Nathan Knorr: by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

J. F. Rutherford, according to the records of the testimony in the Moyle case, thundered. Nathan H. Knorr’s voice was rather thin, but pleasantly modulated, with an affecting timbre. He spoke with the practiced and prim voice of the headmaster who metes out reward and punishment dispassionately. It was a voice I learned, at Bethel, to dread, full of warm if fuzzy paternal concern one day, cold and razor-sharp the next, always rectitudinous. His rebukes were scathing. They came, as had Rutherford’s, at mealtimes.

The morning bells woke us at 6:30. At 6:55, showered and dressed, we ran down the stairs to the basement dining hall. We sat at tables of ten. Our day began with tension and bustle. Breakfast, served briskly and efficiently by white-coated waiters, lasted ten minutes and was preceded by a discussion of the Bible text for the day. Knorr or, in his absence, a director of the Society called upon members of the “family” for comments on the text. Being late was a Bad Thing: four hundred sets of eyes turned upon you if you attempted to slide invisibly into your place. Absenting oneself from breakfast altogether was a Very Bad Thing. If you were not there when Knorr called upon you, it was a Terrible Thing. (I can remember “sleeping over”—a rare self-indulgence—no more than five times in three and a half years. On those occasions, I had breakfast at a cheap drugstore counter in the Heights; no other meals ever tasted as good. I drank coffee and ate sugary, doughy apple turnovers and looked around and thought wonderingly that this was the way other people lived all the time. I savored those few moments of anonymity.)

Sometimes, in addition to the discussion of the text, there was a harangue. (I remember the aroma of coffee brewing in the kitchen, the effort to look alert and intelligent when one was dopey with sleep and to arrange one’s face muscles into an unrevealing mask.) We never, afterward, discussed among ourselves the justice of Knorr’s attack; we avoided each others eyes; there was no redress for the victim, no acquittal in a court of popular opinion.

The attack that stands out most vividly in my mind was one that was wrapped in an anti-Semitism that has infected the Watchtower Society since its beginning. In the Watchtower printery, and at the Bethel residence, we worked eight hours and forty minutes a day, five and a half days a week. We filled out time sheets daily at the factory, and there was no time allotted for coffee or rest breaks. An elderly Bethelite on my floor of the factory kept a small supply of chocolates and candies, which he sold to hungry workers at candy-store cost on an honor system; we dropped our nickels and dimes into a box while he was busy at his menial work. I suppose he made a few pennies’ profit each day; and I suppose also that he was one of those who received no financial help from the outside, so that those pennies were important. I can’t remember ever having heard him speak.

Knorr heard about the little enterprise and read the old man out, at great length, in public. He tied his attack to the fact that the man was a Jew. The Jews, Knorr asserted, had always been willful, penny-grubbing ingrates. Jehovah had chosen them precisely to show that such unappetizing raw material could be redeemed if they adhered to His laws. The candy seller was, Knorr said, demonstrating all the abysmal qualities that had led the Jews to kill Christ. And so on, for an hour, while I cringed. Part of the horror was in knowing that there was no one I could share it with, no one to whom I would or could protest; part of the horror was my guilt. My silence was complicitous.

We see the beginnings of the return of divine favor to fleshly Israel already manifested in the beginning of a turning away of their blindness and their prejudice against Christ Jesus, in the opening up of the land of promise and their expulsion from other lands, and also in the returning fruitfulness of Palestine itself…. Fleshly Israel, recovered from blindness, shall he used as a medium through whom the streams of salvation, issuing from the glorified, spiritual Israel, shall flow to all the families of the earth.—SS, Vol. 111(1891), pp. 293, 307

Nothing in the return of the Jews to Palestine and the setting up of the Israeli republic corresponds with Bible prophecies concerning the restoration of Jehovah’s name-people to his favor and organization.—LGBT, rev. ea., 1952, pp. 213-18

