■ 2 -, 2 
 
 . ...... 
 
 BETH-EL PULPIT 
 
 How Shall the American 
 Jew Face Anti-Semitism 
 
 Sunday, November 7th, 1920 
 
 By 
 
 Rev. Dr. SAMUEL SCHULMAN 
 
 Rabbi of Temple Beth-El 
 5th Ave. at 76th St. 
 
 New York 
 
 ^ .. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2018 with funding from 
 Columbia University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/howshallamericanOOschu 
 
How Shall the American Jew Face Anti-Semitism 
 
 At Temple Beth-El, Fifth Ave. and 76th St., Sunday, Nov. 7th, 
 
 1920. 
 
 By Rabbi Samuel Schulman, D. D. 
 
 Isaiah 54.17: “No weapon that is formed against thee, shall pros¬ 
 per; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment, thou 
 shalt condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and 
 their due reward from Me, saith the Lord.” 
 
 We come together to resume our Sunday Services, in times 
 of great trial for the American Jew. We are filled with sorrow. 
 Our pride as Americans is deeply hurt. The very love of our 
 country and its free institutions, our very joy in American 
 traditions, make us feel all the more humiliated by the recent 
 manifestations of a spirit of anti-Semitism in this land, which 
 till now, had been altogether foreign to it. At last, the slimy 
 serpent from across the seas, has crept into our beloved coun¬ 
 try. It is true, that the large masses of the American people 
 are totally unaflfected by the poison which the Jew-baiters of 
 the world, would infuse into the body politic of the American 
 people, to which we rejoice to belong. It is true, that thus 
 far, the efforts of the anti-Semites have been insidious and 
 subterranean. As far as my observation goes, no great public 
 newspaper has taken note of them, or treated them with any 
 seriousness. We shall not hide from ourselves the danger 
 that this anti-Semitic poison holds for us. But we shall not 
 forget that we are sons and daughters of Israel, which, not for 
 the first time, in our story, rich in suffering and in glory, was 
 made in time of world-crises, the scapegoat for the sins of 
 humanity. And we will not forget that we are not only Jews, 
 but we are American Jews. We are conscious of the great 
 privilege of being part of the American people. And we be¬ 
 lieve in the cleanness, the love of freedom, the passion for jus¬ 
 tice and the loyalty to fair play of the American spirit. We 
 therefore must face the anti-Semitism, which a few misguided 
 men are seeking to import into this land, with an attitude of 
 mind and a courage of heart, worthy of our great holy heritage 
 
 3 
 
as upholders of a religion, for which thousands, in the course 
 of Jewish history, have been ready to lay down their lives. 
 And we must face the insidious foe with a fearlessness worthy 
 of American freemen. 
 
 We shall not become unduly excited. We shall not deal 
 with the hideous and contemptible thing in a spirit, either of 
 timidity, or levity, or pessimism. We are not afraid of it, and 
 we do not consider it a subject for vain and frivolous speech¬ 
 making. It will not do to fight the devil with his own fire. 
 It will not do to indulge in personalities. For we can be as¬ 
 sured that the skins of those who have committed themselves 
 to the anti-Semitic agitation in this country, are very tough. 
 Nor will we allow ourselves to be embittered, to become pes¬ 
 simistic. No such insults, as have been flung at us, can make 
 us for a moment, cease to be hopeful, optimistic, or undermine 
 our joy in the holy heritage of our American patriotism. We 
 feel here thoroughly at home. And we know that, in warding 
 off from ourselves the cowardly blows aimed at us, we are at 
 the same time, protecting the integrity of the American spirit 
 and the humanitarian character of American institutions. The 
 way to face anti-Semitism, it seems to me, is with faith in the 
 God of our fathers, with a dignity which is the only worthy 
 expression of the righteousness of our cause. We must face 
 it also with an immovable confidence in the intelligence and 
 good will of the American people. We must meet the tragic 
 problem, forced upon us, with our own clear and earnest think¬ 
 ing upon the meaning of our heritage, upon the significance of 
 our Judaism, And we, above all, must regard what anti- 
 Semitism can do us, with comparative indifference. Our main 
 energy should be devoted to the moral and spiritual education 
 of the Jewish community. 
 
