XIX The Jew in the Immigrant Problem
The Jew has nearly always been an immigrant and a problem. Nowhere is he accepted as indigenous; neither in Russia, where he has lived for centuries, nor in New York, where he will soon represent the bulk of population. He is as much a stranger on his home soil in Palestine as upon the rawest bit of ground staked into a city, in Wyoming or the Dakotas. His going is nowhere regretted at the time and his coming is not welcomed; while his remaining in a place leads to the development of prejudice, which has its root in various causes, already discussed. In a peculiar sense, his coming in large numbers is felt by the toiler and the trader; by the most antagonistic Gentile groups and by those Jews who came earlier, from some more favoured spot in the culture centres of Europe.
The religious development of the Anglo-Saxon people, influenced more often by the Old Testament than by the New, as well as their familiarity with the Bible, has kept the Jew who lives among them immune from the grosser consequences of Anti-Semitism.
Jehovah’s chosen people have often been regarded with peculiar interest by the Anglo-Saxons, if not always treated with marked favour; yet even among them, this feeling has gradually undergone a change, until, their coming has become a cause for special inquiry by the English Parliament and one of the chief difficulties of the whole immigrant problem, as it affects our cities.
I have had peculiar opportunities to note the development of these changes, and believe that the Jew has been too optimistic regarding his future in the United States; while the Gentile is too pessimistic as to the gravity of the Jewish problem.
A clergyman in the city of New York whose fame is international, who is in constant contact with the best type of Jews, startled me not long ago by saying that the Jewish problem in the city of New York was in a most acute stage. In analysing his own feelings, he said: “No matter what you do, you’re up against it; no matter how you prepare yourself to act the brother towards them, they won’t let you succeed. You can’t love them and you don’t dare hate them.”
Mr. Robert Watchorn, the ex-commissioner of immigration, told me that after an address in which he minimized the problem of immigration, a well-known citizen of New York came to him and said that in twenty years Kisheneff will have its counterpart on the East Side.
One of the most liberal Jewish rabbis in this country, whose addresses teem from the most extreme optimism as to the future of his race in America, will be amazed to hear that because he was invited to preach the baccalaureate sermon in a Western state institution of learning, a large number of the class absented itself from that service. In commenting upon it, I heard one of the number say to another, in unacademic, campus language: “Tough luck, boy. They’ve invited a Sheeny to preach our baccalaureate. It’s an insult to the class!”
The fact that twenty per cent. of the students at Columbia University are Jews, has led a number of Western boys to say to me: “We won’t go to Columbia. There are too many Jews there.”
No less brutally frank expressions I have heard in the shops in which I have worked, and in hotel lobbies where I have loitered; so that while I may not regard the Jewish problem as the most serious in the general one of immigration, I certainly regard it as one of the most sensitive to approach and one of the most difficult to solve.
I usually ask four questions regarding every immigrant group, and the answer determines, in my own mind at least, the desirability of its coming to the United States. The four questions are:
First, Do we need them? By that, I mean, will they perform some useful function which is necessary and which the earlier comers cannot or will not perform? This is entirely an industrial question and can be safely answered only by the economist, who knows the field in all its bearings.
My conviction, based upon no such accurate knowledge, is that we most need those groups which live by their muscle, rather than by their wits; the toiler, rather than the trader. If my theory is correct, this would exclude many Jews; although I am sure that they have performed many important functions in the industrial sphere, both in the realm of manual labour and out of it. Some such discrimination seems to me fair, for it would bar classes, rather than races, and would affect equally other commercial people, such as the Greeks, Armenians and Syrians.
Whether or not this first question is fundamentally sound, of one thing I am sure. Half the ill feeling against the Jews would vanish if they would give themselves in any large numbers to the mechanical trades and to agriculture.
Second, Does the group which seeks admission have the same economic ideals which characterized the earlier groups?
This refers to standards of living as well as to standards of making the living.
The Jew answers well to the first part of the question; in fact, better than the Latin or the Slav. Although he may be compelled to eat plain and coarse food, he craves the richer and daintier fare; if he has to live in a tenement on the East Side, he does it with an eye to a flat in Harlem; for the Jew has never ceased looking for the “land flowing with milk and honey,” or longing for the “flesh-pots of Egypt.” His standard of living is not low, but as some one has said: “elastic.” He may eat red herring to-day, but to-morrow he will eat carp with garlic sauce; that is, if he can afford it.
He will control his historic appetite in order to “get on,” and it is the subordination of health and decency to this desire which often makes him an economic problem, if not a menace.
