By Stuart M. Israel
Mark Twain wrote an essay called “Concerning the Jews,” published in Harper’s Monthly in September 1899. The essay, Cynthia Ozick wrote in 1995, was: “Part polemic, part reprimand, part self-contradictory panegyric.”
The essay was and remains controversial among Jews. It mixed Twain’s welcome philosemitism with his too easy (and “ignorant”) acceptance of antisemitic myths.
Here, in brief, is the story of “Concerning the Jews,” its times, and its partially-mitigating postscript, “The Jew as Soldier.”
1. Stirring Times in Europe
Twain spent 20 months living in Vienna, starting in September 1897. He witnessed, and reported on, political turmoil and antisemitism in Austria-Hungary.
Twain’s reporting from Vienna—“Stirring Times in Austria,” published in Harper’s Monthly (March 1898)—was, in passing, sympathetic to the beleaguered Jews.
Twain reported on friction in the parliament which sat in Vienna and consisted of “425 deputies from the nineteen or twenty states” that made up Austria-Hungary.
The deputies represented “peoples who speak eleven languages” which, Twain wrote, “means eleven distinct varieties of jealousies, hostilities, and warring interests.” The deputies were “from all the walks of life and from all the grades of society.” Twain described the deputies: “They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere, devoted, and they hate the Jews.”
Twain also described rioting in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bohemia, over ethnic conflict between German and Czech residents: “In some cases the Germans being the rioters, in others the Czechs—and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no matter which side he was on.”
Twain’s passing sympathy for Jews earned him vilification by Vienna’s antisemitic press, which inaccurately labeled him “der Jude Mark Twain.”
To put Twain’s 1897-1899 European residence in time-context: Pogroms in Russia in 1881 and 1882, exacerbating oppression and economic deprivation, stimulated the start of mass emigration of Central and Eastern European Jews, many to the United States. Novelist and journalist Emile Zola’s “J’Accuse!”—which charged the French government with antisemitism and supported the falsely-accused, and wrongfully-convicted and imprisoned, Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus—was published on January 13, 1898. Austro-Hungarian lawyer, writer, and journalist Theodor Herzl, author of modern Zionism, published Der Judenstaat in 1896 and convened the first Zionist congress in Switzerland, in August 1897.
2. Why the Jews?
In “Concerning the Jews,” Twain set out to answer an American Jewish reader’s questions prompted by Twain’s reporting from Vienna.
Why, the reader asked Twain, “in these days of supposed intelligence,” were Jews subjected to “baseless, vicious animosities” and “horrible and unjust persecutions”?
Twain’s answer, Ozick wrote, was “honorably motivated but ultimately obtuse and harmful.”
3. Creditable and Discreditable Ways
Declaring himself free of “prejudice,” Twain offered his views “concerning” the state of the Jew at the end of the nineteenth century. Twain used “the Jew” to stand for “both religion and race”—as that “handy” term was understood by “the general world.”
The Jew, Twain wrote, was honest, smart, “quiet, peaceable,” and “industrious,” “unaddicted to high crimes and brutal dispositions,” had “commendable” devotion to family, was “not a burden upon public charities” or a “beggar” or a “sot,” and “in benevolence” was “above the reach of competition.”
The Jew’s “commercial importance” and “contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning” were way “out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.”
The Jew, Twain wrote, “has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him.”
But—Twain wrote—the Jew “has his other side” and “some discreditable ways.” Twain listed some, among them the Jew’s “reputation” for “small forms of cheating,” “cunning contracts,” “oppressive usury,” “smart evasions,” and “unpatriotic disinclination” for military service.
4. The Price of Success
Weighing the “creditable” against the “discreditable,” Twain’s “verdict” was that “the Christian can claim no superiority over the Jew in matters of good citizenship.”
Twain then sought to explain why, “in all countries, from the dawn of history, the Jew has been persistently and implacably hated, and with frequency persecuted.”
