Moritz Goldstein - German-Jewish Parnassus (1912)

Under this heading, an educated Jew sends us explanations that, because of their very unusual frankness, should cause a sensation among Jews and non-Jews alike. It goes without saying that we do not express them as our own opinions and that this lighting from one side must be followed by the lighting from another. But Goldstein's essay seems unusually suitable as a starting point for a discussion.
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Talking about certain things prohibits shame. A higher interest, however, can force us to suppress this feeling and speak openly about something if ruthless exposure is the only way to eliminate an evil. Damage to the general public can only be remedied by and in the general public, and this requires that they be open to public discussion, may come and good taste also against such treatment of delicate things. And no matter how loudly the tender souls are indignant and scream, it will always be a good thing to have spoken about what has so far been imperative to remain silent about.
"The Jew in German literature" is one of the most delicate things that must not be put in the mouth, one does not want to compromise hopelessly. Every now and then, a Jewish or Christian literary professor chose this or a similar subject in order to identify himself as a true European through the elegant matter-of-factness and cool calmness with which he steered the boat of his lecture, without bumping to the right or left, through the difficult waters, we have been repeatedly calculated how often the figure of Esther has been conjured up to dramatic life; How many Jews are among their poets to be asked about? If a Christian grabs the problem and ruthlessly expresses his opinion, like Richard Wagner with "Judaism in Music", he is branded as an "anti-Semite", and polite people ignore his writing. At least in dealing with Jews. Which well-mannered German wanted to miss the praise that he was tolerant? But we Jews finally require honesty, and hopefully the time is not far when a Jew will challenge the villain who dares to be "tolerant" against him. For the time being we are not there yet. Wagner's hatred of Jews is not only a thorn in the side of the Jews, but also well-meaning Christians a pudendum that they only talk about in secret. Officially, on the other hand, we are gladly certified that it was not the German princes or the German people, but Jewish money that made Bayreuth possible, and it is good for us in our hearts to get confirmation from that side that the great man misjudged us, [his work], however, must be separated from its anti-Semitism. So one travels to the festival and
conducts and reviews, and nobody thinks that there will soon be something more shameful for us Jews than to have supported the man who showed us the most unambiguous thing on his side. It may be lucky that Wagner's life's work could be accomplished; it is not an honor for us.
These are the self-evident prerequisites for feeling, which should be given if you wanted to agree on an embarrassing subject like the following. Only among national Jews and Zionists can one presuppose the tact and understanding that are necessary for this. But what is the use of discussing problems in their party papers, the meaning of which they are all clear? These questions must be brought out of the ranks of the party so that those who do not want to hear are forced to listen and that at least so much is understood and publicly admitted that something is problematic here. Because to grasp the problem, to grasp it, is above all the task; we are still a long way from solving it.
I admit that we prefer not to talk about it; I am also against the feeling of shame to say in front of the world what I should only say to Jews. I also wish that we could wash our dirty laundry in-house. But we don't have our own house. There is no Jewish public; It is not possible in Germany, in Western Europe at all, to speak to the totality of the Jews as Jews, as much as we have to let them talk about us. Imagine what this means: that it is almost impossible to gain influence over the Jews - while all progress everywhere and always depends on an individual exerting influence on his peers. But this deficiency is not only there, most of them have not even become aware of it. If you still want to speak to all of the Jews, you have to do it in full publicity without being able to exclude those who are not concerned. However, Jewish questions are almost all European questions at the same time, and so it will ultimately not [be] unreasonable if the non-Jewish general public is witness to the following discussions.
