Jews in Slovakia
By PAUL JAMARIK.
Among the many reports published by American papers every few days of anti-Jewish outbreaks in various parts of central and eastern Europe there have been one or two stories of Jewish persecution in Slovakia. Compared to detailed reports of cruelties in Poland and the Ukraine the charges against Slovaks have been mild and rather indefinite. But unless such stories are properly explained, they create the impression that the Slovaks are guilty of unreasonable and unworthy prejudice, that they are actuated by a religious and racial hatred toward the Jews living among them. An examination of the political and social conditions in Slovakia before the war will throw light on this question of anti-Jewish outbreaks.
Let it be stated first of all that the Czechoslovak people in general and the Slovaks in particular have never been anti-Semitic. Here and there single incidents of hatred or revenge for social or religious reasons may have occurred, but there has never been an anti-Jewish campaign or political party among the Czechoslovaks, such as the anti-Semites of Vienna who for decades and until a few months ago controlled the city hall of the Austrian capital. If cable reports speak of Jewish shops being plundered in Slovakia, it can only mean that the hungry and half-starved people broke into Jewish and other shops, because they believed that the shops contained great supplies of secretly stored food, held back in the expectation of higher prices. And no doubt public sentiment among the Slovaks after the overthrow of the Magyar rule was anything but favorable to the Jews who during the war and before it sided all along with the Magyar government.
Such a thing as a Jewish pogrom has never been known in Slovakia. The peasants were always friendly to the Jews and gave them preference in trading, often to their own detriment. Even in the United States Slovak Jews followed Slovak immigrants and established flourishing business among them. Jewish dealer settled in a Slovak village was generally looked up to as the wisest man in the village. In Bohemia and Moravia the Jews were treated even better, for there a large percentage of them indentified themselves with the Czechoslovak cause before and during the war.
Among the leading Czech deputies in the Austrian parliament were two Jews, and today they sit in Masaryk’s cabinet. President Masaryk himself is known to the Jews of the whole world as their friend; they do not forget how he once at the risk of his own personal popularity championed a Jew who had been found guilty by Austrian courts of ritual murder.
The Jews belong to a distinct race, but they have no nationality in the modern sense of the word. They are therefore peculiarly susceptible to denationalization and assimilation. A German or Russian Jew will become Americanized quicker than anybody else. He picks up a fluent command of English before the other immigrants even begin to think of learning English. For the Jew there is no sentiment attached to any language, except that of utility. He has no specific national culture to leave behind with regret, no native tongue to abandon. To an independent, strong nation the Jew may become an asset, but to a subjected, backward and weak race he may become a hindrance, an instrument of oppression.
In Hungary, of which Slovakia until her recent union with Bohemia was an unwilling part, there were only three classes: those at the bottom, including the peasantry and rural and industrial laborers; the upper class, consisting of the landlords who owned more than half of the arable land and all the big forests, together with the lesser nobility or gentry who made their living exclusively out of politics; and finally a small middle class of merchants and the so-called bourgeois. Magyar magnates, like Karolyi, Andrassy, Apponyi, were all in politics, both for the glory and for the spoils of it. The gentry was entirely subservient to the big noblemen who distributed political jobs in Budapest and in the counties to deserving and needy squires. In that way it came about that the Jew in Hungary acquired an absolute monopoly of business and industry, banking and journalism; through money-lending to the nobles he was getting into his hand also many