 The anti-Semitism which confronts us in this land, is at 
 nresent, insignificantly small in compass, and comparatively 
 negligible in importance, though we cannot afford to disregard 
 it. Essentially, it is an importation. It confronts us in the 
 form of twO' publications, which we were astonished to see 
 that publishers of repute, could lend themselves to spread in 
 this land. It was a shock to our knowledge of the fair play 
 of Americans, to observe that one publishing house in Boston, 
 
 4 
 
could reproduce what bears on the face of it, all the insignia 
 of a forged document, with respect to whose authenticity, the 
 publishers themselves, are in doubt. This is a reproduction 
 of the so-called Protocols of the wise men of Zion, a cryptic 
 document, originally published in Russia in 1905, and since 
 then, translated into English in England, and now brought to 
 us across the seas. Any intelligent person who reads these so- 
 called speeches, which are supposed to have been made by a 
 secret Jewish society, sees at a glance, that they are fiction. 
 The Russian author gives no account how they were supposed 
 to come into his hands. They bear all the characteristics of 
 a document manufactured, in order to bolster up the tottering 
 power of Czarism and reaction. Jews are represented in them 
 as conspiring to overthrow Christian civilization. They are 
 presented as the treacherous plotters against all government. 
 They are made hypocritically to stand for liberal ideas, only 
 as a means of undermining all present government and author¬ 
 ity, in order to seize the power for themselves. And all through 
 the documents, the intimation is given that it is the Jews who 
 are undermining the aristocracy, which, it will make Americans 
 laugh, are upheld by the writer, as the protectors of the great 
 masses of the people. Neither in thought nor in language, is 
 there anything really Jewish about this document. It is a 
 plain piece of propaganda, manufactured to instil hatred in 
 the minds of Christian peoples, against the Jews. Another 
 publishing house of this city has published a book entitled, 
 “The Cause of World Unrest.” This, too, bases itself on these 
 same documents. And the argument of this book is that the 
 Jews and the Free Masons are in a great conspiracy to achieve 
 world-mastery. The book itself, hesitates to affirm that these 
 documents are authentic. But there are constant insinuations 
 that they might be taken as true. The publishers say that they 
 “desire to point out, that while the statements presented do 
 reflect upon the purpose and the actions of certain groups of 
 Jews and of certain groups of Free Masons, there has been 
 no intention of bringing accusation against the Jewish race as 
 a whole, or against the Free Masons, as a society.” With all 
 that, we cannot hold the publishers of this volume free from 
 the charge of having lent themselves to a propaganda against 
 the Jew. For while this reservation is made, it is of course, 
 apparent to any intelligent person that the net result of such 
 
 5 
 
insidious charges, can only be to excite the prejudice, the 
 suspicion and the animosity against Americans of Jewish faith. 
 In addition to these two publications, there have been a series 
 of articles published in an obscure provincial paper, whose 
 financial support is derived from the well known automobile 
 manufacturer, Mr. Ford, who, I would say in charity, has been 
 misled into spending his money upon this futile, but hateful 
 project, even as he was led to enter upon the Quixotic enter¬ 
 prise of taking the boys out of the trenches, during a world- 
 war, which was the outburst of forces, that only a man with a 
 great deal of self-assurance, could for one moment, imagine 
 that he could control. I am inclined to believe that the man 
 who gives the money to encourage such publications, is being 
 misled, through pure ignorance, and that he is being taken 
 advantage of. And I hope that he will wake up from the night¬ 
 mare into which he has allowed himself to be betrayed, and 
 will permit his better nature to assert itself. The whole move¬ 
 ment, as illustrated by the publications mentioned, is quite evi¬ 
 dently part of a conspiracy against the Jew. The charges made 
 are laughable. They assume a stupidity on the part of the non- 
 Jewish world, which is simply incredible. But with all that, 
 they are damnable. 
 