A hundred and a few years ago, the walls that had locked us Jews into a spiritual ghetto fell, torn down by Christians, thank you, eternal advocates of human rights. Those who had previously been thrown into the corner, suddenly brought to light and the open table rushed, starved and greedy for knowledge and education, onto the food offered. It was capable, gifted and enthusiastic pupils who were apprenticed to old Europe. They understood quickly; it didn't take long for them to know everything that the master could teach them, and soon it was no longer enough for them to learn. They wanted to join the ranks of the teachers themselves, they wanted to research and dig with the others, they also wanted to lend a hand to the great work of mankind, they also wanted to help promote culture. And they succeeded. Wherever they were allowed to access, they were up to the task. Yes, due to some mysterious qualities, they showed themselves to be the superior ones: despite their small number, despite all the difficulties they had to overcome on their way, they outstripped their teachers in a way: on all posts, from who are not kept away from them by force suddenly become Jews; the tasks of the Germans made the Jews their own task; it seems more and more as if German cultural life should pass into Jewish hands. But that was not what the Christians expected and did not want when they granted pariahs a share in European culture. They started to fight back, they started calling us foreign again, they started to see us in the temple of their culture as a danger. And so we now face the problem: We Jews manage the intellectual property of a people that denies us the right and the ability to do so.
This outrageous fact, which has to upset the blood of Jews as well as non-Jews, inevitably calls for measures to be taken. This conflict needs to be resolved in some way. What are we doing in this impossible situation, which one has got into from both sides without guilt or intention? What do the Jews do first of all? - Something very simple: they deny the fact.
But that must be made impossible for them at first; otherwise the whole discussion makes no sense. So let's look at the situation in peace.
Nobody seriously doubts the power that the Jews have in the press. The criticism in particular is, at least in the capital cities and their most influential newspapers, about to become a Jewish monopoly. The prevalence of the Jewish element in the theater is just as well known: almost all of Berlin's theater directors are Jews, a large number, perhaps most of the actors, of the same kind, and that theater and concert life in Germany would be virtually impossible without a Jewish audience that boasted or complained. A completely new phenomenon is that German literary studies also seems to be passing into Jewish hands, and it is, depending on the point of view, funny or tragic, to overlook the members of the "Germanic" seminars of our universities. (I myself heard about it.) How many Jews there are at last among the "German poets", so many a guardian of German art knows about his anger.
But whoever does not know and does not want to know is the majority of the Jews themselves. They don't notice the role we play in German cultural life and they watch anxiously that the others don't notice either. If someone reveals the damage, they claim loudly and tirelessly that "you" shouldn't ask, that [it] make[s] no difference which God the critic confesses if he judges correctly, they demand that you don't [see] Judaism in the world music, in poetry, in drama, in the visual arts, but only good and bad, judge art or non-art. And don't you have a right to demand this? Certainly! Because they want nothing more than what their non-Jewish fellow citizens want, the thing, whether it is criticism or theater or art or science.
The assertion of our opponents is that the Jews are attracted to us not by the thing but by the appearance of the thing. To be German means to do something for its own sake, says Richard Wagner, in which, long before Chamberlain, he claims the characteristic of every genuine striving for his compatriots alone. Only we Jews know how much Germanism there is among us. We only know how passionately we fight aesthetics - art freak[s], literary scum and premier hyenas, the parasites on the honest work of others - and how much we wish we could keep this Jewishness (to which some Germans belong) at bay. If, as you like, we are still the strangers, the foreigners, who even speak the German language only “as a foreigner”, only “like a learned, not as an innate language”, we certainly have one thing in common with you: work on culture, work for humanity. We are aware of the fact that we are serving this task with earnestness and zeal, and we are not afraid to issue this testimony to ourselves, since it constantly sounds around us from Jewish influence, but always as something bad and harmful. I say that the Jews have a right to demand that only their achievements be asked for and that they are finally joyfully recognized as fighters, that in them, if not brothers and blood