The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

Julian Mack critic Ludwig Lewisohn argued that the “disease of the assimilatory theory
of emancipation” had hindered Jewish attempts at self-preservation. As a consequence,
“our ablest men are alienated even in this disastrous age” and behave as if they “were not
Jews.” Those “few able and well-known Jews who have identified themselves with their
people” were absent when decisive and practical leadership was needed. Jewish survival,
he claimed, depended upon an end to the “ravages” of this affliction. 41
Jews came before the Conference representing divergent interests and groups;
Zionists versus anti-Zionists, Orthodox versus Reformed. The Congress Bulletin of the
American Jewish Congress described the situation as a “spectacle of Jewish discord and
disruption.” 42 Some of the Jewish leaders, especially those of German background in the
United States and Great Britain, deliberately avoided an outspoken stance against Jewish
persecution out of “fear of stirring up an anti-Semitic backlash” within Germany and
preferred to negotiate out of the limelight. 43 The American Jewish Committee, a group
41 Ludwig Lewisohn, “The World’s Window,” The Sentinel, July 7, 1938, 5. Ludwig Lewisohn, a
German-born literary and drama critic, novelist and Zionist, derided the Jewish lack of unity, the
internecine conflict between pro-Zionists and anti-Zionists and the seeming lack of awareness of reality.
“Everyone is awake. Everyone is determined to defend with his very blood his life, his way of life, his
freedom, his people, the future of posterity. Everyone except the Jews…That people stands as it were
dazed, stupefied, arguing, arguing, proliferating dull edgeless words…” British resistance to Jewish
immigration into Palestine could be surmounted by the “moral pressure of world-Jewry,” especially those
of America. The Jewish communities of the United States, however, were fragmented, “disgracefully
divided into factions [American Jewish Committee versus the American Jewish Congress, for example],
disgracefully hindered by die-hards in high places, by snobs, by self-opinionated men with ugly, hard, vain
little minds…” Such disharmony prevented Jews from “ris[ing] as one people inspired by one faith and
one hope and one goal, intent upon one eternally liberating act…” The British Colonial Office would not be
influenced by a “people divided against itself, a group shot through and through with slavishness of spirit, a
group in which treachery is rampant—treachery out of small phantastic fears and unworthy self-seeking
and a detestable desire not to lose an argument…” Ludwig Lewisohn, “What is Wrong?” The Sentinel,
March 31, 1938, 5.
42 Bryan Mark Rigg, Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler’s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 63.
43 Naomi Shepherd, Wilfrid Israel: German Jewry's Secret Ambassador, (London, Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1984), 133-34 cited in Breitman, American Refugee Policy, 60
262