On the essays shelf:
The Complete Essays Of Mark Twain
In 1898, Mark Twain’s essay about a raucous Parliament-meeting in Austria was published. (It’s a hell of a piece of journalism.) As can be imagined, the response to the piece was intense. Twain was bombarded with letters, many of which came from Jews. He posts one of those letters, from an American Jew, in full. The letter-writer was disturbed by Twain’s piece, and its description of the virulent strain of anti-Semitism in Austrian politics, so omnipresent that it was barely worth mentioning. The man who writes does not critique the piece. He seems baffled, and frightened, and wonders if Twain, as a non-Jew, has any thoughts on why exactly the Jews have been so persecuted throughout their history. He doesn’t understand it. It’s not that he doesn’t know the common explanations, it’s that when faced with such a vicious strain of it, he throws up his hands in defeat. Why the heck do they hate us so? He also wonders if Twain had any suggestions for what American Jews could do, to help their fellow Jews around the world, raise awareness in American Jews, fight back against this attitude. It was a pressing issue at that time (well, in all times), and Mark Twain takes on the challenge as a philosophical exercise. You can see what a celebrity he was, for real, when he is asked to answer such an eternally urgent question.
First, Twain lists what he sees as the main prejudices against Jews, and he theorizes that they far pre-dated Christianity. He sees it as having to do with the same old bugaboo: Jews are good businessmen, good at what they do, and the cultures in which they lived were threatened by their success, threatened at being overrun, and so said cultures did what they could to curtail Jews’ financial/business activities. Twain, looking at the history, suggests that this goes beyond persecution. Religious groups have been persecuting each other for centuries. Protestants after Catholics and vice versa, Muslims against any non-Muslims in their midst (there are very interesting stories of the small groups of Christians and Jews who still survive in homogenous countries like Iran or Yemen, and how they are “allowed” to operate as long as they keep in their place), and on and on and on. Religious wars are common, will always be with us. But the persecution of the Jews has more to do with finance than religion. It’s insidious that way. Twain goes into why he thinks that is, and it has to do with the overall feeling that the Jew must be destroyed, not just in pogroms and massacres and genocide – but by destroying his livelihood as a way of starving them out of existence. Twain sees that as very different from, say, the Inquisition, or the Reformation, bloody bloody times. He may be missing some subtleties. It’s a long piece. I do not know what the reaction was to the following column. In a way, by stating the prejudice so baldly, he could be accused by un-discerning readers as reinforcing those prejudices. Artists are always criticized for that: they PRESENT the problem, and merely presenting the problem is seen as ENDORSING the attitude. But that’s a stupid viewpoint, frankly, and I have no patience for it.
Twain says off the bat that he has no prejudices (save one, and I wonder that is? He doesn’t mention it), and none whatsoever towards Jews. He was struck by the almost casual anti-Semitism in that Parliament in Austria, and felt the dangerous undercurrents, the giant Red Flag that it actually was. One of Twain’s points is that being a “disturber of the peace” has never been part of the Jewish history as citizens. They are law-abiding, they follow the rules, they mind their own business, and they flourish, and add to the economy immeasurably through their industry and smarts. They are a credit to any nation. The persecution, then, has nothing to do with them being bothersome trouble-making citizens, looking to overthrow the rule, or anything like that. The cultures that devote themselves to persecuting Jews have an inferiority complex in terms of business and industry, they don’t like being “shown up”, and the Jews have always taken the blame. The eternal scapegoat. These are not new arguments.
So he answers this man’s letter as best he can. Here’s an excerpt.
The Complete Essays Of Mark Twain
The Jew is being legislated out of Russia. the reason is not concealed. The movement was instituted because the Christian peasant and villager stood no chance against his commercial abilities. He was always ready to lend money on a crop, and sell vodka and other necessaries of life on credit while the crop was growing. When settlement day came he owned the crop; and next year or year after he owned the farm, like Joseph.
In the dull and ignorant England of John’s time everybody got into debt to the Jew. He gathered all lucrative enterprises into his hands; he was the king of commerce; he was ready to be helpful in all profitable ways; he even financed crusades for the rescue of the Sepulcher. To wipe out his account with the nation and restore business to its natural and incompetent channels he had to be banished from the realm.
For the like reasons Spain had to banish him four hundred years ago, and Austria about a couple of centuries later.