 They are laughable, because to those who know history, they 
 are merely a rehash of what has been said before. In times of 
 world-crisis, the Jew, standing out as a conspicuous target for 
 attack, because he is a minority, is selected to be the scapegoat, 
 in order that the attention of the masses be deflected from 
 whatever real evils there may exist in the political and 
 economic conditions of the time. It is an old game, that has 
 been played again and again, this of Jew-baiting, in order to 
 make it appear that the Jew is the enemy of the world, and to 
 concentrate upon him the hatred of the masses. And this 
 coupling of the Jew with free masonry, is also not new. I 
 know nothing about free masonry, because I am not a Mason. 
 And I suppose the Masonic organization will be able to take 
 care of itself. But I do know, that the idea of there being a 
 secret power amongst the Jews, which governs Jewry all over 
 the world, is a pure lie, made of whole cloth. If such lies did 
 not sometimes have tragic consequences for us, we, who know 
 the actual conditions of Jewry, would be inclined to shrug the 
 
 6 
 
shoulder and laugh at them. There is no community in the 
 world, that is so broken up into parties and fragments, that so 
 much lacks efficient organization, as Israel. There is no Church 
 in which there is so little central authority as exists in the 
 Synagogue. There is no spiritual communion in which there 
 is such free and untrammelled individualism as exists in 
 Judaism. 
 
 True it is, that if our Jewish coreligionists suffer in any 
 part of the world, our hearts go out to them in sympathy,_ and 
 we do what we can to bring them relief. True it is, that Jews, 
 as is natural to an oppressed and persecuted minority, will do 
 what they can for the emancipation of their brethren in lands 
 of oppression, and bring influence to bear, to obtain for them 
 the essential human rights, which America guarantees to all, 
 of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, without any 
 prejudice or injustice, because of differences of race or creed. 
 But when the impression is given that Jews all over the world, 
 have a “foreign policy of their own, with a definite end in 
 view,” then it must be said, that such an opinion is either an 
 expression of crass ignorance, or of wilful malicious distortion 
 of the truth. I prefer to say that it is the result of ignorance. 
 And in general, it can be asserted, that much of the prejudice 
 against the Jew is simply the effect of ignorance. The Jews 
 are anything but unified on so-called policies. Nor is there 
 today, in Jewry, any clear and definite conception of the pur¬ 
 pose of the Jew in the world. If there were such a clear 
 conception of what the Jew stands for, the Jewish religion 
 would be much stronger, and Jewish moral and spiritual in¬ 
 fluence would be much profounder and more fruitful. Actual 
 Jewry is broken up into religious parties—Orthodox, Con¬ 
 servative, Reform. There are amongst the Jews, Rationalists 
 and Mystics, observers of the letter and free liberal thinkers. 
 There is the almost unbridgeable chasm between the extreme 
 allegiance to the old, which refuses to take one step in ad¬ 
 vance, and adjust Judaism to the problems of life, and the 
 most radical thought, which would re-interpret entirely, the 
 fundamental principles of our faith. There is the great cleav¬ 
 age which runs through contemporary Jewry, between the Zion¬ 
 ists and the anti-Zionists, between those who dream dreams 
 of Palestine, and those whose aim is to obtain perfect equality 
 
 7 
 
of rights for Jews in any land in which they may dwell, and 
 who preach the ideal of a perfect incorporation of the Jews 
 in the body politic, to which they belong; who maintain the 
 doctrine that Jews are only Jews in religion, but belong whole- 
 souledly to the respective nations, of which they are a part. 
 There exists today, no body or agency, public or secret, which 
 can in any way, be said to represent Jewry as a whole. The 
 gravamen of the accusation against the Jew, is a fabric of 
 falsehood. The burden of proof rests upon those who assert 
 it. We are well aware that the masses can easily be misled 
 by insinuations. But we also feel that truth, in the end, will 
 conquer and destroy, as it has done often in our history, this 
 baseless charge. 
 
