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we refer to individuals as "good Samaritans"? If, on the other hand, within a certain context someone would choose to designate or symbolize the Middle Age Crusaders as "Christians", very few pious Christians of our day would care to identify themselves with the same term. Would the first instance make this writer a convert to Christianity, or would the latter instance turn a Christian anti-Christian?

ANTI-SEMITISM AND SELF-HATRED

There is also a rather interesting aside. Mr. Runes is right in suggesting that some converts from Judaism have been known to become enemies of Judaism. But equally known has been the phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred on the part of non-converts. Somehow they walk around with a chip on their shoulder for having been born Jews, and parenthetically, this occasionally leads them to adopting rather fantastic first or family names, like Dagobert, for instance. Furthermore, this very crusading publisher, who could not swallow the insult of "my people", who prides himself on having written books on the Torah and on the Kabbalah, keeps using quite contemptuously a word of his own coining-"Talmudizing" (in his letter to a Mr. Richard DeHaan, a copy of which is before me). When we add to this a quote from a letter with which Mr. Runes has "honored" this writer (in response to a request for a confrontation of the editions of Marx's books quoted under Runes title "A World Without Jews"), the suspicion of his own bigotry becomes quite definite: "From your name I take you to be a European or something like that. Your approach is strictly from East of the Danube River. Firstly, for an author on the Torah and the Kabbalah it may be quite unforgivable that he has missed the purely Hebrew-Aramaic origin of a name like Arnoni (Arnuniyoth). Secondly, referring to Europeans "or something like that" he discloses an American chauvinism (-Let no one accuse me, Dagobert D. Runes, of weak Americanism just because I was born overseas!) more compatible with the Daughters of the American Revolution or a Westbrook Pegler than with a self-professed crusader against bigotry which he found in Hitler and... Karl Marx. Thirdly, speaking of Hitler, Mr. Runes seems to share with him a feeling of natural superiority towards the people "East of the Danube River".

One must indeed be deprived not only of intellectual integrity but also of common honesty to make Runes' claim that Hitler's advent to power was made possible by the anti-Semitism Marxism fostered in Germany. But Runes states unhesitatingly: "It is therefore not surprising that Adolf Hitler was able to take over the Marxist unions of Germany almost unchecked." The thousands of former leaders of Marxist and non-Marxist German trade unions who shared this writer's plight in Nazi concentration camps were according to Runes Marx's willing tools for Hitler's victory. How insane can Runes get?

DISCOVERING AMERICA AND...CONFESSIONS

But the fraud keeps piling up. The "Eminent Philosopher", who claims no one can get a degree in philosophy or social history without studying his books, has never heard of Birobidzhan until "(As) Khrushchev himself CONFESSED, Stalin planned to rele- gate all the Jews of Russia to the marsh- lands of Biro-Bidjan in SIBERIA" (Capitals added). When and where did Khrushchev make that "CONFESSION"? And, how could he make a "confession" about an official, self-admitted, well-publicized decision of the Soviet Government to establish a Jewish Autonomous Province in Birobidzhan, a province that even attracted some Jewish immigration from outside the Soviet Union? Is it possible that the Jewish-minded Mr. Runes did not know all this, or is it that he chose to speak about a confession that could not have been confessed, in spite of his knowledge of facts? Then too, should not one expect of a self-professed authority on philosophy and social history at least an elementary knowledge of geography? It so happens that the reference to Birobidzhan as a part of Siberia can be made only in the rather archaic, sloppy and inexact sense in which all of Asian Russia is considered as Siberia. Why wasn't Mr. Runes more up-to-date and specific in his geographic reference? Because he obviously used it advisedly to associate Birobidzham, in the reader's mind, with those icy parts of Asian Russia that were the suffering sites of katorga and seylka. Does an honest scholar resort to such insidious geographic associations in spite of all the geographic dissimilarities and unrelatedness, obvious to the elementary student of geography?

When Runes proceeds to claim that Khrushchev "publicly admitted having ...reintroduced the Czarist numerus clausus in all schools of higher education in the Soviet Union", he is by now a much too compromised source to make such allegations without referring to a specific place. time and record that would make a verification of his claim possible.

ZIONISM, ISRAEL AND ANTI-SEMITISM

Then Runes presents a whole new parade of "evidence" to "prove" the existence of official Soviet anti-Semitism. And, in one way we do identify ourselves with his indignation against the hostile attitude of the Soviet Union to Zionism and Israel. I agree with Runes fully when he states that "There is no Sabbath Judaism without Zionism" and that "Judaism is as little possible without Zionism as Christianity without Christ." But I am aware that there are other just as legitimate opinions on the subject as Runes and mine. If everyone who is not a Zionist, or if everyone who is an anti-Zionist were to be classified as an anti-Semite, then indeed we live in a terribly anti-Semitic world, and Mr. Runes may add to his collection of anti-Semites" (to keep company with Marx and Hitler) such men as Mahatma Ghandi, George Bernard Shaw, Nehru (whom he actually accuses of anti-Semitism), the great Jewish historian Dubnow, to mention just a few "greats", in addition to a multitude of Jews and non-Jews, all over the world.

