The Evening Star FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9, 1938. JEWS AND GHETTOS.

Evening Star, Issue 23136, 9 December 1938, Page 8

The Evening Star FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9, 1938. JEWS AND GHETTOS.

“ The world’s Dark Age begins anew ” might be a motto for the German Government’s persecution of Jews. In addition to the restrictions, enforced flights, and spoliations which have disgraced humanity in the latest era a new step has been taken. Decrees have been issued, the forerunners, it is announced, of similar ones to be introduced throughout Germany, which will relegate Jews in Berlin to a more oppressive ghetto than that of the Middle Ages. Whereas they then enjoyed freedom of movement, except for the curfew, they are now permanently restricted to a limited quarter, chosen as the most dismal in the entire city. The wearing of a yellow rosette, as tin invitation to assaults it they wander abroad, is also being imposed on them. So far as enactments can provide they

will also be forced, to live in general conditions- of the Dark Ages, forbidden all the amenities of which they can be deprived.

“ Back to the Ghetto ” should be as proud a cry for Nazism as “ Back to Thor and Odin,” which is still something less than an official slogan. Tho ghetto system in Europe had its rise in tho twelfth century, enforced by religious intolerance. Jews’ quarters, for a beginning, became places of ostracism because Christians were forbidden to live among them. A special garb for the oppressed people was prescribed, which had the effect of making them figures of obloquy, but the legal regulations regarding ghettos were not enforced with their full vigour till the sixteenth century, and their severity differed at different times and in different countries. The. whole influence of the system was degrading. One can read in ‘ Ivauhoe,’ whose date is set at the end of tho twelfth century, how Jews were then treated in’ England very much as they are to-day in Germany. It was King John, the successor to the King Richard the Lion Heart of that romance, who drew a Jew’s teeth one by one to induce him to make successive disgorgements of. his wealth. No calumny was too wild in that ignorant and superstitious time to be credited against tho descendants of Abraham, a state of things which the unspeakable Herr Streicher has done his best to revive in Germany to-day. Only two reigns after John’s Jews were expelled from England, not to return legally till the time of Cromwell. England was tho last country of their arrival, in Western Europe, and the first from which they were completely expelled. The bad chapter in its treatment of the chosen race was brief, therefore, as well as early, and presumably loft no time for tho ghetto system to be established. The extreme development of that system in other countries was left to the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, which have been called “ the real dark ages ” of later Jewry. Within their ghettos the Jews were more or less a self-governing community under their own authorities, who wero responsible for the collection of their oppressive communal taxation. Economic activity was, however, restricted by law to money-lending and a few more of the meanest occupations. The houses tended to bd of unusual height, since areas were cramped. The ghettos were enclosed with walls and gates, which were kept locked at night and on certain church festivals, when the faithful were easily induced to show their Christianity by tho harrying of Jews. The French Revolution, it has been said, “ temporarily swept away the infamous system, though it was widely restored in the reaction that followed. It was abolished, however, for good by the Liberal movements of the nineteenth century, the last vestige disappearing with the capture of Rome in 1870.”

Herr Hitler is writing an addendum to that note which future generations of Germans will read with shame. It is an old tradition of Germany, however, which he is reviving. It was in the Rhineland, at the time of the first Crusade, that there took place the “ first of the long series of massacres which made the Middle Ages one long martyrdom for the Jews.” It was Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of the composer, who won for tho German Jews a new period of consideration which they enjoyed till tho advent of Nazism. Herr Hitler’s life-long antipathy to Jews has been something apart from reason. Abnormalities like Herr Streicher are unaccountable. But, apart from all other aspects, tho mediaeval treatment of the Jews which has been revived by Nazism is proving already the worst of policy. It is making the greatest obstacle to an AngloGerman accord, and it has destroyed the last chance of the return of colonies. No native race could be given over to the control of rulers who have such ideas of what is due to “ nonAryans.”