National Atavism – Mother Earth (1906)

From ‘Mother Earth’, Vol.1, No.1, March 1906, New York City, published by Emma Goldman

By Internationalist

The Jewish circles in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and other cities in America are aroused over the visit of a spectre called Nationalism, alias Territorialism. Like all spectres, it is doing a lot of mischief and causing much confusion in the heads of the Jewish population.

The spirit of our ancestor, Abraham, has come to life again. Like Abraham, when Jehovah commanded him to go in quest of the promised land, the Jewish Nationalists make themselves and others believe that they long for the moment, when with wife and child and all possessions, they will migrate to that spot on earth, which will represent the Jewish state, where Jewish traits will have a chance to develop in idyllic peace.

Natural science calls retrogression of species, which shows signs of a former state already overcome, atavism. The same term may be applied to the advanced section of the Jewish population, which has listened to the call of the Nationalists. They have retrogressed from a universal view of things to a philosophy fenced in by boundary lines; from the glorious conception that “the world is my country” to the conception of exclusiveness. They have abridged their wide vision and have made it narrow and superficial.

The Zionism of Max Nordau and his followers never was more than a sentimental sport for the well-to-do in the ranks of the Jews. The latter-day Nationalists, however, are bent on reaching those circles of the Jewish race that have so far followed the banner of Internationalism and Revolution; and this at a moment when revolutionists of all nationalities and races are most in need of unity and solidarity. Nothing could be more injurious to the Russian revolution, nothing prove a lack of confidence in its success, so much as the present nationalistic agitation.

The most encouraging and glorious feature of revolutions is that they purify the atmosphere from the thick, poisonous vapors of prejudices and superstition.

From time immemorial revolutions have been the only hope and refuge of all the oppressed from national and social yokes. The radical nationalistic elements seem to have forgotten that all their enthusiasm, their faith and hope in the power of a great social change, now falters before the question: Will it give us our own territory where we can surround ourselves with walls and watch-towers? Yes, the very people, who once spoke with a divine fire of the beauty of the solidarity of all individuals and all peoples, now indulge in the shallow phrases that the Jew is powerless, that he is nowhere at home, and that he owns no place on earth, where he can do justice to his nature, and that he must first obtain national rights, like all nations, ere he can go further.

These lamentations contain more fiction than truth, more sentimentality than logic.

The Poles have their own territory; still this fact does not hinder Russia from brutalizing Poland or from flogging and killing her children; neither does it hinder the Prussian government from maltreating her Polish subjects and forcibly obliterating the Polish language. And of what avail is native territory to the small nations of the Balkans, with Russian; Turkish and Austrian influences keeping them in a helpless and dependent condition. Various raids and expeditions by the powerful neighboring states forced on them, have proven what little protection their territorial independence has given them against brutal coercion. The independent existence of small peoples has ever served powerful states as a pretext for venomous attacks, pillage and attempts at annexation. Nothing is left them but to bow before the superior powers, or to be ever prepared for bitter wars that might, in a measure, temporarily loosen the tyrannical hold, but never end in a complete overthrow of the powerful enemy.

Switzerland is often cited as an example of a united nation which is able to maintain itself in peace and neutrality. It might be advisable to consider what circumstances have made this possible.

It is an indisputable fact that Switzerland acts as the executive agent of European powers, who consider her a foreign detective bureau which watches over, annoys and persecutes refugees and the dissatisfied elements.

Italian, Russian and German spies look upon Switzerland as a hunting ground, and the Swiss police are never so happy, as when they can render constable service to the governments of surrounding states. It is nothing unusual for the Swiss police to carry out the order of Germany or Italy to arrest political refugees and forcibly take them across the frontier, where they are given over into the hands of the German or Italian gendarmes. A very enticing national independence, is it not?

Is it possible that former revolutionists and enthusiastic fighters for freedom, who are now in the nationalistic field, should long for similar conditions? Those who refuse to be carried away by nationalistic phrases and who would rather follow the broad path of Internationalism, are accused of indifference to and lack of sympathy with the sufferings of the Jewish race. Rather it is far more likely that those who stand for the establishment of a Jewish nation show a serious lack of judgment.

Especially the radicals among the Nationalists seem to be altogether lost in the thicket of phrases. They are ashamed of the label “nationalist” because it stands for so much retrogression for so many memories of hatred, of savage wars and wild persecutions, that it is difficult for one who claims to be advanced and modern to adorn himself with the name. And who does not wish to appear advanced and modern? Therefore the name of Nationalist is rejected, and the name of territorialist taken instead, as if that were not the same thing. True, the territorialists will have nothing to do with an organized Jewish state; they aim for a free commune. But, if it is certain that small states are subordinated to great powers and merely endured by them, it is still more certain that free communes within powerful states, built on coercion and land robbery, have even less chance for a free existence. Such cuckoos’ eggs the ruling powers will not have in their nests. A community, in which exploitation and slavery do not reign, would have the same effect on these powers, as a red rag to a bull. It would stand an everlasting reproach, a nagging accusation, which would have to be destroyed as quickly as possible. Or is the national glory of the Jews to begin after the social revolution?

If we are to throw into the dust heap our hope that humanity will some day reach a height from which difference of nationality and ancestry will appear but an insignificant speck on earth, well and good! Then let us be patriots and continue to nurse national characteristics; but we ought, at least, not to clothe ourselves in the mantel of Faust, in our pretentious sweep through space. We ought at least declare openly that the life of all peoples is never to be anything else but an outrageous mixture of stupid patriotism, national vanities; everlasting antagonism, and a ravenous greed for wealth and supremacy.

Might it not be advisable to consider how the idea of a national unity of the Jews can live in the face of the deep social abysses that exist between the various ranks within the Jewish race?