relatives, comrades are honored and loved: from a just Germany, they should expect this from a just Europe. But Europe is not just, but with all "civilization", as soon as it concerns Jews, from a truly barbaric injustice. If you don't console yourself with the excuse that these are rude [Hetz und Radau – hateful/hate speech and rowdy ???] anti-Semites: nobody would care about them, and wherever they appeared, they used us more than they harmed us. No, they are the best spirits, clever, truth-loving men who, however, as soon as there is talk of the Jews, fall into a blind hatred bordering on rabies, and to prove the fundamental inferiority, badness, harmfulness of the Jews, all the facts turn it upside down. Chamberlain's fateful book, "Foundations of the Nineteenth Century", whose "evidence" of the superiority of the Germanic "race" is based on a flat hand-trick, namely that it makes the
differences between then and now, the progress of a development of more than 3000 years simply reinterprets a difference between here and there, between Teutons on the one hand and the other peoples, especially the Jews, on the other - a book that, among other things, almost denies today's Jewish scholars the ability to grasp the inadequacy of Kant's human cognitive capacity. The book can of course be refuted on every page; but irrefutable is the hatred that drives a knowledgeable, witty, and truth-loving man to tell the untruth. Truthful? It is said to bury one's head in the sand when the Jews always dismiss their enemies as malicious slanderers. No, Chamberlain believes what he says, which is exactly why his distortions shake me. And thousands believe it with him, since the book is going through editions after editions, and I would like to know how many “Germans”, whose self-confidence is tickled so pleasantly by the theory presented, retain not enough criticism to take part in the countless injustices and forgeries. With Schopenhauer, who is also not dismissed with the word "anti-Semite", but who was tasked with searching and preaching the truth, we read: 'Even the chosen people of God do not let us forget which, after having been in Egypt, on Jehovah’s express special command that had stolen the borrowed gold and silver vessels from his old, trusting friends, now that the murderer Moses at the head, his murder and raid on the promised land, to express it, as the 'land of promise', on the same Jehovah repeatedly repeated orders to know no pity, with the relentless murder and extermination of all residents, even women and children (Joshua, chapters 10 and 11), to snatch them from the rightful owners - because they were not circumcised and that Jehovah did not know what was reason enough to justify all the abominations against them; how, for the same reason, the infamous villainy of the patriarch Jacob and his elect against Hemor, the king of Salem and his people is gloriously told to us (Gen. 34) because the people were unbelievers." And in footnotes: "There (at Tacitus and Justinus) we see that the pharaoh no longer wanted to tolerate the creeping-in, unfathomable, dirty diseases (scabies) which threatened infection, in pure Egypt, that is, on ships brought and dropped on the Arabian coast. It is true that a detachment of Egyptians was forwarded to them, but not to bring back the pretentious guys that were exported, but to take away from them what they had stolen, because they had stolen golden vessels from the temples: who would? Borrow rabble a bit!" And: "Incidentally, the impression that the study of the Septuagint has left with me is a warm love and deep adoration of the μεγας βασιλευς Ναβουχωδονοσορ, even if he is a little too gentle with a people who are a god who gave or promised him the lands of his neighbors, who then owned them through robbery and murders and then built a temple for the god in them. May every people who keep a god who makes the neighboring countries "lands of promise" find his Nebuchadnezzar and his Antiochus Epiphanes in time, and no further trouble will be done with him!" Not what the philosopher says in his hatred but what passion a fanatic aversion must rage in this man in order to make him forget all human and male dignity, that is what we have to turn our eyes to. And without guarantors: for eight hundred years, namely since the Crusades, the Jews have been persecuted, slaughtered, mocked and abused, why? Because they were so stubborn to remain Jews, since there was Christianity in the world. And today, when Christianity has lost its reputation, what are we experiencing? All of a sudden, the praised Christianity is bashful Judaism, the Christianization of Europe is a rejuvenation that has spoiled the Germanic people's glorious religion, and in sum: all the evils that the Church has brought to mankind, including intolerance, belief in authority, dogmatism, ascetics and Darkness, the Jews are in debt [sic !!!].
This is just an overly rapid flowering of European justice and logic. All protests by level-headed Christians against this prove nothing against the hundreds of thousands who are of this opinion - want to be of this opinion.