 Such a charge assumes the stupidity of the non-Jewish 
 world. The documents to which I have referred, present the 
 non-Jewish world, with its statesmen, with its great leaders in 
 finance, commerce and industry, with its zealous prophets for 
 righteousness, with its liberal thinkers, with its self-sacrificing 
 patriots, with its fighters for human rights—in a word, the 
 whole of the civilization of Christendom, as secretly and un¬ 
 consciously manipulated by the hand of the Jew, through free 
 masonry, and made to play their roles as automata, of which 
 the secret power holds the wires. This charge makes it appear 
 that the insignificantly small number of Jews have the intellect, 
 the ability and the world-wide power to enslave such a world. 
 To state such a charge, is to show its ridiculousness. It is a 
 sinister tribute, indeed, to Jewish genius, which we cannot 
 accept. But if it were only ridiculous, we would not discuss 
 it. It is venomous with Jew-hatred. Therefore, we must 
 warn our fellow-citizens against the untruthful, unjust, cruel 
 and inhuman accusation, which is being made against Jews. 
 The Jewish genius has, indeed, given much to the world. It 
 can fairly be stated that Western civilization is inspired by 
 certain fundamental ideals which Hebrew Prophets, and he 
 whom Christendom regards as more than prophet, gave to the 
 world. But much as the Jew gave, he has also received much 
 from the world. And it is nothing less than a calumny to 
 accuse him of seeking to overthrow a civilization, whose soul 
 is part of his own soul. And it is nothing less than a fanatical 
 delusion and absurdity to say that the “worm Jacob’' has the 
 
 8 
 
power to gnaw at and destroy that civilization. The damnable 
 ness of these charges consists in their subtle appeal to the 
 latent prejudice which exists against the Jew, and which they 
 seek to inflame into active animosity. 
 
 We must face this thing with a strong faith. The destiny 
 of the Jew has been thus far, to witness to God in suffering. 
 But no weapon formed against him could prosper, so as to 
 destroy him, and no tongue that rose against him in judgment, 
 failed of being condemned. For the suffering of the Jew means 
 his martyred service on behalf of the Lord. Our faith is 
 strong and indestructible, because it is a truth, not merely 
 for the Jew, but for all men. Judaism is a message that binds 
 men together in unity. There is utterly foreign to it, any 
 belief or practice that makes for the separation of men in sus¬ 
 picion and hatred. The vital breath of the Jew is his proclama¬ 
 tion of the Unity of God. One God implies one humanity. 
 The religion of Israel has been the first to proclaim the brother¬ 
 hood of mankind. It has disparaged any claim of racial 
 aristocracy, by its enunciation of the truth that man is created 
 in the image of God. Its ethics are universally human. Their 
 central virtues are justice, as an aspiration, an ideal, in the 
 light of which civilization is to advance, and love of the fellow- 
 man, which is to be the driving force in men, impelling them 
 to relieve suffering, to remove unrighteousness, and to moralize 
 and sanctify human existence. These virtues were applied to 
 all men, irrespective of race or creed. In every commandment 
 in our Torah, which inculcates in us sympathy with, and com¬ 
 mands service to the poor, the needy, the suffering and the 
 dependent there is always included the stranger, the man of 
 alien race. The love of neighbor includes always the love of 
 the stranger. The vision of our Prophets was not centered 
 in the glorification of Israel. It embraced all peoples, and 
 foresaw the time when they would be united as one family, 
 to do the will of their Father in heaven. And when they 
 would pilgrim to the mountain of the Lord, and learning 
 of Flis ways of righteousness, they would win peace. The 
 Jewish religion is therefore, a religion of universal application. 
 It is hospitable to men and women of all races. It forces none 
 to join it. It welcomes all. Our sages have taught us to 
 respect and honor men of any creed or race, insofar as they 
 
 9 
 
walk by the light of their conscience, and have taught that the 
 righteous of all peoples will inherit the everlasting life. Israel, 
 bearing witness to these truths, has with infinite patience, 
 waited for them to spread over the world. And while waiting, 
 it has paid the price of all those who wish to walk alone, and 
 as a minority, in accordance with what they regard as truth 
 and as the ideal. Not all the powers of a world in arms 
 against the Jew, seeking in every age to destroy him, prevailed 
 against him. For Israel does not live by its own strength, 
 but by the power of the spirit, by the idea which makes its 
 soul, by the Divine purpose, which history reveals. 
 
