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 maintenance 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?