Editor, Jewish Daily Bulletin:
Permit me to voice my objections to R.D.B.’s yielding attitude in his recent conversation with a Catholic bishop on the persecution of the Jews in Germany, which appeared in your esteemed column of Sunday, Jan. 14. Then, as if to silence us, he tries to justify his own silence.
In the first place, how could he accept the bishop’s illogical comparison? In Mexico, Spain, and France only the Catholic religion was persecuted, and not the Catholics as citizens or as human beings. But in Germany it is not so much the Jewish religion that is persecuted, but the Jews as a race, as individuals, as citizens, and as human beings.
Then too, Mexico, France, and Spain are Catholic countries, and Catholicism as a dominant, majority religion, was overthrown by the natives themselves. But in Germany neither the handful of Jews, nor the Jewish religion ever constituted a dominant majority. The Jews are persecuted simply because they are a helpless minority.
Suppose the Jews themselves suddenly decided to suppres Orthodoxy, say, in Palestine. Would the Orthodox Jews expect a wave of protest from other religious groups in a local, religious issue? Of course, if atrocities and cruelties were involved, protests would be expected on humanitarian grounds. So, with the suppression or limitation of Catholicism by Catholics themselves in Catholic countries, why should Jews interfere? But the Jews of Germany have been classified as aliens, and that certainly is an international matter. Suppose the Nazis are later over-thrown and persecuted, should the Jews also protest? ity we should champion the cause of the Negroes and other oppressed races and groups-although as in dividuals many of us do-yet we are not responsible for their oppression; but the persecution of the Jews, while it is anti-Christian in character and motive, is paraded under the cloak of Christianity. It therefore behooves the Christian world and the bishop especially to remove the false mask, as Dr. Samuel Johnson said, “the flag is the last refuge of a scoundrel”, to expose its paganism and bestiality, by protesting, at least against dragging the name of Christianity in the mire, aside from the humanitarian considerations.
RABBI SAMUEL HOROWITZ. Temple Beth E1, Sunbury, Pa.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
