Gentile and Jew: A Symposium on the Future of the Jewish People / This curious little book has a real significance, though logically it should be valueless. It consists of statements by one hundred non-Jews, mostly English, about the “Jewish problem.” The problem itself is not defined in advance; there is no recognizable basis upon which the contributors were chosen; their statements range from the trivial to the philosophic; and the order of arrangement is alphabetical rather than analytical. The result is confused and uncritical. Yet for that very reason the book turns out to be a remarkably accurate mirroring of the confusion of the public on this question. It is certainly one step toward solution of a problem to discover that understandings and solutions of that problem are as varied and as numerous as the people involved.
As might be expected, each of the contributors does little more than bring his own prepossessions to bear on the question without thought, and quite without self-criticism. The rather large sprinkling of Christian clergymen urge the application of Christian charity. The Russophiles point happily to the USSR and extol Biro-Bidjan as a better Zion. Government leaders rest on the vague official guarantees of their governments. The devotees of 19th-century nationalism nod enthusiastically in the direction of Zionism. The professional social scientists write sagely of scapegoat theories and cultural dislocations. The professional patriots (the book was compiled in wartime) see the problem in terms of annihilation of the Nazis. Root-and-branch reformers alternately espouse social ostracism of anti-Semites and a self-denying ordinance by the Jews themselves. And at the end we are back just where we started. But just because the opinions are unthoughtful, “horseback opinions,” they are illuminating as documentary material, if not as thought.
compiled and edited by Chaim Newman ; with a foreword by Lord Strabolgi Hardcover – 1945
