine them as high as thirty dollars, while the native was arrested under the statute of the town and fined three dollars for his spree.

The Indianapolis police arrested a Slovak woman for the heinous crime of picking up coal on the tracks. On the coldest day of the year she was taken from her home and children and driven to the workhouse, in spite of the fact that she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. The terrible results of this inhuman treatment were, of course, what might be expected. Such facts have led the citizens to organize an Immigrant Protection League, which makes it its business to see that the immigrant is not exploited by the courts.

On Guinea Hill every “Roundhead,” as he is commonly called, despises the court for its undignified procedures and its perspicuous dishonesty. The judges’ contempt for the immigrant, as well as that of other executive officers, rankles and hurts beyond the telling, causing people who might become stanch, loyal, and heroic citizens, to hate and despise our institutions. If in time of turmoil and economic distress they become lawless, as I firmly believe they will, we shall reap only what we have sown. In our present hysteria about Anarchy it is well to remember that it feeds on injustice, that it cannot grow—in sane minds at least—if a nation deals out justice impartially, and that it would die out completely if as a people we would live somewhere within hailing distance of Mount Sinai.

I do not ask any sentimental consideration in our law courts for the Slavic or the Italian offender. Deal with him firmly; punish him if punish we must; but let the man who steals a coal mine be not dealt with more leniently than the woman who picks up coal on the track. Let the Jewish thief suffer, if he has stolen the railway’s old iron; but let him who steals a whole railway also suffer in proportion to the magnitude of his crime.

I have asked for the aliens, and shall not cease asking until I am heard: First, that we learn to know them. The people of Montenegro, Poland, Hungary, and Italy are worth the knowing. If struggle for liberty means anything in the character of a nation, then these people have character; for their fields are drenched in martyrs’ blood. Where in Hungary the poppy grows reddest, or in Italy the figs are most luscious, there the common people have shed their blood heroically.

Besides that knowledge, which, if it did no more for us, would at least enlarge our mental horizon, I ask for common, fundamental justice; not only for the sake of the alien but for our own sake. I ask and shall continue to ask for justice—justice, which is the least if not the most that we are capable of giving them. At present I do not ask, for I cannot expect it, that enlightened justice which is love, the divinest human gift. I ask for just plain, common, every-day justice.

“As ye would that” your own offenders should be done by, so do ye even unto the alien. This is as far from the Golden Rule as Guinea Hill is from the Lovczin; but it is the most we may expect, although not the most for which we ought to ask.

Not a hundred miles away from Guinea Hill, at the Hazleton Young Men’s Christian Association, I want to show you what enlightened justice can do for the “Roundhead.” I came down from the Hill disheartened and sad, and, stepping into the office of that rather remarkable Young Men’s Christian Association building, I saw a man, with dust-cloth and broom, walking about with the peculiarly graceful stride of the mountaineer. “That’s Gabriel—not the archangel; but an angel, anyway,” Mr. Hill, the secretary, told me. “Go from garret to cellar and you will find no dust or disorder. The small boy, that bane of the Young Men’s Christian Association, fears him and loves him in turn. I don’t see how we could get along without Gabriel.”

“Kiss my cheek, Gabriel, and wish me well.” And Gabriel kissed my cheek and wished me well, just as he used to in his Montenegrin home, when kinsman met kinsman upon the war-path as they fought their ancient enemy, the Turk. Now, no weapons bulged from Gabriel’s belt, his clothing was faultlessly American, his once furious mustachios had fallen beneath an American barber’s shears, and his battle-field was this splendidly equipped building. Officially, he was the janitor; but he was also the self-appointed and beneficent dictator, feared by all evil-doers and breakers of rules, and beloved by all who could appreciate a faultlessly kept building.

“You must see his room,” the genial secretary said, with a twinkle in his eyes, and we followed Gabriel to the topmost story. He opened the door of his room with pardonable pride, for Prince Nicolas, the ruler of his country, whose bedroom I have seen and in whose throne-room I have had audience, cannot boast of an apartment so neat and clean or so gorgeously decorated. Besides the comfortable furniture, unrivalled in Gabriel’s home-land, the walls were hung with pictures which reflected prevailing American tastes. Celluloid toilet articles lay upon the bureau, while many books and newspapers betrayed how this janitor spent his spare time.