No, Europe is not fair, and so the good Jews are right, who - insisting on their accomplishments and goodwill - demand nothing but justice. [sic !!!] Because now they should speak and answer this question: since this is how you are met by your fellow human beings, how do you meet them? If you don't notice any of this hatred, this insurmountable aversion around you, you are in the mood. If you notice it and you just don't know anything, you're worse. Worst of all, if you console yourself with the fact that the aversion applies to those who mumble there, show off their precious things, make themselves wide and loud and, in short: cannot do away with the Eastern-All-Too-Eastern. You are wrong, my friend, you are meant yourself. You, in spite of your European demeanor and appearance, are not forgiven the Jews.
Let us not fool ourselves: we Jews, among us, may have the impression that we speak as Germans to Germans - we have the impression. But at least we may feel completely German, the others feel completely German. We may now be called Max Reinhardt and give the stage an unprecedented upswing, or, as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, set a new poetic style instead of the used Schiller's pictorial language, or as Max Liebermann lead modern painting: we may call it German, the others call it Jewish, they hear the "Asian", they miss the "Germanic mind", and if they have to recognize the performance - with reservations - they wish we did less. The jubilation with which a Schmidtbonn, Eulenberg, Schönherr and other suspects are greeted is simply different from that which ours hear, it sounds a tone that humiliates the Jews if their ears are only fine enough, hear him out; compared to the voices welcoming Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, it is the same difference as the cheering cheers of the spectators at a race, depending on whether the crowd's favorite or an unexpected, unwelcome approaches victory; Here the applause sounds like wrung out, there it jumps out of itself, shouting: we want you, you belong to us and we belong to you! If you see through the situation, it is a tragicomic sight to see how certain liberal daily newspapers behave as if they were speaking to the German people. The "German people" do not even think of reading the "Berliner Tageblatt", the Prussian junker, the soldiers, the civil servant, the countryman, the voice does not reach a feuilletonist Jew. What the gentlemen were so terrified of has almost become reality: Jewish literature in Germany, written by Jews for Jews. You just have to have eyes in your head and the courage and honesty to use them.
That is the situation. I'm not saying whether it is right or wrong, whether we deserve it. I am not saying to whom it is honor and to whom disgrace is. I'm just saying: that's the problem. It is important to accept this. What do we do now? is the serious question. Is there an answer?
Let us consider the possibilities!
We could first try to enlighten, defend our right to German soil, to German culture, refute errors, ward off suspicions and defamations. This tactic has so far been followed by the few who were concerned about clarifying the situation. It turned out to be completely wrong, as could not be otherwise. Because it is not so that people do not like us because they think we are inferior, etc., but the other way round: they slander, suspect, abuse, misjudge us because they cannot stand us. We can easily lead our opponents to absurdity and show them that their hostility is unfounded. What does it prove? That their hatred is real. If all slander has been refuted, all distortions have been corrected, and all wrong judgments about us have been improved, then the aversion itself remains as irrefutable. If you don't see that, you can't be helped. [sic !!!]
Furthermore, we could not care what others say about our literary, art and cultural achievements, and if they think that their German-ness through our "brokers" and "jobbers", through our "parvenus" and their "jargon" spoiled, leave it up to them to defend themselves against it or to resign themselves otherwise. That is what the majority of productive or otherwise public Jews do. But that's where we other Jews will start to bother them. You can't get over this problem, you have to bump into this thing, this relationship is unbearable for every upright man - and who can endure it has an indecently thick fur or an elastic backbone. The gentlemen's critics from the Jewish family who review Hauptmann's Christ novel without hinting in a word - what do I say? - without feeling the slightest emotion that they do not belong to the audience for which the poet wrote; the gentlemen of literary history who work without ever thinking about Luther and the Reformation; the gentlemen poets, who have themselves photographed and published as "German poets" under the Christmas tree, we will frighten them out of their naivety and objectivity, we will shout in their ears the question they are about, we all will force them to profess to be Jews or to be baptized.