 Relying on our faith, we meet these attacks with the dig¬ 
 nity, which is the only worthy expression of the righteousness 
 of our cause. During the last century, the lot of the Jew was 
 materially improved in the Western World, because of the 
 enlightenment and liberalism and democracy which spread 
 amongst men. Yet the spirit of reaction always threatened 
 to undo what was achieved for the Jew. And in benighted 
 lands, even the Twentieth Century, found the Jew oppressed, 
 robbed of his human rights, and persecuted as in the darkest 
 years of the Middle Ages. But the spirit of truth, of justice, 
 and of democracy cannot be resisted. Its triumphant march is 
 as sure as is the victory of the righteousness which, because a 
 righteous God is ruling the world, is at the heart of things. 
 It was therefore, natural that Jews, both because of the ideals 
 of justice and humanity which make up their religion and be¬ 
 cause of their being a minority that suffered from the oppres¬ 
 sions of caste and privilege, found themselves in the ranks of 
 liberalism in the last century. We have no apology to make for 
 the champions of liberty and progress, in whose front ranks 
 many a Jew fought for human rights. And it is equally natural 
 that all the forces of darkness, all the selfish interests in Europe, 
 which would fain restore mediaevalism in Church and State, 
 should with sinister cunning, seeking to destroy all liberal 
 thought, single out the Jew as the protagonist of liberty and 
 progress, and playing upon racial prejudice, deceive the people, 
 and while making the Jew the victim, really aim at re-enslav¬ 
 ing the masses. The method is shrewd, but it is not so subtle 
 as not to be easily understood. We are convinced that the 
 true salvation for the Jew in the Western World, as anywhere 
 
 10 
 
else, is bound up with the salvation of all men. Perfect free¬ 
 dom and justice for the Jew, can only come with the estab¬ 
 lishment of perfect freedom and justice for all men. 
 
 We must, however, hurl back with horror the suggestion 
 that there is any natural union or relationship between what is 
 called Bolshevism, with its mad excesses, in Russia to-day, 
 and Judaism. This pulpit did not hesitate when Bolshevism 
 first arose to speak in clear and uncompromising language its 
 opinion of this movement. There is as much compatibility 
 between Bolshevism and Judaism as there is between evil and 
 good. Judaism is the very contradiction of everything that 
 goes to make up Bolshevism. For Bolshevism violates every 
 commandment of the Decalogue. It is an irreligious, aetheistic 
 movement. It does not believe in God. It regards all religion 
 as a superstition. It seeks to rob men of their belief in a 
 God, Who loves men and redeems them. It does not recog¬ 
 nize true freedom of the individual, and therefore treats the 
 individual’s rights with contempt. It is opposed to the respect 
 for the institution of property, which is the only safeguard of 
 a free personality. It bears false witness against the neighbor 
 because it refuses, judging from all reports, to permit freedom 
 of thought and the honest expression of opinion. It is com¬ 
 mitted to the establishment, by brute force, of the rule of one 
 element of the people, and the subjugation of the large ma¬ 
 jority that dififers with it. Nothing is more dastardly than 
 to make Jews responsible for Bolshevism because, forsooth, 
 there may be some men, who having had Jewish mothers and 
 bearing Jewish names are conspicuously active in the move¬ 
 ment. These men are traitors to everything Jewish. They 
 have trampled under foot every Jewish sanctity. There is as 
 much in common between a real Jew and a Bolshevik, as 
 between an enlightened, cultured Christian and a Hottentot. 
 I know I am putting this in very strong language. But it is 
 time that some one made this as clear and as strong as pos¬ 
 sible. We have at least the satisfaction of not having waited 
 for anti-Semitism to cross the seas, before declaring the danger 
 which exists for the Jew in the possibility of anti-Semitism 
 singling out a Trotzky and his allies, as the representatives 
 of the Jewish spirit. 
 
