A charge of great importance during the height of prejudice against the Russian Soviet government was that the Jews were responsible for that government, its success and its excesses. The inevitable conclusion was, then, that the Jews were trying to introduce the ideals of the Soviets into the United States. Even when this conclusion was not drawn, the connection was so emphasized as to minister to anti-Semitic sentiment. John Spargo [100]made a special effort to minimize this rather indirect, but at the time very dangerous piece of propaganda. He showed that the number of Jews in high position in Russia was very small, while the larger number of government clerks and similar functionaries was due to the larger percentage of educated men among Jews than among the mass of Russians; that the great commercial class of Jews were financially ruined by the socialistic policy of the government; that the Jews of Russia were divided among the several political parties for and against the Communists; and finally that the Bolsheviki had suppressed Jewish religious schools, like Christian ones, and estranged the orthodox of both religions. But the anti-Semitic writers used the Russian Revolution to show the growing menace of Jewish power the world over. Finally, the charge of the Dearborn Independent that there is a Jewish world conspiracy to overthrow the governments of the world in favor of an all-Judaic power. To the person who knows Jewish life, broken into so many conflicting theories and different cultural and economic groups, the whole viewpoint is too ridiculous to require disproof. It is merely another sign that the modern conception of social and economic process is very new indeed and has made little headway into the group mind. Every world process from the World War to the fall of the German mark, from immodest clothing to vapid popular songs, must be blamed on a person or race. In this case the person disliked is the Jew, and everything is blamed on him. But a different group prejudice could just as well ascribe these same factors to the German (as during the war), to the Russian, to the international bankers, or to the Republican party. Again, we are confronted by the rationalization of a group prejudice, and in this case the rationalization is merely unusually fantastic. As Ludwig Lewisohn sums up anti-Jewish prejudice: [101]Jew-baiting has nothing to do with the quality of Jewish characteristics. We are hated for our wealth and for our poverty, for our plutocrats and for our Reds, for display and for hard-headedness and warm-heartedness, for arrogance and servility, for pushingness and reserve, for speech and silence, for political participation and nonparticipation. If we desire assimilation you drive us out of your universities by chicanery and insult; if we do not strive after assimilation you say we ought to go where we came from. To this we may compare the interesting if somewhat hasty generalization of Friedman: