A Good Jew

Israel Shamir • August 5, 2024

A French revisionist publisher Jean Plantin is about to publish the book of Josef Ginsberg’s Guilt and Fate. Ginsberg was a famous man in his times; he inspired the ill-fated Ernst Zundel and accompanied him to his trial in Canada. Guilt and Fate was published in Germany in original German, and never translated. Ginsberg was afraid of persecution by Zionists and their supporters, and in his lifetime he gave only one interview. On his relationship to Zundel, you can read here.

The right time for this book is now, for the roots of the present war for Gaza go back to 1930s, and the memoirs of Joseph Ginsberg enlighten for us its circumstances.

Joseph Ginsberg (known under the nom de plume J G Burg) was a sincere, modest and humble man who lived through the difficult times of the Second World War and its aftermath. He witnessed exiles and deportations in Poland and Romania; came under Soviet occupation, and after the war he went to Germany, then to Israel in its very first years, and then back to Germany. He never overestimated his abilities and knowledge, and described himself thus:

“It is not my task to investigate the causes of the last war. Because I am not a historian. I am just a little Jew who was swept away in the current of time and who was forced to experience and suffer part of the tragedy.”

We may accept him as a witness of the time, understanding that he was a man of his time and his people. He hailed from Zhitomir in the Ukraine, brought up in the heavily Jewish part of Eastern Europe that fell, during his lifetime, under the rule of Russians, Romanians, Poles, Germans and Ukrainians.

The Jews were a strange social phenomenon: they moved from a country to country, forming an alternative Church and creating capitalist mechanism. As the result, ordinary folk remained impoverished spiritually and materially, while spirit and capital was concentrated in the Jewish hands. The Jews acted with consent of the King or its equivalent, to whom they offered the means to rule.

The result was always catastrophic for both sides: for the Jews and for the host society. Without money and without God, a society can’t survive for a long time. And then the society realised that it was swindled and acted against the Jews. This development happened in medieval Spain and France; it happened in 20th c Germany, and we witness the same process now in the US, Russia, France.

And then Jews have to move to a new territory, to repeat all this process again. At the bottom, there was hostility to non-Jews built into Judaism. So-called anti-Semitism is just an inversion of negative feelings towards their non-Jewish neighbours. Eventually, the world becomes too small for such an entity. That’s why in beginning of 20 c. almost all the world Jews were concentrated in the most far-away piece of Eastern Europe, at the border of Russia proper, which did not allow Jews to enter until 1917. That is the place where our author lived and flourished.

Being immensely clannish, the Jews practiced the exclusion of the native people. They interfered with them trading, and for this reason Poland and Romania did not develop capitalism. They considered capitalist management a unique art for themselves. As relatively rich folk, they had many children and the children survived. It created demographic problem: Jews had multiplied tenfold in the last hundred years, much faster than the native folk in the same area. Their occupation niche did not allow for such growth. There was no need for so many rabbis and clergy; nor for middlemen and small traders in a predominantly agrarian society. There was a glut of somewhat-educated men, with a lot of drive, energy, but very little interest in manufacture or agriculture. Too many Jews wanted to write for newspapers, to make revolution, to run banks and too few wanted to till the soil.

Emigration provided a pressure release but tended to irritate the neighbours. The Jews moved to Germany, France, the US, and later to Russia proper and to Palestine. Everywhere they experienced a lack of employment, encountered hurdles meant to prevent them from making a living, and were afflicted by a breakdown of their traditional fabric of life. Zionism was an answer to it: move to Palestine and till the earth. As we learn from real history, it was not the real thing. Zionists moved to Palestine and seized the lands, and brought Thai and Chinese farmers to till the soil for them. The Jewish problem could not be solved without undoing hatred to a native. Burg wrote: “the saddest times of the Tsarist regime, when we young Jews were also brought up to hate everything non-Jewish”, but it turned out that this hatred to native is an inherent quality of Jewish existence. Burg apparently felt it and he was one of the early anti-Zionists.

The book starts with the beginning of the Second World War. The author and other Jews ponder what they should do. The idea of fighting does not even occur to them. It is to run, and to run from their Ukrainian neighbours to the Germans. They have beautiful memories about Germans at the First World War, while the Ukrainians were and are the enemy. “I’m not most afraid of the Germans, but of the Ukrainians,” – writes Burg. Indeed, the Ukrainians responded with pogroms to clever Jewish stratagems. Some Jews are being killed by the Ukrainian robbers in the process of robbery, too. Our contemporary thinks that Jews were for Ukrainians and against Germans, and this book is likely to surprise and chock.

But the big choice is between the Red Army and Wehrmacht, and the Jews choose the German Army:

“An order has been issued to the Jews that they should flee from the Red Army to the part of Poland that the Germans have invaded”, announced the Zionist representative. Whose order? By order of the Zionists, explains the representative. As a result, “around 200,000 Jews had left eastern Poland and fled from the Russians to the Germans in accordance with the Zionist slogans”, says Burg.

It is not only good memories of Germans, but the Red Army is socialist, and the Jews do not want socialism – they want to become rich, and socialism does not allow for it.

The Germans changed their ways from WWI to WWII, and not only due to National Socialism, but also the massive Jewish immigration and Jewish enrichment in 1920s made an impact.

Burg runs to the borderlands of Romania and Russia, and remarks: “Restlessness is the essence of the Jewish temperament. That is why Jewish merchants and Jewish traders have always made a name for themselves in the world and automatically aroused envy and hatred.”

I can’t guess why Burg thought that his lot was enviable. It seems that European Jews typically assumed that most non-Jews envy them.

