The Wanganui Chronicle SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1939. THE REFUGEE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 29, 4 February 1939, Page 8

The Wanganui Chronicle SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1939. THE REFUGEE

world, lias witnessed two streams of refugees in the last two decades, one from Russia and the other from Germany. The refugee is a significant person because he leaves perforce one country and takes with him a heritage of culture which he engrafts on to the country of his adoption. The country which receives him is usually the gainer, while the country which turns him out is generally the poorer. The stream which flowed out of Muscory carried with it. a great love of the Old Russia, so much so that the refugees who left from the Crimea could not bring themselves to believe that they had been cast out. They settled in Constantinople and in Paris, where they have done their best, contriving to maintain their respectability and to preserve some of the culture with which they had been endowed. In large, measure these people were driven out because of their faith. There is much which can be said against the Greek Orthodox Church and its toleration of evil under the old Tsarist regime, but this much must be said for it, it never thrust people out of Russia. Communism, however, drove out the best elements, and Russia has been ever since endeavouring to replace the. human treasure that was thereby lost. The stream which flows out of Germany to-day also moves out because of its faith. Nazism and Communism have, that much in common they can make exiles. The outflow of people from Germany to-day is not wholly Jewish, but it is mainly so. Looking at the situation broadly, it is surprising that Nazism should have made this great attack upon Jewry, because it was in Germany that Jewry was more nearly absorbed into the nation. Why has this great rejection been staged? From the Nazi point of view, the question is easy to answer. There was the desire to.have a victim on which the national hate could be exercised, because hate against an outsider holds the mass of men together. It was, therefore, good mass, or mob, psychology. There was also a financial aspect in that Nazi Germany needed more money than it could collect from its citizens, so it deliberately despoiled the Jews. The persecution of the Jews in Germany has, therefore, served a double purpose. A lowed from the opposite end, however, the refugee presents a much more interesting problem. Why, in the great scheme of things, has this tremendous iniquity been permitted? What good purpose is served? What shall be the outcome of such apparent vandalism in human values?

It is as well to endeavour to view the matter as dispassionately as such a tremendous mass crime admits of, and to attain to a proper perspective it is as well to turn to the pages of history, Jewish history, and when this is done it is surprising howparallel is the past to the present day. In 175 B.C. Antiochus the Fourth seized the throne of Syria. His coins bore the title of Epiphanes “God made manifest.” His enemies called him “Epimanes” the “madman.” In his reign came the crisis of Judaism, in which it appeared convenient for the Jew to be absorbed in the Greek world. A Jewish reaction set in and the Chasidim, the. “pious ones” arose to maintain the purity of the Jewish faith. When Antiochus, in 169 B.C.- suddenly returned from Egypt, his soldiers plundered Jerusalem and sacked the Temple in order to replenish the Treasury. So far the parallels between the past and the present have been remarkable. But what happened to Jewry? Under persecution the Jews became proud of their faith, left their home and their fields, and went to the mountains and lived in caves clad in goatskins and sheepskins. There they hardened in character and fought a long guerrilla fight with their enemies in the Plains. In their anguish they saw the insufficiency of their belief that God rewarded a man for good works in the man’s own lifetime. God does not always do so, and yet God is just. Therefore, by such travail came the belief in the Immortality of the Soul and the certainty of life hereafter. Such a belief has sustained mankind ever since, but it is the fruit of Jewish sufferings among the mountain crags of their country. The Jew is in exile once more, and it is not hard to believe that such exile shall once more result in a greater revelation.