In 1911, Charles Taze Russell returned from a trip around the world to a great ovation in the New York Hippodrome, where he was acclaimed by thousands of New York Jews. Russell supported the Jews’ return to Palestine He saw the Jews as God’s instruments. But even as he proclaimed that Israel would be the medium of salvation, he commented on the “unchanged physiognomy of Jews,” their hooked noses, and talked with scarcely concealed contempt of their supposed predilections: “Among the relics of antiquity that have come down to our day, there is no other object of so great interest as the Jewish people…. The national characteristics of many centuries ago are still prominent, even to their fondness for the leeks and onions and garlic of Egypt, and their stiff-necked obstinacy.” [SS III, pp. 243-244]

Russell believed that the pogroms and the persecution of the Jews inspired by God (for their own good and for the ultimate glory of mankind and he believed also that a disproportionate number of Jews are blessed with the ability to score worldly and financial success. [Ibid., pp. 270-71]

Russell had proclaimed that “the deliverance of fleshly Israel” was due to take place before 1914: “The re-establishment of Israel in the land of Palestine is one of the events to be expected in this day of the Lord.” [Ibid., 244] The year 1881, he believed, marked the time for “the turning back of special light upon the long-blinded Jews.” [p. 278] “Restitution,” he wrote, would begin in Palestine: “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with Daniel and all the holy prophets, will be made perfect—awakened from death to perfect manhood, after the Gospel Church has been glorified; and they will constitute the ‘princes in all the earth,’ the earthly and visible representatives the Christ.” [p. 265] He claimed to have it on the authority of missionaries that since 1878, unprecedented “showers and dews in summer” had blessed the Holy Land, preparing it for the influx of Jews, who were “buying I planting and building, and getting possession of the trade of the city… many of them . . . rising to distinction far beyond their Gentile neighbors.” [pp. 265-66] Jews had been propelled to Palestine by persecution in Russia and Germany, which had been “permitted” by God: “God has permitted . . . afflictions and persecutions to come as a penalty for their national crime of rejection of the gospel and crucifixion of the Redeemer. He will . . . in due time reward the constancy of their faith in his promises. . . God foreknew their pride and hardness of heart…. Within the present century a sifting and separating process is manifest among them, dividing them into two classes, the Orthodox and the Non-orthodox Jews.” The Non-orthodox Jews, Russell declaimed, were “losing faith in a person God . . . drifting toward liberalism, rationalism, infidelity. The Orthodox include most of the poor, oppressed Jews, as well as some of the wealthy and learned, and are vastly more numerous than the Non-orthodox; though the latter are by far the more influential and respected, often bankers, merchants, editors, etc.” [p. 248]

Horrified equally by rich Jews and the specters of socialism and anarchism, that triple threat, as he saw it, could be eradicated by a simple expedient: “Not until further persecutions shall have driven more of the poorer Jews to Palestine, and modern civilization shall be still further advanced there, will the wealthier classes of Jews be attracted thither; and then it will be in great measure from selfish motives—when the general and great time of trouble shall render property less secure in other lands than it is now. Then Palestine, far away from socialism and anarchism, will appear to be a haven of safety to the wealthy Jews.” A singularly nasty vision, nor did it come to pass quite as Russell foretold. The Jews did not accept Christ as their Savior; and so, once again, the Watchtower Society had to modify its theology to accommodate external realities: By 1952, the Witnesses had changed their opinions, and Russell’s fantasies had been put to rest: “Many Jewish leaders believe the Bible supports their being regathered a second time to their ‘Holy Land of Palestine,’ ” the Witnesses were told (they were not told that Russell had shared and promulgated that belief.. “Failing to see that spiritual Israel has become the heir to God’s promises, they do not appreciate that the . . . fulfillment [of prophecy] applies to the ‘Israel of God,’ made up of those Jews, inwardly spiritual Israelites, who came out from captivity to this Babylonish world…. Israel’s applying for admission into the United Nations and her accepting membership in that worldly body which assumes to take the place of Messiah’s rule is a flat rejection of God’s kingdom of the heavens.” [LGBT, pp. 213-18]

It’s an old and wicked story. The oppressed are blamed for their oppression: “To this day the natural circumcised Jews are suffering the sad consequences from the works of darkness that were done within their nation nineteen hundred years ago. This illustrates what can happen to a whole nation that comes under the influence of that unseen superhuman intelligence, Satan the Devil.” [TW, Nov. I, 1975, p. 654]