“When the Polish Ministry of Education wanted to hand over the chair of organic chemistry in Lviv to Professor Fayans, who had emigrated from Germany, at the end of 1935, the Ukrainian and Polish students threw rotten eggs at the professor and made the lectures impossible.”

Burg thought that the natives can’t prefer a local teacher; that every preference of non-Jew is a sign of bigotry. This is very typical for the Jewish attitude.

The 1930’s were the years of a rising Zionist movement. Burg, however, was an adversary of Zionism; he was perceptive enough to see that the Zionists were sowing the seeds of their own self-destruction:

“Zionism is not only spiritually related to anti-Semitism, it can’t live without it at all. The terrible thing is that it is precisely the Zionists who have the greatest interest in anti-Semitism.”

The Zionists certainly created anti-Semitism (or at least encouraged it) when they published “Germany Must Perish!”, the call to exterminate Germans by sterilising them. Another Zionist organisation, International Jewish Economic Federation to combat the Hitlerite Oppression of Jews, declared war on Hitler from the safety of New York, of course, writes Burg.

The saddest event for Burg was the Evian Conference, discussing how best to organise Jewish emigration from Germany. It turned out that the Germans were ready to approve and encourage Jewish emigration, but not many countries were willing to take in the German Jews, and there was no significant capital to encourage emigration. Now we know that the Zionists wanted to bring Jews only to Palestine, and they blocked all other possibilities. Palestine was a country of Palestinians, under British rule, and the Brits could not bring into Palestine millions of Jews.

Burg minted a sentence exemplifying his epoch:

“We Jews stand helplessly between the executioners and the hypocrites.”

Burg thought that the way forward was through friendship with the Germans, but the Zionists were dead set against it:

“Yehudi Menuhin wanted to come to Berlin to give a concert for the German population, the proceeds of which were to be used to help starving German children. Yehudi Menuhin was savagely insulted, especially by the Zionists, and labelled a traitor.”

The socialist Henrik Ehrlich shared his opinion of Zionism in the Warsaw Jewish “Volkszeitung” in May 1933: “Jewish nationalism is just as ugly and disgusting as the nationalism of other peoples. If Jewish nationalism in general is not bloodthirsty, it is out of necessity and not out of virtue. Should an opportunity present itself, it would prove this with teeth and claws, just like the nationalism of other peoples.”

In the aftermath of the war, there was a mass expulsion of Germans from Breslau as the city became Wrocław. German children left behind often mistook Yiddish for German, and approached runaway Jews. Burg tells that he fed them to great dissatisfaction of the other Jews.

Eventually Burg and many other Jews made their way to Germany, and there he witnessed the Nuremberg trial. There he learned that the Jews were being prevented from emigrating to wherever they liked. Many Jews assigned blame to the Americans and the British: why they did not spend more money and did not move the Jews to Palestine, or wherever? That is the line of Israeli’s Hasbara – otherwise one would have to condemn the Zionists, who did everything they could to block the emigration of Jews to anywhere but Palestine.

The American Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson condemned the Germans, who, in his view, wanted to use Jewish money for military purposes. Burg, however, quotes the words of Hjalmar Schacht, the economics boss of Germany, who claimed that if his plan had been carried out, “not a single German Jew would have died.”

Once the war was over, Germany was occupied by the Allies and the Jewish position was much improved. They could import things without taxes and custom duties, they got jobs in the process of “the infamous Aryanisation in reverse”. And then the war reparations began to roll in. Burg tells of various schemes by which the Jews cheated Germany out of billions of dollars.

Earlier, in 1949, Burg had moved to the recently-created State of Israel. These were very difficult times, and work was not easily available. He tried to open a bookbinding shop, but the state played a trick on him: once everything was arranged, the state doubled the rent. He noticed that only members of the ruling MAPAI party were entitled to stable positions and agreements. Everyone else was routinely and shamelessly taken advantage of.

“Social conditions in Israel at that time were worse than in any other European country. Almost all the immigrants had come from countries where conditions were far better than in Israel. Even the Jews coming from Africa and the rest of Asia claimed that they had never had to suffer as much misery in their home countries as they now did in Israel. The government proved incapable of managing things.”

If it was bad for Jewish immigrants, it was even worse for Palestinian natives. Burg went to Nazareth:

“The buses were repeatedly stopped, and Israeli military policemen checked the passengers’ identity cards. I felt like I was at war… indescribable poverty. Wherever you walked or stood, you were begged by dozens of Arab children. These Arab children were all undernourished…”

Israeli children were raised at hate non-Jews, says Burg, just like it had been in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Burg noticed: “While its socialist brother parties around the world advocate racial equality and the protection of national minorities, MAPAI governs with the harshest racial laws. It is well known that the Arabs, who are under the most severe political and economic pressure, are not even included in the labour unions. It is unthinkable that a socialist Arab could be accepted into the ranks of the socialist MAPAI. And it is completely unthinkable that under this socialist government in Israel a Jew could marry an Arab, much less an Arab marrying a Jewess.”

Eventually, the heart-broken Burg returned to Munich in Germany, with great difficulty, as it was difficult to leave Israel in these times. He was sorry that the Jews did not learn as much as they could have from the difficult history of the world war; he regretted that they did not create a state of equality.

Perhaps Burg’s hopes were unrealistic, but they were also shared by much of the world. In fact, the Zionists traded on such hopes and dreams. If WW2 was indeed a war between the Jews and Germany, then America fought to free the Jews. The question is, 80 years later, are the Jews free? Or have they become helpless, captured pawns of international Zionists scheming plots of world conquest?

https://www.unz.com/ishamir/a-good-jew/