You always pretend to be above such scruples. In truth, however, things are very different. To come up as a German Jew, to assert yourself as a second-rate person in this ambiguous situation, with an equality that is only on paper, you must not be too sensitive or you break up.
But do you have to get up? The very best of us have probably split in this impossible life; the strongest, the very straight, have probably not done their best. Perhaps those who deny us the really creative are not entirely wrong, perhaps the very great achievement is missing - not because the great men are missing, but because the living conditions are missing, under which only the brilliant personality, the productive character is possible. If that is true, then those who do not compromise nature, who cannot be bent, can only be broken, had to perish because they could not change the time. But time has changed in the meantime, and soon the Jew, who can thrive in the half-ness and confusion of previous conditions, will compromise morally. Why are there so many Jewish journalists? A journalist is a mirror: catching and throwing back the pictures of the day is his essence. Is it Jewish to just be a mirror instead of creating yourself? You say so, many believe it. But I say: no! But whoever was nothing but a mirror, cuddly, agile, who knew how to put up with it, how to make do with it, came up in our Jewish half-way situation. That's how you had to be to prevail in an environment of contempt. Whoever was like that succeeded. But whoever was more, who aspired to the totality of the personality, had to break with the impossibility of being whole. A creator needs the resonance of the masses; rather, it makes him create that the voices of the masses, the voices of time all sound in his soul. What a discord in the soul of a German Jew!
However, the “liberal” Jew of today objects: “What do you want? I have left the ghetto internally and externally and I am fully in possession of Western European culture. No one could notice from my writings that my ancestor was accompanied by caftans and curls.” Noble friend! The task of converting the Jews to Europeans was the task 150 years ago. In the meantime, it has become a matter of course that one should not be noticed in a society of decently dressed, reasonably educated and well-educated people; it is the prerequisite, we are only talking about such here. But those who still demand nothing more from themselves today than to seize Europeans are from the day before yesterday. It is still in the same place where Moses Mendelssohn once stood. Lessing's friend is honored to have wanted and enforced this. Cultural equality with the others had to be achieved, of course, it was on our way.
But it is only half the way, it turns out to be half-ness itself and in any case it is something that we Jews have to overcome anyway.
So if there is no hope of changing our position within German culture through enlightenment, etc., on the other hand, it is impossible for the best of us, in particular, to let the matter rest and harmlessly cheerfully tune their little song in the German poet forest: so we have to because, finally, from the state of suffering and mere defense to the action and attack. At last we will get tired of being accused of "lack of creative power", "cool intellectual poetry", "frivolity", "joke". If we are not supposed to understand the “German mind”, we will finally see that our Jewish mind is understood much less. And finally we will forgo the honor of being a German poet and making German culture. Because, God knows! the German Parnassus should not lure a Jew! The example of Heinrich Heine teaches him what he has to do up there. Regardless of how one thinks of him as a person and artist, the Romanzero is once an incomparable achievement in German literature, and Heine's political and contemporary poems are unmatched in visual power, wit, and striking effect by any of the other political poets. Instead, in order to judge the poet, one clings to the youth work of the Book of Songs as if it were the only fruit of his poetry. Do we want to cover up his weaknesses, especially his moral ones? In the least not; but we Jews have ten times more reason to look our big ones in the soul and on the fingers. But we want to measure with the same mass. Didn't the Germans have their makers like Kotzebue and Raupach? Not her Wieland, who could be more slippery in his writings than anyone else and who was also a mere poet, almost only clever and sleek, without a trace of genuine originality? Didn't many romantics change their religion, didn't Friedrich Schlegel humble himself to Metternich's creature, didn't Herwegh become a Frenchman and a German eater? If you blame them, it happens with the respect that their performance demands. But what sounds after Heine, who - rightly and wrongly - is accused of roughly the same things, sounds very different; it is a roar of immeasurable slander, disfigurement, mockery, the raging of the same people who broke into the Jewish quarters in the Middle Ages to murder, burn and, above all, rob in the name of Jesus Christ. The hatred that rages here is for each of us, the glory or power or money above the others. One shouldn't shrug contemptuously at Adolf Bartels; the Weimar professor would be easily dismissed, but not the thousands whose opinion he expressed. Heinrich Heine, still the only Jewish poet of European importance, is a symptom. Anyone who knows how to interpret it will lose the desire to deal with the oh! to measure so much happier German poets; he will tie up his bundle and go his own way.