In all the ages Christian Europe has been obliged to curtail his activities. If he entered upon a mechanical trade, the Christian had to retire from it. If he set up as a doctor, he was the best one, and he took the business. If he exploited agriculture, the other farmers had to get at something else. Since there was no way to successfully compete with him in any vocation, the law had to step in and save the Christians from the poorhouse. Trade after trade was taken away from the Jew by statue till practically none was left. He was forbidden to engage in agriculture; he was forbidden to practice law; he was forbidden to practice medicine, except among Jews; he was forbidden the handicrafts. Even the seats of learning and the schools of science had to be closed against this tremendous antagonist. Still, almost bereft of employments, he found ways to make money, even ways to get rich. Also ways to invest his takings well, for usury was not denied him. In the hard conditions suggested, the Jew without brains could not survive, and the Jew with brains had to keep them in good training and well sharpened up, or starve. Ages of restriction to the one tool which the law was not able to take from him – his brain – have made that tool singularly competent; ages of compulsory disuse of his hands have atrophied them, and he never uses them now. This history has a very, very commercial look, a most sordid and practical commercial look, the business aspect of a Chinese cheap-labor crusade. Religious prejudices may account for one part of it, but not for the other nine.
Protestants have persecuted Catholics, but they did not take their livelihoods away from them. The Catholics have persecuted the Protestants with bloody and awful bitterness, but they never closed agriculture and the handicrafts against them. Why was that? That has the candid look of genuine religious persecution, not a trade-union boycott in a religious disguise.
The Jews are harried and obstructed in Austria and Germany, and lately in France; but England and America give them an open field and yet survive. Scotland offers them an unembarrassed field too, but there are not many takers. There are a few Jews in Glasgow, and one in Aberdeen; but that is because they can’t earn enough to get away. The Scotch pay themselves that compliant, but it is authentic.
I feel convinced that the Crucifixion has nor much to do with the world’s attitude toward the Jew; that the reasons for it are older than that event, as suggested by Egypt’s experience and by Rome’s regret for having persecuted an unknown quantity called a Christian, under the mistaken impression that she was merely persecuting a Jew. Merely a Jew – a skinned eel who was used to it, presumably. I am persuaded that in Russia, Austria, and Germany nine-tenths of the hostility to the Jews comes from the average Christian’s inability to compete successfully with the average Jew in business – in either straight business or the questionable sort.
In Berlin, a few years ago, I read a speech which frankly urged the expulsion of the Jews from Germany; and the agitator’s reason was as frank as his proposition. It was this: that eighty-five per cent of the successful lawyers of Berlin were Jews, and that about the same percentage of the great and lucrative businesses of all sorts in Germany were in the hands of the Jewish race! Isn’t it an amazing confession? It was but another way of saying that in a population of 48,000,000, of whom only 500,000 were registered as Jews, eighty-five per cent of the brains and honesty of the whole was lodged in the Jews. I must insist upon the honesty – it is an essential of successful business, taken by and large. Of course it does not rule out rascals entirely, even among Christians, but it is a good working rule, nevertheless. The speaker’s figures may have been inexact, but the motive of persecution stands out clear as day.
The man claimed that in Berlin the banks, the newspapers, the theaters, the great mercantile, shipping, mining, and manufacturing interests, the big army and city contracts, the tramways, and pretty much all other properties of high value, and also the small businesses – were in the hands of the Jews. He said the Jew was pushing the Christian to scrape together a living; and the Jew must be banished, and soon – there was no other way of saving the Christian. Here in Vienna, last autumn, an agitator said that all these disastrous details were true of Austria-Hungary also; and in fierce language he demanded the expulsion of the Jews. When politicians come out without a blush and read the baby act in this frank way, unreduced, it is a very good indication that they have a market back of them, and know where to fish for votes.
You note the crucial point of the mentioned agitation; the argument is that the Christian cannot compete with the Jew, and that hence his very bread is in peril. To human beings this is a much more hate-inspiring thing than is any detail connected with religion. With most people, if a necessity, bread and meat take first rank, religion second. I am convinced that the persecution of the Jew is not due in any large degree to religious prejudice.
No, the Jew is a money-getter; and in getting his money he is a very serious obstruction to less capable neighbors who are on the same quest. I think that that is the trouble. In estimating worldly values the Jew is not shallow, but deep. What precocious wisdom he found out in the morning of time that some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and that over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite – but that they all worship money so he made it the end and aim of his life to get it. He was at it in Egypt thirty-six centuries ago; he was at it in Rome when that Christian got persecuted by mistake for him; he has been at it ever since. The cost to him has been heavy; his success has made the whole human race his enemy – but it has paid, for it has brought him envy, and that is the only thing which men will sell both soul and body to get. He long ago observed that a millionaire commands respect, a two-millionaire homage, a multi-millionaire the deepest deeps of adoration. We all know that feeling; we have seen it express itself. We have noticed that when the average man mentions the name of a multi-millionaire he does it with that mixture in his voice of awe and reverence and lust which burns in a Frenchman’s eye when it falls on another man’s centime.
