The star of David

Exhibition under the patronage of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs
and the British Council.

Preface by Herbert Read

Geza Szobel has already shown, in drawings which depicted the miseries of modern war and the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, that he is a master of the particular technique which gives to the pen and brush those qualities of precision and excision which we normally associate with surgical instruments. His hand does not tremble, nor his vision falter, before subjects from which most of us would turn our outraged eyes. The questions that therefore arise in connection with his art are apt to be ethical rather than æsthetic. The public can admire the skill of this artist, but they may be inclined to ask : Should he use it for such a purpose? Must we be made to look upon such things ? Surely the world has pleasanter aspects to which the artist could more properly devote his talents ? The purpose of art, such people imply, is the creation of beauty and not the revelation of ugliness.

The new series of drawings which is now exhibited under the auspices of the British Council and the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs is devoted to a subject which exceeds in horror even the excesses of the concentration camp. Men, women and children, who are neither declared enemies nor political opponents of the diseased minds that now tyrannize over Europe, are herded together and sent into concentration camps and ghettoes from which they never return. A minority of able men are driven into slavery : the rest are either slaughtered brutally like dumb and unresisting cattle, or suffer the more horrible death which comes from starvation and overcrowding. The accusation under which they die is in their blood, and is not any effect of mind or will, which is the criterion of guilt in any humane society.

These people belong to the race of the divine prophets, of Moses and Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Job : they have sung with David and Saul, and their tribulations have become “ the still, sad music of humanity ” : they gave the world Jesus Christ, with His gospel of love and forgiveness : and in modern times, not to speak of countless other gifts, philosophy has reached its sublimest point in Spinoza, poetry its most fault- less lyricism in Heine, and the faculty of understanding its farthest reach in Einstein. Like all human beings, Jews have their faults, but in so far as these are the faults of a particular class or race, they are the effects of persecution. The wander- ing Jew has been a universal scapegoat, and his sins of covetousness or of greed are but the enlarged reflection of the same vices in the nations which have condemned them to a servile or exclusive status. But the Jew is not only a scape- goat : he might endure that indignity with resignation had not a worse fate befallen him. In the modern world he has become the focus of those sadistic impulses which are the most hideous aspect of modern civilisation, and from which no nation is altogether exempt (for where Jews do not exist in sufficient numbers, or are too numerous and powerful, then some other downtrodden race fulfils the same rôle). How, in the course of centuries, these impulses have arisen, and what steps should be taken for their eradication, is a question for TWO AGAINST TWO the psychologist. Here I can only mention the hypothesis that such impulses are a consequence of that feeling of social insecurity which characterises an economy based on finance capital, and there are, of course, special reasons of an historical nature for associating the Jewish people with the origins and development of that system. Whatever the explanation, it is certain that the sadistic lust to dominate and torture other people is always based on weakness, and not on strength. The anti-semites in our own country are composed either of snivelling little cads utterly lacking in self-confidence and integrity : or of pompous bullies inflated with the gases of their own moral corruption. Or to put it more mildly, the anti-semite is always a “ case ”” ripe for the psychiatrist. These are facts which the psychologist can demonstrate to a select audience : a wider public must be reached by more direct means, and none is more direct than the pictorial image. It penetrates immediately to the unconscious, and there works with unrealised effect. Such is the justification—the ethical justification—for Szobel’s drawings. I do not suppose that they will cure a neurosis of such universal dimensions. But wherever they are seen they will stir the conscience of humanity, and contribute their vivid share to the solution of those social problems among whose symptoms none is more tragic and extreme than the persecution of the Jews.

Herbert READ.