Go his way - but which is our way? I don't know how others feel about it - I, truly, if I followed my feelings, I would give way; I would no longer be able to endure suffering badly, I would take whatever skills I have to where I would like to use them - I only knew where that would be. We don't know a way out. We may know him, but we mustn't go.
There is no German or Chinese or Jewish truth and consequently no German, Chinese, Jewish or any national science, except that in practice the object of science differs nationally, as for example the so-called world history is different for the East Asians looks like for the Western European. But there is national art. Yes, there is only national art, and the world literature sought by old Goethe can only be a collection of the best that has grown on the ground of solid and genuine folklore. The national is not the end and the goal, but it is the root of every achievement, and from Homer and the Bible to Tolstoy and Ibsen, all the great were first great in their people and for their people.
The sparrows are whistling off the roof today; "World citizenship", "internationalism" - that seems almost old-fashioned.
It is strangely difficult for the Jews to apply these findings to themselves. The fact that there is something “Jewish” in life and in art is almost always meant as a reproach for the time being and is therefore disputed by most Jews or applied to the Russian passed on Polish-Galician brothers. In the sense of that principle of nationality, however, Jewishness is the best thing about a Jew; or at least it can and should be its best, the national idiosyncrasy must be increased, internalized, refined in such a way that it becomes a virtue, a virtue, that a particular strength and all achievements emerge from it. Because if the Jews are not worth something as Jews, they are worth nothing at all. Anyone who sees this and wants it must also want the means; he must seek to create conditions from which Jewish-national idiosyncrasies can develop freely and easily, like elsewhere German, English, Italian. For people as for art, however, the prerequisite for every development is a home, a separate soil, and so results the application of modern ideas of national individualism to the Jews: for the people - Zionism, for art - the revival of the Hebrew language and Hebrew poetry.
Indeed: for a productive or otherwise German Jew who is involved in culture, the only salvation from half-ness, from the hermaphrodite, from defamation and suspicion, from injustice and malice would be the leap into New Hebrew literature. The only salvation and at the same time the infallibly safe one: here is virgin soil, there are endless possibilities for creation, and here any unfair comparison stops, here the host peoples no longer arouse resistance to the “jewing” of their national literature, here the word Jew automatically becomes name of honor; because suddenly it makes no sense to ask us to do anything other than that we are Jewish, with body and soul, with manners, views, feelings, with virtues and mistakes. Probably those lucky ones who are allowed to run after the palm tree on this track!
But the rest of us are like Moses, who was allowed to see the promised land but was not allowed to enter it. We who escaped from the ghetto, we happy and unfortunate heirs of Western European culture, we eternally half, we excluded and homeless, we cannot do anything with this new possibility, the young spring, which has long since begun to none from the old tribes of the Hebrew language, for us it does not greet, the gray word stands over our lives: resign!
Because we German Jews, we living today, we can no more become Hebrew poets than we can emigrate to Zion. Or in other words: as much as we must wish to culturally separate Jewish and non-Jewish Germans from each other in order to get out of the compromise, the half-ness, the inhuman and male unworthiness, it seems impossible, at least in the foreseeable future. Because despite persecution, mockery and disregard, in the course of more than a thousand years of community with Germanism, Judaism has grown so close to the roots that the two can no longer be separated.