 11 
 
We have no apology to make for the Jew’s love of knowl¬ 
 edge, of freedom, for his sympathies with the masses of the 
 people, for his advocacy of democratic self-government. But 
 we reject as a slander the intimation that the madness of the 
 Bolshevists is the machination of a secret Jewish conspiracy. 
 The masses of the Jews in Russia are simple, law-abiding, 
 faithful observers of their religion, and are only too glad, in 
 accordance with the teachings of Judaism in all ages, to prove 
 their loyalty to the fatherland. All they ask is for the rights 
 of a free citizenship, which will enable them to show their 
 patriotism as Jews have shown it in all Western lands. And 
 when the madness of Bolshevism will be swept away, and a 
 free Russia will arise, then the Jews will be found to be loyal 
 upholders of their newly constituted nationality and govern¬ 
 ment. The record of the Jew in Western lands is clear. The 
 conflagration of the world-war has gloriously illumined it. On 
 every battlefield, Jews laid down their lives for their country. 
 In our own land, the Jews gave a splendid account of them¬ 
 selves. They gave more than their percentage of the popula¬ 
 tion to the service. They had their share of positions of 
 leadership. They got their share of honors and distinctions 
 for heroism. Any one who insinuates that the Jew cannot be 
 trusted for his patriotism is deliberately slandering our people. 
 
 We meet this thing with confidence in the intelligence and 
 good-will of the American people. All we need is to warn 
 America against the treason to its spirit, which misguided men 
 are undertaking to foster. We can rest assured in the common 
 sense and fair play of Americans. But we do think that the 
 leaders of public opinion in Qiristendom ought to denounce 
 the insidious attacks upon us. We believe that it is the duty 
 of the teachers of Christianity in this country, with many of 
 whom we work shoulder to shoulder, on behalf of every good 
 civic cause, to speak a clear word of protest against this propa¬ 
 ganda against the Jew. We do not doubt that when their 
 attention is called to it, then in a spirit of righteousness and 
 chivalry, they will tread upon the serpent, which has dared to 
 raise its head and hiss the hatred of the European anti-Semite 
 into the land, we, as Jews and Christians, love as the hope of 
 mankind. We have the right to ask this of those who are 
 
 12 
 
responsible for the moral education of the nation. And we 
 do not doubt that they will rise to the opportunity. 
 
 We ourselves are called upon to remove the evil from our 
 midst. We ourselves must make impossible any misunder¬ 
 standing which is only too readily grasped at by the anti- 
 Semite. We have been weltering in a chaos of confused ideas. 
 Far from being organized, we are the most completely unor¬ 
 ganized religious community. Far from being strong in uni¬ 
 on, we are weak through our dissensions. And our weakness 
 comes from the weakness of Jewish faith. We are not as 
 powerful and influential as we might be, despite what our 
 enemies say, because of the loss of loyalty to the Jewish re¬ 
 ligion, which pervades our ranks. We must think clearly and 
 become conscious of that in Which alone consists our only 
 reason for existence, as a distinct and diflferentiated body in 
 the world. We must make clear to ourselves wherein the 
 Jewish consciousness consists. We must refuse to recognize 
 any one as Jew, who is not in some way affiliated with our 
 religion. We must not allow any one for a moment to be 
 our spokesman who, either in his denial of Judaism as a 
 religion, spurns the heritage of the fathers, or in his cham¬ 
 pionship of political and social doctrines, radically opposed to 
 all Jewish teachings, misrepresents us. We must re-emphasize 
 the principles of American Judaism, which have been clearly 
 enough expounded, and which it is interesting to observe, the 
 anti-Semitic literature does not like to quote. We must tell 
 the world that we regard Judaism as a religion only, and 
 that we claim only one kind of nationality, and that is our 
 American nationality. We must make this American Judaism 
 known. We spend money on many things, but we do not spend 
 enough to enlighten the world with respect to our beliefs, to 
 the principles by which we actually live, as Americans and 
 Jews. And as all the signs point to the leadership in the 
 world, of American Israel, we must hold up our ideals to the 
 Jewry of the world so that Jews all over the world consider 
 themselves only a religious community and refuse to be re¬ 
 garded as an alien, national minority group. We should, in 
 season and out of season, minimise race and magnify our 
 religion. As a matter of fact, there is no such thing as a pure 
 Jewish race. There is an historic Jewish community. There 
 