Gabriel’s face was radiant from pride, and so was mine; while added to my pride was a pleasurable feeling to which I could give no other expression than to ask for another fraternal kiss, which he gave me with a resounding smack. When we returned to the lobby, I looked over the group of men gathered there to meet me, and my wits were tested to place each man according to his nationality. I looked into the face of one young man, a veritable giant, and before he opened his lips I said, “You are a Dalmatian.” “Yes, yes,” he replied, “from Ragusa.”

Again I looked into his deep eyes and finely chiselled features. Yes, it was the type one sees beneath the half-ruined porticoes of ancient palaces, where young men play the tambouritza and young maidens listen behind latticed windows; where old men dream dreams of the Ragusan Republic and its vanished glory, when it vied with Venice in maritime power, although it never gained her ascendency. Now it is dying a slow and a forgotten death, beneath shading palm trees, while its warrior sons, the bluest blood of Dalmatia, are sent to dig coal in Pennsylvania, and its guslar minstrels make music for the merry-makers at Coney Island.

What a fine specimen this is which Ragusa has sent us! Ask the secretary about him and he will tell you that he is intelligent, cleanly, temperate, and frugal; yet in Pennsylvania he is just a “Hunky.” Other members of the Young Men’s Christian Association are loth to see him on the gymnasium floor with them, and to most Americans he is only an undesirable immigrant from Southern Europe—something to be dreaded.

“I am an Italian,” very proudly says the next man who grasps my hand, and, looking into his face, I ask doubtfully, “From Italy?” for his face shows Slavic lines. “From Triest,” he adds.

Ah! now I understand. That is where Italian, Slav, and German meet—and fight, as is the custom of all good Austrians; for each race claims superiority over the others, and in most of them flows the blood of all three races.

“You must come to see my kindergarten and my church.” I promise; for he is quite an important factor in the redemption of Little Italy. The next man is a Slovene from the neighbourhood of Agram, the next a Slovak, then a Pole, and “last but not least,” a Bohemian. All these are gathered here beneath the sheltering wing of this archangel Gabriel, janitor of the Young Men’s Christian Association and self-appointed, beneficent dictator and preserver of the peace. He preserves the peace by carrying out, bodily, offending or offensive visitors—a task for which he is well fitted. One of his ancestors plunged into the thick of Turkish foes, dragged a magnificent Pasha from his horse and carried him across the intervening space in the face of a rain of bullets, one of which struck him. He fell with his burden; but, quickly recovering his footing, held the Pasha safe by the throat with one hand, pulled a pistol with the other, and in a moment argued the distinguished prisoner into taking him upon his shoulders. Carried thus by the Turkish officer, he came riding into camp and presented his trophy to his commander, saying, “This is a fine horse I have brought to you, my captain;” and then fell swooning to the ground.

The building over which his descendant, Gabriel, watches, is as safe as a fortress. There are only two things which this brave fears. One is the steam boiler which provides the building with heat. Steam is an unknown force in his native land, which even the fiery horse has not yet invaded; so, no matter how often Gabriel is instructed, no matter how often he is reassured, when the steam bubbles and hisses he flees for safety; and to this day, valves, screws, wheels, and radiators are terrifying mysteries to him.

Gabriel’s other dread is—women. Not that he dislikes them; on the contrary, you should see his face all aglow from pleasure when a woman looks at him, and yet “trembling takes hold upon him as upon the inhabitants of Philistia,” and he returns to his task as if beaten by an enemy, all discouraged and distraught.

Rightly used and wisely directed, men like Gabriel can become a power among us. Over the various nationalities of Southern Europe now coming here in great numbers, such men can wield an influence more potent, perhaps, for the peace of the world than the Hague Tribunal.

Nine men of nine nationalities grasped hands in that Young Men’s Christian Association lobby at Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and formed a circular chain like unto the chain formed by the ancient Slavic heroes when they swore fealty to old “Duchan.” Thus did we pledge our faith to this new country as we exhorted one another to patience, to justice, and to love.

In leaving Hazleton I was asked by one of its citizens, “What will these foreigners do to America when they get the power?”

My answer was, “They will help you save it, or they will aid you in destroying it. It is very much in your own power whether they shall be ‘leaven’ or ‘dynamite.’”