The pure-bred Teutons may resist as they like, they may claim (with genuine Germanic logic) all the best for themselves and accuse the Jews of all evil: they will not remove the fact that German culture is one is not a small part of Jewish culture. Because Europe in general is probably more Jewish than you generally know. The hegemony of Western Europe over the globe is certainly one of the most interesting and, due to its causes, the most difficult historical problems. Without refuting Chamberlain's chauvinistic naivety, which simply makes all great Europeans Germanic and calls European culture Germanic culture, by a new chauvinism, I would like to ask whether the spirit of
free enterprise that has brought Europe to where it is now, is not to a large extent the spirit of the Jewish enterprise, the Jewish spirit of the enterprise. There is also, despite all the denial of Jewish genius, as it is - not out of modesty - popularized by some people today, but there are still a number of Jewish names that can no longer be excluded from German and European development.
And even we Jews! If we wanted to turn our backs on the German people who don't like us with finally awakened male pride: could we ever stop being largely German? Our lives are also not exhausted with “Jehovah”, the “Old Testament God of Wrath” and the “Law” as Christians use to outline the map of our inner world. We have - sad enough! - The German soil has hardly ever been plowed and for two thousand years hardly any of us have eaten bread that he has sown and harvested himself. Nevertheless, this ground also belongs to us, in which we have been bedding our dead for such a long, long time that, if they become dust, must decay into German dust despite all race fanatics. The German spring is also a spring for us, like the German winter was our winter, and against this change of the seasons, which has been witnessed for countless generations, what does the heart of the east blue sky under which palm trees, cedars and olives flourish? A miracle at best. Didn't we grow up with the German fairy tale? Didn't we play with Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty, weren't we sad about Snow White and happy with the seven dwarfs? Doesn't the German forest live for us too, shouldn't we also be able to see its elves and gnomes, don't we also understand the rustling of the stream and the song of the birds?
And further: we too are pupils of the Greeks and Romans, also we formed our ideals for Schiller, we also brooded over Faust and were young with the green Heinrich. And if we have ambition - and we have ambition - what are the role models that move forward? Goethe and Lessing and Kant and Beethoven.
We who live today, we have become and manufacture, we cannot shake it off, we cannot do it by ourselves, how to change a dress. We don't want to give it all up either: it means tapping the blood of our lives. But at the same time we no longer want to beg for a favor that has been withheld from us for so long and that is withheld again after a short period of apparent reconciliation. We don't want to produce more values and always let it be said against it that it is un-values that distort the wonderfully German. We no longer want to commit our lives to the culture of a people who declare our active cooperation to be Jewish intrusiveness. We no longer want to force anything on a country that has given us so much and to which we gratefully sought to reward its gifts twice and three times, because it does not like our thanks. Our relationship with Germany is that of an unhappy love: we finally want to be masculine enough to tear our beloved out of our hearts with vigorous determination, instead of indulging endlessly and pitilessly - and we also get stuck in our hearts.
I said what we want, what we have to want. I also said why we can't want it. It was my intention to point out the problem. It is not my fault that I have no solution.
I want to prescribe palliative, palliative, until the herb that heals us has grown - until there are people again, modern, educated, "European" people who were young on Jewish earth, in a Jewish people, with a Jewish homeland - and a feeling for language, far from our needs, also far from our half-ness.
First I name one thing (it hurts but it helps): to be loud and ruthless, I would almost like to say shamelessly to confess as Jews; do not hide his clearly compromising name behind Germanic-sounding and clinking war names. Not just writing and writing about Jews for and about Jews, but
working everywhere and absolutely as a Jew. We still lack the organ that unites all creative Jews, just as Jews, an organ that does not serve religious or political individual and party purposes, nor does it allow the good Jewish attitude to happen instead of good performance, but is nothing but one collection point of the best that Jews do in Germany. If we had it, some Christian-Germanic callers would become silent in the dispute, and some High-European Jews would convert to be philosemites.