Twain’s explanation: Jew-hatred is mostly motivated not by “religious prejudice” but by “envy”—by “the average Christian’s inability to compete successfully with the average Jew in business—in either straight business or the questionable sort.”
All human beings “worship” money, Twain wrote, and the Jew is a successful “money-getter.” Twain concluded that the Jew’s “success has made the whole human race his enemy.”
5. Save Us From Our Friends
The debate continues as to whether—on balance—Twain’s well-meaning but canard-laden essay is—as the saying goes—“good for the Jews.” Ozick quoted a contemporary response to Twain’s essay from the London Jewish Chronicle: “Of all such advocates, we can but say ‘Heaven save us from our friends.’”
One aspect of our friend Twain’s essay certainly was not good: its dissemination of the antisemitic canard that Jews were unpatriotic and evaded military service.
Twain wrote that the Jew “is charged with an unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier.” Twain did not “endorse” this charge, but he repeated it and “supposed it to be true.”
One of Twain’s suggestions to Jews for improving their “situation” was to organize “volunteer regiments composed of Jews solely, and, when the drum beats, fall in and go to the front.” This would help, Twain wrote, “remove the reproach” that Jews ”feed on a country, but don’t like to fight for it.”
It was Twain, however, who was promptly reproached.
6. The Truth About Jewish Patriotism and Military Service
One notable reproach came in an essay written by M.S. Levy, published in Overland Monthly in October1899, called “A Rabbi’s Reply to Mark Twain.”
Rabbi Levy wrote that despite Twain’s claim to being “unbiased and unprejudiced,” Twain’s statements about Jewish patriotism and military service were “tinged with malice and prejudice” and “incorrect and false.”
Rabbi Levy made his case. His reply referred Twain to Simon Wolf’s The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (1895) and named many Jewish patriots and service members—including Hyam Salomon, member of the Sons of Liberty and financier of the American Revolution; Benjamin Levy, awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for battlefield valor during the Civil War; and Maurice Justh, killed in 1898 in combat in the Philippines in the Spanish-American War.
Rabbi Levy named many more Jewish soldiers and sailors, examples drawn from “ten thousand, twenty-five percent of whom died in service and on the field upholding the flag of their country.” Supposed Jewish “money-getters”—Levy corrected Twain—“cheerfully enlisted” and “as cheerfully” accepted “the pay of privates in the volunteer ranks to become patriotic soldiers.”
7. “The Jew as Soldier”—Twain’s Mea Culpa
To his credit, Twain confessed his error. When he later included “Concerning the Jews” in a book—in The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays—Twain added a “postscript” titled “The Jew as Soldier.”
The postscript offered Twain’s mea culpa. Twain wrote that when he originally published his essay, he “was ignorant—like the rest of the Christian world—of the fact that the Jew had a record as a soldier.” Twain had “since seen the official statistics” and concluded that “the Jews patriotism was not merely level with the Christian’s, but overpassed it.”
The “common reproach” denigrating Jewish patriotism and military service, credited in his original essay, was a “slur” which, Twain had learned, could not “hold up its head in the presence of the figures of the War Department.”
In fact, Twain learned, the Jew’s record “for capacity, for fidelity, and for gallant soldiership in the field”— earned by “the Jewish private soldiers and the Jewish generals alike”—was, at the least, “as good as any one’s.”
Twain’s postscript concluded that the “slur” denigrating Jewish patriotism and military service “ought to be pensioned off now, and retired from active service.”
Better, it should be dishonorably discharged.
__________
Mark Twain read the “official statistics,” lamented his earlier ignorance, and disclaimed his “supposition” crediting antisemitic canards who denigrated Jewish patriotism and military service. The wiser Twain’s postscript acknowledged that “it is not allowable to endorse wandering maxims upon supposition.”
Attributed to Twain (and others) is additional sound advice: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Originally published in the Chanukah/Purim 5784 issue of The Jewish American Warrior.