P. S. Gabriel has left Hazleton. He is now in New York, a valuable member of the Immigrant Department of the Presbyterian church, and they say that this Montenegrin is “leaven” and not “dynamite.”

XVIII

THE JEW AND THE CHRISTIAN

Whatever the cause, be it the old tribal spirit, the ethnic motive or the opposing religious dogmas; whatever has been endured by one or other of the races and for whatever cause, the Jewish race has suffered for all causes, has suffered everywhere, has suffered long, and has not yet seen the end of its sufferings anywhere.

There is no country in which the Jews have been in any large numbers, where they have not endured and are not now enduring persecution. There is no country to-day of which we can say that the causes which led to their persecutions have been removed.

This is as true of Germany as it is of Russia, and as true of the United States as it is of Austro-Hungary.

Every fair minded Jew knows this, and because he knows it he would rather not talk about it or hear it talked about.

Every fair minded Gentile knows it, although perhaps he would not be willing to acknowledge it, even to himself.

Undoubtedly, there must be reasons for an attitude so universal, and before we can apply any remedy, it is necessary to analyze the disease.

First: The Jews have been able to maintain the tribal spirit during periods when it was breaking down all around them. The tenacity necessary for this and the extremely exclusive methods used, blocked every avenue of social approach and aroused the suspicion of their neighbours. Whether these neighbours were Egyptians, Assyrians, Romans, Greeks, Slavs or Teutons, they hated the Jews because they kept themselves separate.

The feeling of superiority which the Jew felt, soon degenerated into contempt for the Gentile and was fostered by the fact that the mass of the people with whom he came in contact was beneath him culturally, using the word in its broadest sense.

The Jew could read and write when his Gentile neighbours did not know the alphabet.

The Gentile bowed down to stocks and stones, to priests and Pope, while the Jew held his head erect and covered, even in the presence of Jehovah.

The people who thus voluntarily excluded themselves from Gentile society were finally kept aloof by law, and when their masters became their equals, and in some respects their superiors, the way of approach was effectually blocked; until now, the aversion of the Gentile for the Jew is fixed, and seems almost ineradicable, much as the Jew may wish to free himself from it.

Second: Religious prejudice is another vital factor leading to this antipathy between Jew and Gentile; although it is not the only one. It manifested itself early in some of the New Testament writings, grew more intense as the church began to overshadow the synagogue, reached its height during the crusades and is still a compelling force among the common people all over the world.

The myth that Jews used the blood of Gentile children for their Passover feast very early gained currency, and this, coupled with the fact that it is the anniversary period of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, has always made Easter time a season of brutal outrages against the Jews.

In reality, the Church has never been quite blameless in these fanatical outbreaks; although it is also true that Church dignitaries at all times have tried to shield the Jewish victims. In most cases, however, they have made no effort to put out the fire until after it was well started, and consequently were too late.

Yet I firmly believe that religious prejudice alone does not account for this feeling, because it exists in irreligious and religious people alike; among those who are quite indifferent to the fact that Jesus lived and who have but a vague and distant interest in His crucifixion.

The late Prof. Nathaniel S. Shaler of Harvard, one of the most broad-minded observers, after an exhaustive study of the subject, comes to these conclusions.[1]

“The greater number of those who have helped me in this inquiry note that there is, on contact with those who are characteristic Jews, a distinct and peculiar state of mind aroused by the intercourse. They are conscious that the feeling is other than that which they experience when they meet those of their own race; but there is, as might be expected, no clear agreement as to the precise nature of the impression.

“So far as I have been able to gather, the state is emotional and instinctive, being in effect the same as that which is always excited by contact of racially different men. To support and explain this primitive emotion, there is a natural effort to find some peculiarities of aspect or demeanour in the neighbour. As to what these idiosyncrasies are, there is a considerable difference of opinion. The greater number of the observers agree that there is a failure on the part of the Jews to respond in like temper to the greeting which they send them; they agree further that there is generally a sense of avidity, a sense of the presence of the seeking, in the Jew, for immediate profit, a desire to win at once some advantage from the situation, such as is not immediately disclosed, however clear it might be to an interlocutor of his own race. Several have stated that the offense came from a feeling that the Jew neighbour was smarter than themselves, having keener wits and a mind more intent on gainful ends. Others state that the Israelite spirit makes a much swifter response to the greeting the stranger gives them than the Aryan, and that the acquaintance is forced to such a degree as to breed dislike.

