When Cleveland and Lakewood arranged for a community Christmas, the Cleveland Jewish press said: “The writer of this has no idea how many Jews there are in Lakewood, but if there is only one, there should be no community Christmas, no community religion of any kind.” That is not a counsel of tolerance, it is a counsel of attack. The Christmas literature of American Judaism is fiercer than the flames of the Inquisition. In the month of January, the Jewish press has urged its readers to begin an early campaign against Christmas celebrations the next Christmas—“Only three hundred and sixty days before Christmas. So let us do our Christmas arguing early and take plenty of time to do it.”
If anything, Easter is attacked yet more bitterly. But we refrain, for good reasons, from repeating what Jews commonly say on such occasions. The strange inconsistency of it all is to see the great department stores of the Levys and the Isaacs and the Goldsteins and the Silvermans filled with brilliant Christmas cheer and at Easter with the goods appropriate to the time. The festivals of the “heathen” are very profitable. Jewish merchants have been chided for this—not over-severely—by certain rabbis. But on the whole the rabbis had better remain content, for there are no forces more rapidly secularizing the two festival days than are the merchandising and profiteering forces.
Even religious intolerance has its gleesome moments, and the Jews’ come whenever the signs appear of the greater secularization of the church. One parallel between the Protocols and the real hopes of the Jews is written in the common Jewish prophecy that Christianity is doomed to perish. It will perish by becoming, to all intents and purposes, Judaism. And it will become Judaism, first, by ousting all the doctrines pertaining to the person of Christ, excising from the Gospels the great “I Ams” which are His distinctive teachings concerning Himself; and, second, by devitalizing Christianity of all the spiritual content which flows from a union by faith with a Person believed to be divine. That is the only way it can