But when he has attained, he is no miser. His children must have the best education, and his wife the most expensive clothing; he will save his children from the sweat shop if he can, and his wife whether he can or not. He is not willing to live off his children or on the town; although he is not always above living on his more fortunate brethren, whom he thus gives a chance to earn the divine favour by bestowing alms; he rarely sinks into pauperism.
The agencies which minister to pleasure, the theatre, the concert hall and vaudeville, would lose a fair share of their patronage if Jews were excluded from them.
The Jew is neither a total abstainer, nor is he intemperate, and his expenditure for alcohol, compared with that of the Irish, is about as one to a hundred. None dreads the coming of Jews into a neighbourhood more than the saloon-keeper, and some of the vilest localities in New York have been made fairly decent by the expansion of the Ghetto.
One of the most difficult questions to answer is, whether Jewish ideals of making a living accord with those which characterize the older groups. The popular judgment is that they do not. It is commonly charged that the Jew degrades the industries upon which he enters; that as a competitor he is unscrupulous and as an advertiser, dishonest. “Jewing down” is a phrase too well known in commercial life to need interpretation.
Whether it is the “quality of the Jewish mind” which has created this judgment, as Professor Shaler indicates, or whether it is the quality of his moral nature, I am not in a position to determine. All I can say with a sense of assurance is, first, that the business morality of the Jew not only compares favourably with other commercial groups which are coming to the United States, but is generally admitted to be higher than that of the Greeks and Armenians.
Second, That the so-called Jewish business ethics, which in reality are Oriental and not essentially Jewish, and are also prevalent on the continent of Europe, do not compare favourably with the straightforward business methods traditional in America.
Third, That the Jew has adopted these American standards in the lines of business which he controls, and that in every city he is counted among its most substantial and reliable business men.
Fourth, That although the methods used by large numbers of Jews in business are often questionable, as is often the business itself, they have a remarkably clear record in the sphere of high finance, and that it is most fortunate for the well-being of the Jews in America that the so-called “Captains of Industry” are a native product.
Roughly speaking, then, the charges that the Jew is an unfair competitor in the industries and in business may be true; yet if the case were put to a jury which could to some degree free itself from prejudice, the result would probably be a disagreement. What could not be easily denied is, that the sense of truth in the Jew from the east of Europe, notably from Poland, is low.
I quote Mr. H. S. Lewis of London, a Jew, and an unprejudiced authority.2 “One is sometimes tempted to conclude in despair that the bulk of the Polish immigrants have no sense of truth whatever. No more painful spectacle can be witnessed than the hearing of a summons at an East-End police court, where the parties concerned are foreign Jews. Obvious perjury on the slightest provocation is committed in case after case. The comments of Judge Bacon at the Whitechapel County Court on this fact have been at times severely criticised by the Jewish press. His generalizations may have been too sweeping, being based on his experience of petty litigation, where the seamy side of life is necessarily prominent. At the same time, his remarks have been based on a substantial substratum of truth. It is the experience of most visitors among the foreign poor for charitable societies, that although absolute imposture is exceptional, falsehoods with regard to the details of cases are constantly met with.
“It is to this taint of untruthfulness that most of the other defects of the foreign Jews are to be traced. I fear that it cannot be denied that their standard of business morality is often defective. A statement of this kind may be regarded as unfair, and it is, of course, difficult to put it to any exact test. An illustration is, however, afforded by a return of convictions, periodically issued in the minutes of the London County Council, for the use of false weights and measures and kindred offenses. Judging by the names of the offenders, an altogether undue proportion of them appear to be foreign Jews.
“We meet also in East London with far too many cases where the Bankruptcy laws are evaded by persons who pass through the courts and reappear in business with suspicious celerity and without apparent loss.”
The testimony of Rev. Max Wertheim of Ada, Ohio, ought to have some weight—it concerns the Americanized Jew. He was a rabbi at Dayton, Ohio, and after passing through various religious crises, became a Baptist, and is now doing devoted work on a small salary. Naturally, he has not received the most generous treatment from his former co-religionists, and would hardly flatter them. In answer to my question whether he found any difference in business standards between his Jewish and his Christian flocks, he unhesitatingly said that there was no difference.
More weighty is the testimony which Prof. Graham Taylor gave recently before a Christian Brotherhood. “I know as good Christians among the Jews as among the churches.”
I am quite sure that basically there is no difference; although I should characterize some Jewish methods as mean, and those of some Gentiles as dangerous. In making this distinction, however, I realize that “wooden nutmegs,” high-bottomed fruit boxes, sun-kissed apples at the top of the barrel and gnarled ones at the bottom, as well as other tricks of the native trade, are mean enough; while the methods of the theatrical trust, the adulteration of foods and drugs, the white slave trade and other questionable forms of business engaged in by both Jew and Gentile, may be called both mean and dangerous.
