Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol4, 1920.pdf/32
enemy of the pure-blooded Aryan—German—than the Slav; nay, the more does the Jew put on the appearance of patriotic German, the more dangerous is he. Not only from the standpoint of race! The Slav at least worships the same God as the German, the God of love, whereas the Jew knows only his God of vengeance who is inferior compared with Jesus Christ, just as the Semite is inferior compared with the Aryan German.
Prejudice grew, when German science uncovered the secrets of Talmud which—so it was claimed—millions of Jews had heretofore cleverly hidden, secrets declaring a war of extermination by the Jews against the Christians and culminating in direct inculcation of ritual murder. Eisenmenger of the 18th century found an imitator in Prof. Rohling of the 19th. Is not all Jewry the world over in reality a secret society aiming at the subjugation of the Christian world and its culture, the highest flower of which is the German Kultur?
In 1882, seventeen years before the Polná affair a similar sensation occured in Hungary in Tisza-Eszlar. A Christian girl of fourteen years, named Esther Solymossi, disappeared and was said to have become a victim of Jewish ritual murder. A few years after the Polná mystery a similar story was concocted in Prussia over the killing of a young student by name of Winter. German science was ever ready to prove the crime to have been ritual murder, and Czech anti-semitic press, chiefly clerical, swallowed the learned accounts with avidity.
However, the glory of such science did not last long. Normal conditions were re-established, Slavs grew stronger and held their own against German-Magyar pressure, their cultural and economic wealth increased; in the Hapsburg realm everyone realized that the artificial dualism was bound to collapse sooner or later, and in the Bohemian lands national consciousness, and with it Czech-Jewish movement, acquired strength. The years 1897 and 1899 were being forgotten; there was a rapprochment between Christians and Jews in the Czech lands. Social relations between them were growing better. There was hardly a city or town without Jewish membership in the council, and even in villages this was not unusual. In other autonomous corporations, in all societies, even those of the most pronounced national character like Sokols, Jews were members. There were no entertainments or celebrations in which the Jews would not participate as arrangers or at least guests, and this not merely in purely Czech territory, but also among Czech minorities in Germanized parts of Bohemia.
As against that the German anti-semite was very reserved and narrow-minded in his relations with the Jew. He would not receive the Jew into his purely German societies, boycotted him socially not merely in districts where Germanism was in full control, as in the north of Bohemia, but even where the Jews with great generosity helped to support German minorities. So it was for example in Prague, where the Jews furnished scholars for the many German schools from the common grades to the university and polytechnic, supported the German theater and other German cultural institutions. The same thing is true of Pilsen and Budějovice, Brno, Olomouc and other Moravian cities. In many such cities German minority managed to retain control of the city hall only through the help of the Jews and by artificial franchise restrictions.
Such a situation furnished food for reflection to the best of the Jews who had been brought up as Germans and looked upon themselves as German. How much the Jews had done for Germanism! It was not a question of political support only; but how many great Jewish authors, scientists, artists, journalists, actors, how many talented financiers and political economists have contributed richly to the cultural and material wealth of the German nation, even long before the Jews received the rights of citizens; how great a number of Jewish enthusiasts in the cause of Germany’s greatness fell in the war of 1870–1871.
This was German gratitude! There was bitterness in the heart of many German-Jews, when they saw themselves turned down by their fellow-Germans, because they lacked baptismal certificate; they were not allowed to participate in the joys and sorrows of the nation which they served faithfully, far more faithfully than many of those Christian Germans who could only yell: Hurrah for Germania.
This feeling of bitterness breaking out at first only in occasional complaints and