If Jews and non-Jews had finally divorced on German Parnassus, the exaggeration of the principle of nationality would stop by itself - and this is the second remedy that I can advise. Because what is now taught and believed about this is childish exaggeration. We no longer preach a “mosaic denomination”, but believe in a Jewish people with innate indelible traits. But it is not as simple as the world paints in certain minds and over there. Treating Germans and Jews as opposites is rape, fake. After all, some things may separate us: what we have in common is more if you are honest enough to see the connection. Because if we were not comrades anywhere else, we are certainly contemporaries and have everything in common that time brings to us tasks and demands. Almost all cultural phenomena in Europe have long been international: it was humanism and Renaissance, romanticism and naturalism were the same. The social problem calls for all of us to cooperate, and the age of the machine has equally benefited or harmed each of us. And so ultimately we all build on the same work and could all find ourselves in this work, even if everyone encourages it in its own way - precisely because everyone supports it in its own way. What distinguishes us does not need to separate us. If we Jews are all ready to want to be nothing other than Jews, then perhaps Europe will also come to take us for nothing but for Jews, then it will admit that it is necessary for us - as Jews.
Goethe once said to Eckermann about some artist that he suffered from the material that all of us modern ones suffer from. Indeed: if you look at Greek art and its creation of national myths and legends, or at that of the Middle Ages, which arose from the tireless variation of Christian-religious themes at the height of Renaissance art: this is how modern art offers us what the objects the picture, a picture of wild embarrassment and perplexity. Our artists gather their material from all peoples and times, from all professions and trades, from all ups and downs of society, from both sides. This fiddling around is undoubtedly, as Goethe just said, a damage to art. The national, in history or saga, on the other hand, always offers a certain amount of clue, to which each person does not have a random or arbitrary, but necessary relationship. The upswing in art therefore often coincides with an emphasis on the national and the choice of national materials.
The treatment of Jewish substances has recently increased enormously among the productive Jews of Germany and Western Europe. One after the other, more or less determinedly, deals with the Jewish problem, one after the other discovers the Jewish problem as his problem. And this is the last and perhaps most effective palliative I know how to propose. Admittedly, Jewish art is by no means identical to the treatment of Jewish material. Nevertheless, here is an urgent and beautiful task for us Jews. Because so much has already happened, the Jewish drama, the Jewish novel is still unpublished. What matters most here is the creation of a new type of Jew, new not in life but in literature. As we know, we all see life, people and the landscape in the way our artists intend us to do. But who is the Jew that you showed us? Shylock and Shylock's daughter! This model is so powerful that no Christian, despite all his lively views in daily dealings with Jews, knew how to get rid of it. Neither did the Jews (see Beer-Hoffmann's Earl of Charolais), unless they fled to the idyll and represented the narrowness of the ghetto. The demonic-vicious Shylock and the caricatured or good-natured-comic junk - until
now there were almost only these two extremes. The Jew who is our likeness, our Jewish ideal of the Jew, is still missing. Jewish poets, approach!
We are fighting on two fronts. Our enemies on the one hand are the German-Christian-Germanic fools and envious people who have made the word Jew a dirty word and call everything that comes from Jews "Jewish" in order to stain, diminish or suspect it. We do not underestimate these leaders and their followers; they are more than they know, and which non-Jew does not want anything in common with them, check carefully whether he does not have a lot in common with them, against his will.
On the other hand, there are our worse enemies, the Jews who don't notice anything, who constantly make German culture, who pretend to be, and convince themselves that you don't recognize them. These are our real enemies; it must be ousted from the all too visible posts, where they represent Judaism as a false type of Jew, it must be silenced and gradually exterminated, so that we other Jews can again be happy with our life in the only one in which one You can feel proud and free: in an open fight against an equal opponent.
Before we are ready, however, we demand respect for a tragedy that we have uncovered here with a heavy heart in front of the whole world.
Moritz Goldstein
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We have had the author speak without interrupting him in any of the places where the world looks different from him. We have also not indicated which passages are so as not to affect the reader's impartiality anywhere. We do not want to hurry up with our answer or supplement, because we would like to see beforehand how our Jewish fellow citizens are going about Goldstein's remarks.