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pression and comprehension-so tragic that "they laugh at you when
you speak of it, and this is the greatest tragedy of all."
We do not find this premonition in Spinoza or Marx. Freud in
his old age reeled mentally under the blow of Nazism. To Trotsky
it came as a shock that Stalin used against him the anti-Semitic in–
nuendo.
As
.a
young man Trotsky had, in most categorical terms,
repudiated the demand for Jewish "cultural autonomy" which the
Bund, the Jewish Socialist Party, raised in 1903. He did it in the
name of the solidarity of Jew and non-Jew in the socialist camp.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, while he was engaged in an un–
equal struggle with Stalin and went to the party cells in Moscow
to expound his views, he was met there with vicious allusions to his
Jewishness and even with plain anti-Semitic insults. The allusions and
insults came from members of the party which he had, together with
Lenin, led in the revolution and the civil war. In Trotsky's archives
I have found a letter which he wrote about this to Bukharin in 1926.
He described the scenes in the Moscow organization and asked: "Is
it possible ..."- and you can feel
in
the words and in
his
under–
scorings the anguish, the astonishment and the horror of the man–
"is it possible that
in our party, in workers' celis, here in Moscow,
people should use anti-Semitic insults with impunity? Is it possible?"
With the same astonishment and anguish he asked the same question
at a session of the Politbureau, where his colleagues shrugged him
off and pooh-poohed the matter. Mter another quarter of a century,
and after Auschwitz and Majdanek and Belsen, Trotsky's question had
to be asked anew when once again, this time much more openly and
menacingly, Stalin resorted to the anti-Semitic innuendo and insult.
IV
It is an indubitable fact that the Nazi massacre of six million
European Jews has not made any deep impression on the nations of
Europe. It has not truly shocked their conscience. It has left them
almost cold. Was then the optimistic belief in humanity voiced by
the great Jewish revolutionaries justified? Can we still share their
faith in the future of civilization? I admit that if one were to try
and answer these questions from an exclusively Jewish standpoint
it would be hard, perhaps impossible, to give a positive answer.
As
to myself, I cannot approach the issue from an exclusively Jewish