It is also interesting to note that in the great industrial struggle the Jew is represented largely on the capitalistic side; but on the other hand, some of the strongest leaders in the labour unions and many of the Socialists of the rank and file are Jews; consequently the vox populi may condemn them for being both.
The third question is: Does the group possess ethnic qualities that will prevent normal assimilation, and therefore will increase race friction already dangerously strong?
Disagreeable as is the Jewish type when very pronounced, it is undergoing such rapid changes where the environment is favourable, that it does not present a serious barrier to assimilation. The issues of intermarriage are exceptionally good and the resultant types normal. Yet in spite of the vanishing type, the Jews are a peculiar people and will long remain so. Their historic inheritance and their religious traditions, no less than their attitude towards the Gentiles and the attitude of the Gentiles towards them, will naturally keep them a group apart. The hostile attitude on both sides ought not to be strengthened, and I believe that for a period at least, Jewish emigration from the east of Europe should cease. Not because I believe the Russian Jew inferior, but merely because he is numerous and the ethnic and cultural difference between him and the native is so marked as to aggravate an antipathy already intense; this the Jews themselves feel.
A Jewish merchant, who lives in a certain town in the Middle West, told me that strong Anti-Semitic feelings were aroused in the community by the arrival there of Russian Jews, and that as soon as they moved away the feeling vanished.
Another Jewish merchant told me that in visiting various places with a view to locating his business, his first inquiry was: “Are there any Russian Jews in the town?” He said that business for the Jew is better where there are no Russian Jews.
The feeling of the Americanized Jew towards this new immigrant was thus expressed by one of them: “We have to stand by them, but we wish they hadn’t come.”
My fourth question refers to the attitude of the groups towards our social and political ideals.
If the family ideal is the basis of our social and political life, it is certainly safe in the keeping of the Jew, who, if he errs at all in that direction, errs in making the well-being of the community or state, secondary to the well-being of his family.
In spite of the fact that divorce, according to the rabbinic law, is easily obtained, almost as easily as in some of our Western states, it is rarely resorted to. Sexual immorality, wife desertion and divorce, become more common among the Jews only under stress of changed economic and religious environment.
The criminal record of the Jew is still good; although he is under suspicion of merely being too shrewd to be caught.
In the so-called lesser and meaner crimes, such as receiving stolen goods and pocket-picking, he has almost a monopoly; while in burglary and murder his record is fairly clean.
At present there are no reliable statistics on this point, and there is much chance of juggling with figures, for friend and foe alike.
The report of the Commission of Immigration of the state of New York presents a table of foreign born white offenders in the state’s prisons in 1904, but unfortunately does not classify the Jews as such. However, if one took the entire number of criminals tabulated under the countries from which the Jews come, namely: Austria, Hungary, Russia and Poland, and counted all as Jews—a procedure manifestly unfair, even then the prison population of the state of New York contains over twelve per cent. more Irish than all the natives from these four countries, who of course are not all Jews, but represent different faiths.
In lieu of reliable statistics, therefore, I must trust to my own experience. I have found that grosser criminality among the Jews is a more abnormal phenomenon than among most of the newer immigrant groups. In my intimate acquaintance with a number of Jewish communities in Europe, I know some as large as 10,000 souls, where such crimes as theft, robbery and murder are never committed; yet where cheating, fraudulent bankruptcy and receiving stolen goods are not uncommon.
The Jew has done himself almost irreparable injury by his protest against the reading of the Bible, and Christmas exercises in the public schools and in his attitude towards Sunday laws. In both cases he has shown himself intolerant, and has alienated staunch friends whose help and sympathy he may need in the day of tribulation. As a citizen and patriot, he is everywhere giving evidence of his devotion; while in the struggle for the coming of a better day in the government of our cities and of the state, he has done his full share; indeed, among the newer immigrant groups, he has furnished to that cause by far the largest quota.
There are several points at which the Jew does not satisfactorily answer the questions I ask. He provides far too large a number of those, who, as a class, seem unnecessary at the present stage of our economic development; he presents too solid a differentiated group, will retard proper adjustment and increase existing race antagonisms. His attitude towards the manifestation of the religious spirit in our public schools, his intolerance towards certain religious practices which are fundamentally ethical and social, but not necessarily sectarian, will more and more alienate those Americans who have been most hospitable towards him and upon whose good will he is dependent, economically and socially, if not politically.
These, I think, are the sore spots of the problem; and if the Jew is as shrewd as he is painted, he will look to their healing; while if the American is as charitable as I think him to be, he will give the Jew full time for reconvalescence.