 13 
 
is Israel, with an unbroken tradition of two thousand years 
 since the destruction of the political nationality of the Jews 
 who lived in Palestine. This historic Israel is a religious com¬ 
 munity and nothing else. To it there were admitted in the 
 past men and women of non-Jewish blood. What is called the 
 Jewish race to-day is very mixed. The physiognomies of 
 Jews coming from different parts of the world testify to the 
 fact that there has been a strong infiltration of non-Jewish 
 blood. It is absolutely necessary for us to cease talking of 
 the Jewish race, and to emphasize the Jewish spiritual com¬ 
 munion. Israel has survived, not because of its racial power, 
 but because of the ideas which kept it alive. And we should 
 indeed unite and organize upon the basis, not of race, but of 
 religion. So long as we tolerate the idea, in whatever atten¬ 
 uated a form, of a racial basis of organization we expose our¬ 
 selves to the greatest misunderstandings. We provide mate¬ 
 rial which, in a spirit of injustice and cruel malice, the anti- 
 Semite pounces upon. We make ourselves responsible for 
 those who we know are outcasts from Jewish society, because 
 while they may claim to have so-called Jewish blood in their 
 veins, belie by their lives, any right of claiming the glorious 
 name of Jew. For, as our sages say, “a Jew is one who pro¬ 
 claims and maintains the unity of God in the presence of the 
 world.” There can be and there ought to be only one kind of 
 Jewish brotherhood and that is brotherhood which is the 
 “heritage of the servants of the Lord.” 
 
 Lastly we should not worry too much about what the anti- 
 Semites may do to us. What should fill us with great 
 anxiety, is the crying indifference to Judaism as a religion, 
 which has seized large numbers of our people. What should 
 fill us with great concern is the injury that we ourselves are 
 doing to our sacred heritage. What we need is, not so much 
 a campaign against anti-Semitism. Lies will die of themselves. 
 The healthy organism of the American people will throw off 
 these germs which, like the anarchy which threatens to sub¬ 
 vert American institutions by force, has been imported from 
 abroad. The only way to render anti-Semitism futile, is by 
 a revival of Jewish faith. What we need is a great campaign 
 of religious education in this, the greatest Jewish community 
 of the world. We must set our spiritual house in order. We 
 
 14 
 
need to win back the thousands who have drifted away from 
 the heritage of their fathers, and who, many of them cut off 
 from the root of their religion, have ceased to produce its 
 noble fruitage in character, and its fine outflowering in the 
 graces of the spirit. If anti-Semitism, a scourge which again 
 and again in the course of our history has made us suffer, 
 will prove a challenge to our Jewish conscience, it will be no 
 unmixed evil. To thy tents, O Israel, should be our battlecry. 
 Back to the sanctuary which has been neglected by the great 
 and the little, the classes and the masses, the leaders and the 
 led—is the call of the crisis for us. Our only hope is in our 
 loyalty to the everlasting God Whom, if we serve, we deserve 
 to live, and Whom, if we forget, we deserve to perish as a 
 people of Israel. If we serve the God of our fathers with 
 renewed faith, with the dignity of self-reliance, with the con¬ 
 fidence in the fairness and good-will of our fellow citizens, 
 with a whole-souled self-consecration, then we know that 
 no weapon that is formed against us shall prosper. And 
 every tongue that shall rise against us in judgment, shall be 
 condemned. For our reward is certain. It is “from Me, saith 
 the Lord.” 
 
 15