The same goes for those people and groups who for political reasons find themselves in opposition to the State of Israel or its policies. This is a subject at least as close to this writer's heart as it is to Runes'. I have participated personally and actively in Israel's struggle for independence. Prior to the establishment of that Republic, I have engaged in highly dangerous underground activities to bring it about. I have "illegally" guided Jews across the boundaries of Soviet occupied East European countries to bring them to the Promised Land. I have contemptuously rejected a British "certificate" for legal entry to Palestine and instead have shared the fate of the many people I inspired and led on perilous, "illegal" journeys to Palestine. Hardly recuperated from my close to six- year experience in German concentration camps, I was incarcerated in a British concentration camp in Cyprus for one year and a half. My only remaining kin, not destroyed by the Nazis, outside my own post-war immediate family are in Israel. Israel with her unprecedented program of construction and the raising of human values has my heartfelt blessings, sympathy and devotion. Yet, when someone like Mr. Runes attempts to equate all political opposition to Israel or her policies with anti-Semitism, I believe him to be committing an unforgivable intellectual and political fraud. If the late President Zapolocki's of Czechoslovakia reference to a "Jerusalem-New York axis" is anti-Semitism, then all references to the Communist block of nations is anti-Slavism and all references to a Washington-London alliance is anti-Anglo-Saxonism. The same goes for Mr. Runes' quote of Mao Tse-Tung's reference to Israel as "the Formosa of the Mediterranean".

When Runes states that "the German as well as the Russian forms of Socialism, be they national or international, have never freed themselves of the taint of malevolent Jew hatred", he is committing a double fraud: one, by equating Nazism with Socialism, the other by not admitting that, with all the grievances Jews and specifically Zionists may justly entertain against the Soviet Union, the historic truth is that most Jewish sufferings under the Communists were not anti-Semitically caused but followed on ideological and religious clash that neither was confined to the Jews nor singled them out. When Runes further states that "in the Communist domain, the governments themselves spearhead the drive against the ancient people", he is committing still another historical fraud, because anyone acquainted with Czarist Russia and East Europe before World War II known that much more than the Jews were made to suffer as Jews by the Communists, they were shielded by them against unending waves of persecution, pogroms and physical extermination.

AN "UNEXPURGATED" EDITION WITH OMISSIONS AND MISTRANSLATIONS

In the main we have restricted ourselves to a review of Runes' introduction to his "small book". As for the pages devoted to the reproduction of some of Marx's early polemical articles, upon which he has superimposed his own title "A World Without Jews", a survey of their manipulative omissions and outright mistranslations would require much more time and space than Runes' work deserves. Some examples will amply indicate the type of fraud he indulges in in this department. They explain why Runes felt compelled to acknowledge (on the dust jacket only!) that he "edited" Marx's text. The German term Judentum (Judaism) and Judenschaft (Jewry) manipulatively interchanged by Runes with the obviously fraudulent intention of representing Marx's negation of Judaism as a Hitler-like exterminationism of the Jews themselves; Schacher is mistranslated into "usury" (which it indeed means in Yiddish but not in German) instead of "small trade".

This writer is fully aware of the seriousness of the charges he has made against Mr. Runes. If unfounded, they certainly are libelous. I also know that Mr. Runes is not eager to sue those who denounce his literary fraud. When the aforementioned Mr. Richard DeHaan had his letter published in the New York Times, in which he not only denounced Runes but also invited him to file suit for libel, the "Eminent Philosopher" resorted to the traditional way-out in a private letter to the challenger: "You invite me to sue you. Brother, I don't shoot at sparrows with cannons". In my case, however, the situation is different; I have an advanced commitment from Mr. Runes implying that, not being a sparrow, I might be sued for libel (which he expressed in a letter to me). But one can never be certain about Mr. Runes' reactions. Will he sue me for libel (he knows better than to risk an examination of his literary fraud!) or will he threaten me as he did Mr. DeHaan: "take care I not (sic!) blow you away into the crack (he doesn't know anatomical terms either!) from whence you came." When Mr. Runes complained in a letter to another editor about the reviewer of his book for having felt "the need to cut down the size of the man he intends to attack", the question arises who does the cutting- Mr. Runes' reviewers or Mr. Runes himself with his "literary" endeavors and the language of his polemic that all too frequently is that of a hoodlum rather than a bona fide scholar.