“This last noted feature in the contact phenomena of Israelites and Aryans appears to me a matter of much importance, especially as it accords with my own experiences and with observations formed long before I began to devise and criticise theories on this subject. As one of the Deans of Harvard University, I have been for ten years in a position where I have to meet from year to year a number of young Hebrews. It has been evident to me from the first that these youths normally respond more quickly to my greeting than those of my own race, and that they divine and act on my state of mind with far greater celerity. They are in fact so quick that they are often where I am, in my slower way, about to be, before I am really there. This would make them at times seem irritating, indeed, presumptious, were it not interesting to me from a racial point of view. To those who are in nowise concerned with such questions, this alacrity is naturally exasperating, especially when the movement is not only one of wits but one of sympathies.

“We all know how disagreeable it is to have the neighbour call on us for some kind of affectionate response, before we are ready to be moved, and how certain is such a summons to dry the springs which else might have yielded abundantly. In our slow, Aryan way, we demand an introductory process on the part of the fellow man who would successfully appeal to our emotions. Our orators know this, and provide ample exordiums for their moving passages; none ventures in the manner of the Hebrew prophet to assume that his hearers will awaken at a cry.

“In observations made for me by young men, students in Harvard College, and thus under my own eyes, so to speak, I have confirmation of the hypothesis that an important part of the difficulty of social contact between these diverse people is due to the difference in the way their minds work when they come together. It is an unhappy fact that the last wave of anti-Semiticism, that which led to the semblance of persecution in Germany and to the abomination of the Dreyfus incident in France, swept across the Atlantic and affected to a considerable extent the social position of the Jews in the United States. They became unwelcome in clubs, and in hotels; their daughters were not admitted to certain private schools; and in various ways the unhappy people were made to feel the ancient burden as in this country it had not come upon them before.

“Of this resurgence of dislike, the Hebrew students had some, though not a serious share. Thirty years ago, when the Jews began to be an appreciable element among the students of this university, there was no evidence whatever of dislike to them. They took their places among their mates with no reference to their race; that indeed seemed, so far as I could discern, to be quite unnoted. Following on the last European epidemic of hatred to the Israelites, there has developed among this body of students an evident dislike for their fellows of that race. The feeling is by no means universal or intense; it is condemned by the greater part of the leaders of opinion among these young men; yet it is sufficient to be noticeable and to awaken keen regret in all those who love the catholic and human motive which so long has inspired that school. One of my helpers in the effort to find the reason for this state of mind summed up his acute observations in the statement that when one spoke to the Jew kindly, ‘the fellow climbed all over you.’”

I agree with nearly all Professor Shaler says; but I am sure that there are two facts which he does not sufficiently emphasize. First: The anti-Semitic feeling was carried to Harvard on the wave which came from France during the Dreyfus trial. This is important; for it proves my point that race antipathies are contagious, and that it does not matter whether the contagion springs from an ethical or unethical source.

The psychological law for this lies in the now fairly well explored field of the “mob” and is a common phenomenon from which many races have to suffer.

The second point made by Professor Shaler is that which refers to the Jewish mind. That quick response which the Jews give, which is so obnoxious to the Gentile, was certainly not disagreeable to Jehovah; for if we trust Holy Writ, He often held converse with them and made the quick Jewish mind the vehicle of His thought.

This quality of the Jewish mind made an Amos hear the roaring of the Lord’s voice in the lonely wilderness; it made an Isaiah hear the call of Jehovah amid the din of the traffic of Jerusalem, and brought to the ears of a Paul the heavenly voice, on the road to Damascus.

This quality of the Jewish mind also betrays his “seeking for immediate profit” and explains the repulsion felt by Professor Shaler’s friends, and felt by American people in academic circles and out of them.

In my judgment the difference between the Jew and other commercial people lies largely in the fact that the Jew cannot so well conceal his desire to make profit. It is written upon his mobile face and conveys itself in the shrug of his shoulders and the upturned palms of his hands.