It is not at all a mere accident that the Bund, the strongest organization of the Jewish proletariat, will have nothing to do with the nationalistic agitation. The social and economic motives for concerted action or separation are of far more vital influence than the national.

The feeling of solidarity of the working-people is bound to prove stronger than the nationalistic glue. As to the remainder of the adherents of the nationalistic movement, they are recruited from the ranks of the middle Jewish class.

The Jewish banker, for instance, feels much more drawn to the Christian or Mohammedan banker than to his Jewish factory worker, or tenement house dweller. Equally so will the Jewish workingman, conscious of the revolutionizing effect of the daily struggle between labor and money power, find his brother in a fellow worker, and not in a Jewish banker.

True, the Jewish worker suffers twofold: he is exploited, oppressed and robbed as one of suffering humanity, and despised, hated, trampled upon, because he is a Jew; but he would look in vain toward the wealthy Jews for his friends and saviors. The latter have just as great an interest in the maintainance of a system that stands for wage slavery, social subordination, and the economic dependence of the great mass of mankind, as the Christian employer and owner of wealth.

The Jewish population of the East side has little in common with the dweller of a Fifth Avenue mansion. He has much more in common with the workingmen of other nationalities of the country — he has sorrows, struggles, indignation and longings for freedom in common with them. His hope is the social reconstruction of society and not nationalistic scene shifting. His conditions can be ameliorated only through a union with his fellow sufferers, through human brotherhood, and not by means of separation and barriers. In his struggles against humiliating demands, inhuman treatment, economic pressure, he can depend on help from his non-Jewish comrades, and not on the assistance of Jewish manufacturers and speculators. How then can he be expected to co-operate with them in the building of a Jewish commonwealth?

Certain it is that the battle which is to bring liberty, peace and well-being to humanity is of a mental, social, economic nature and not of a nationalistic one. The former brightens and widens the horizon, the latter stupefies the reasoning faculties, cripples and stifles the emotions, and sows hatred and strife instead of love and tenderness in the human soul. All that is big and beautiful in the world has been created by thinkers and artists, whose vision was far beyond the Liliputian sphere of Nationalism. Only that which contains the life’s pulse of mankind expands and liberates. That is why every attempt to establish a national art, a patriotic literature, a life’s philosophy with the seal of the government attached thereto is bound to fall flat and to be insignificant.

It were well and wholesome if all works dealing with national glory and victory, with national courage and patriotic songs could be used for bonfires. In their place we could have the poems of Shelley and Whitman, essays of Emerson or Thoreau, the Book of the Bees, by Maeterlink, the music of Wagner, Beethoven and Tschaikovsky, the wonderful art of Eleanore Duse.

I can deeply sympathize with the dread of massacres and persecutions of the Jewish people; and I consider it just and fair that they should strain every effort to put a stop to such atrocities as have been witnessed by the civilized world within a few years. But it must be borne in mind that it is the Russian government, the Russian reactionary party, including the Russian Church, and not the Russian people, that are responsible for the slaughter of the Jews.

Jewish, Socialists and Anarchists, however, who have joined the ranks of the Nationalists and who have forgotten to emphasize the fundamental distinction between the people of Russia and the reactionary forces of that country, who have fought and are still fighting so bravely for their freedom and for the liberation of all who are oppressed, deserve severe censure. They have thrown the responsibility of the massacres upon the Russian people and have even blamed the Revolutionists for them, whereas it is an undisputed fact that the agitation against the Jews has been inaugurated and paid for by the ruling clique, in the hope that the hatred and discontent of the Russian people would turn from them, the real criminals, to the Jews. It is said, “we have no rights in Russia, we are being robbed, hounded, killed, let the Russian people take care of themselves, we will turn our backs on them.”

Would it not show deeper insight into the condition of affairs if my Jewish brethren were to say, “Our people are being abused, insulted, ill-treated and killed by the hirelings of Russian despotism. Let us strengthen our union with the intellectuals, the peasants, the rebellious elements of the people for the overthrow of the abominable tyranny; and when we have accomplished that let us co-operate in the great work of building a social structure upon which neither the nation nor the race but Humanity can live and grow in beauty.”

Prejudices are never overcome by one who shows himself equally narrow and bigoted. To confront one brutal outbreak of national sentiment with the demand for another form of national sentiment means only to lay the foundation for a new persecution that is bound to come sooner or later. Were the retrogressive ideas of the Jewish Nationalists ever to materialize, the world would witness, after a few years, that one Jew is being persecuted by another.

In one respect the Jews are really a “chosen people.” Not chosen by the grace of God, nor by their national peculiarities, which with every people, as well as with the Jews, merely prove national narrowness. They are “chosen” by a necessity, which has relieved them of many prejudices, a necessity which has prevented the development of many of those stupidities which have caused other nations great efforts to overcome. Repeated persecution has put the stamp of sorrow on the Jews; they have grown big in their endurance, in their comprehension of human suffering, and in their sympathy with the struggles and longings of the human soul.

Driven from country to country, they avenged themselves by producing great thinkers, able theoreticians, heroic leaders of progress. All governments lament the fact that the Jewish people have contributed the bravest fighters to the armies for every liberating war of mankind.

Owing to the lack of a country of their own, they developed, crystallized and idealized their cosmopolitan reasoning faculty. True, they have not their own empire, but many of them are working for the great moment when the earth will become the home for all, without distinction of ancestry or race. That is certainly a greater, nobler and sounder ideal to strive for than a petty nationality.

It is this ideal that is daily attracting larger numbers of Jews, as well as Gentiles; and all attempts to hinder the realization thereof, like the present nationalistic movement, will be swept away by the storm that precedes the birth of the new era-mankind clasped in universal brotherhood.