For that reason the Jew is not successful in those forms of business which demand that their commercial features be hidden. He does not make a good life insurance agent, for here one must assume the rôle of a benefactor; nor does he make a good book agent; for in that work one must seem disinterestedly interested in the entire family or sell the book as a great favour to a few cultured people in the community.

Although the Jew, especially in America, becomes a fairly clever gambler, he is a poor match for the Gentile in the game of poker, and for a long time to come he will have to keep out of games in which the mask one assumes determines their success; even as he will have to continue to do business in scrap iron and not in railroads, in pawn-shops and not in politics.

In my experience with Jewish tradespeople in America, I am convinced that the sense of immediate profit is no less present in the Gentile mind than it is in that of the Jew, and that the Gentile does not always completely conceal it.

There is at least one sphere out of which the Jew keeps his business more carefully than does his Gentile competitor, and that is the sphere of religion.

I have yet to see Jewish hymnals invaded by advertisements, as are those of some Gentile congregations, and although the Jew is a direct descendant of those traffickers whom Jesus drove out of the temple, he has managed to keep his synagogue much more free from commercialism than his critics have their churches.

In the great and solemn moments of life, he is not nearly so practical as the funny papers would have us believe. At the birth of a child, at the marriage feast and at the death-bed, he shows his natural idealism and gives, forgives and forgets.

All this is not quite so true of other commercial peoples, notably the Americans. The following instance may not be typical nor may it prove the rule, and would no doubt be attributed to a Jew, had it not occurred in the college town in which I live and where all the clothing dealers are Gentiles, if not Christians.

One of them was suddenly taken to a distant city to be operated on for appendicitis, and the next day a local paper contained the following advertisement:

“I have gone to Rochester, Minn., to have my appendix cut out. This will be a great cut, but it will not compare with the cut I am making in clothing at my store on the corner of X and Y Streets.”

After the operation, while the man hovered between the unknown places, a second advertisement appeared.

“I am having a hot time holding down a bed in this hospital; but it does not compare with the hot time my competitors will have in meeting my prices in clothing at my store, on the corner of X and Y Streets.”

My readers will agree with me that this “beats the Jews.”

The question of business standards is a very different matter, and that I wish to discuss in another chapter.

I have not set myself the task of playing the apologist for the Jew or for any of the groups of which I treat. I freely acknowledge that there are disagreeable qualities in the Jew which explain in a measure, at least, the prejudice aroused by him.

Foremost, I suppose, is the type which, when it is most pronounced, is apt to be unpleasant and unsympathetic.

The offenses against good taste in dress are marked in many of them; but that lies more in the air with which the clothes are worn than in the clothes themselves. They are usually such as fashion dictates, and not in all cases more extreme than those worn by many Gentiles. The love of display is to some degree common to both Jew and Gentile; but is more noticeable among Jewish women, because they cannot conceal their feelings as well as the Gentile woman can.

The Jewish woman who has “arrived” and knows it, wants the whole world to know it also; while the Gentile woman, especially the Gentile American woman, wears her first imported gown and diamonds as if her swaddling clothes had been made in Paris and her original baby pins encrusted with jewels.

Still more apparent is a certain arrogance, a most annoying characteristic, especially in a people which ought to have the quality of humility in a large degree. The Jew recognizes this in his fellow Jew if not in himself, and no one more deplores it.

He calls it Jewish chuzpa, Jewish “cheek,” and it is, perhaps, one of the greatest causes for the social barriers raised against him. It is found in the Jewish beggar and in the Jewish millionaire.

It is an ancient fault; for long ago, “Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked.” It is a quality which leads many eminent Jews to acts of unwisdom, such as protests against Christmas exercises in the public schools; the resolution passed by a recent conference of Jewish Rabbis, that America is not a Christian country, and other acts equally unadvised.

This, also, has its causes, which are found among many peoples suddenly released from disabilities and given social and political rights.

In order to introduce my main theme, the relation of the Jew to the Christian, I have tried conscientiously to analyze the causes which obstruct the social contact between Jew and Gentile.

There are real antagonisms arising from the Jewish mind and habits, which are historic inheritances and cannot be easily overcome; but which have made it often a hard task for the Christian to be a real Christian towards his Jewish neighbour.

There are other barriers, however, and they exist first, in the historic development of Judaism and second, in the nature and content of historic Christianity.

The Jew is heterogeneous in cultural development. There are Orthodox Jews, wrapped in cabalistic mysticism, who have never moved an inch along the pathway of progress; to whom not only each word written in the law of Moses has divine origin and divine meaning, but to whom each word has as many meanings, as it has letters and dots and dashes. Upon these Jews, all the fetters of legalism are still rivetted, and to them, tradition and revelation are one and the same.

There are less Orthodox Jews who have progressed as far as the philosopher Mendelssohn led them a century ago.

There are nationalistic Jews to whom Zion is beckoning, and who hear the voice of the prophet bidding them “possess the land” and promising that “the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion, with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads” and that then, “sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

There are modern Jews, who have forsaken the law and the ordinances, the Sabbath and the full moons, to whom the reformed synagogue is merely a connecting link with the historic past.

There are rationalistic Jews to whom Karl Marx is the Messiah, and the Socialistic commonwealth, Jerusalem; and there are just Jews, who eat Kosher food because they like it, to whom Mammon is the Messiah and their business the Holy of Holies.

To none of these does Christianity in its historic development appeal very strongly: First, because becoming a Christian means separation from the race; for heterogeneous as the Jews are in cultural development, so homogeneous are they in their racial consciousness. This is something which baffles analysis; it is the strongest example of race cohesion which we have. People who have lost national unity, who have diverged widely in religious beliefs and ceremonial observances, who are as far apart in culture as Greek and Barbarian, are still one as a race, and the man is Anathema who breaks the racial tie. It matters not whether he does it to escape persecution, to gain preferment, or from deep conviction; to his fellow Jews it is always apostasy.

That the broad-minded Jew may have a race consciousness which breaks through the ties of blood, they admit; but he must not become a Christian, even if to him Christianity is the only escape from the narrow tribal idea and from his own outgrown race consciousness, into the broader realm where he can say that he is a member of the human race, and as such is under the obligations of brotherhood to all men.

In the second place, Christianity in its ceremonies, its ecclesiastical practices and its theology, is repellent to all these Jews, from the extreme radical to the extremest Orthodox.

Anything which has even a semblance of idolatry, the slightest suspicion of Polytheism, must be obnoxious to the Jew; for he has been smitten by hail, drought and pestilence, and has been led into captivity because his unregenerate nature delighted in the worship of Baalim, and because he forsook Jehovah who dwelt between the Cherubim and the Seraphim.

Then, too, the methods used to win the Jew to Christianity have aroused his opposition. In the Old World, until comparatively recently, he was forced once a year to attend church and listen to a sermon preached with the avowed object of his conversion. Needless to say, it rarely, if ever, converted him.

The modern method as it manifests itself in Jewish Missions is no less repellent to him; although he is not forced to listen to the missionaries’ sermons. Naturally, the converted Jew, who is an official converter, is usually under suspicion, although that suspicion is not always justified.

With this question of race consciousness and habits, the Jew alone can deal, and he, unfortunately, is not always in the frame of mind required to adjust himself to the feelings of the Gentiles. He will therefore have to bear the consequences which lie in the social realm and may soon reach into the economic.

The task of historic Christianity in its relation to the Jew is not an easy one. It cannot unmake itself or readily adjust itself to his likes and dislikes in theology; nor can it recede from its endeavour to make propaganda for the faith which it believes should be universal.

I have the conviction that when Christ comes fully to His own in the church, He will also come to His own in the synagogue; certainly no sooner, and perhaps not much later.

When He emerges from the tangle of Greek philosophy, Roman legalism and Byzantine traditionalism—when “in deed and in truth” He becomes the Gentile’s Messiah, He will also become the Messiah of the Jew.

As a working basis for the right relation between Jew and Gentile, I wish to quote Rabbi Sonnenschein, formerly of Des Moines, Iowa, in words spoken by him to a colleague in the Christian ministry.

“I want to live so, that when you see me, you will say: ‘There goes Rabbi Sonnenschein, who is a Jew; yet he is a better Christian than I am.’ And I want you to live so, that when I see you, I will say: ‘That man is a Christian; but he is a better Jew than I am.’”

XIX

THE JEW IN THE IMMIGRANT PROBLEM