"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - John 8:32
A Jewish Writer On Anti-Jewish Sentiment - 1928
From: The Century Magazine, January 1928
An article (title unknown) by Marcus Eli Ravage the approved biographer of the Rothschilds.
Of course, you do resent us. It is no good telling me you don't. So
let us not waste any time on denials and alibis. You know you do,
and I know it, and we understand each other.
To be sure, some of your best friends are Jews, and all that. I
have heard that before once or twice, I think. And I know, too,
that you do not include me personally being any particular
individual Jew -- when you fling out at us in your wholesale
fashion, because I am, well, so different, don't you know, almost
as good as one of yourselves.
That little exemption does not, somehow, move me to gratitude; but
never mind that now. It is the aggressive, climbing, pushing,
materialistic sort you dislike -- those, in a word, who remind you
so much of your own up-and-coming brethren. We understand each
other perfectly. I don't hold it against you.
Bless my soul, I do not blame anybody for disliking anybody. The
thing that intrigues me about this anti-Jewish business, as you
play at it, is your total lack of grit. You are so indirect and
roundabout with it, you make such transparent excuses, you seem to
be suffering from self-consciousness so horribly, that if the
performance were not grotesque, it would be irritating.
It is not as if you were amateurs: you have been at it for over
fifteen centuries. Yet watching you and hearing your childish
pretexts, one might get the impression that you did not know
yourselves what it is all about. You resent us, but you can not
clearly say why.
You think up a new excuse -- a reason is what you call it -- every
other day. You have been piling up justifications for yourselves
these many hundreds of years and each new invention is more
laughable than the last and each new excuse contradicts and
annihilates the last.
Not so many years ago I used to hear that we were money-grubbers
and commercial materialists; now the complaint is being whispered
around that no art and no profession is safe against Jewish
invasion.
We are, if you are to be believed, at once clannish and exclusive
and unassimilable because we won't intermarry with you, and we are
also climbers and pushers and a menace to your racial integrity.
Our standard of living is so low that we create your slums and
sweated industries, and so high that we crowd you out of your best
residential sections.
We shirk our patriotic duty in wartime because we are pacifists by
nature and tradition, and we are the arch-plotters of universal
wars and the chief beneficiaries of those wars (see the late
Dearborn Independent passim, and The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion ).
We are at once the founders and leading adherents of capitalism and
the chief perpetrators of the rebellion against capitalism.
Surely, history has nothing like us for versatility!
And, oh! I almost forgot the reason of reasons. We are the
stiff-necked people who never accepted Christianity, and we are the
criminal people who crucified its founder.
But I can tell you, you are self-deceivers. You lack either the
self-knowledge or the mettle to face the facts squarely and own up
to the truth. You resent the Jew not because, as some of you seem
to think, he crucified Jesus but because he gave him birth. Your
real quarrel with us is not that we have rejected Christianity but
that we have imposed it upon you!
Your loose, contradictory charges against us are not a patch on the
blackness of our proved historic offense. You accuse us of stirring
up revolution in Moscow. Suppose we admit the charge. What of it?
Compared with what Paul the Jew of Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the
Russian upheaval is a mere street brawl.
You make much noise and fury about the undue Jewish influence in
your theaters and movie palaces. Very good; granted your complaint
is well-founded. But what is that compared to our staggering
influence in your churches, your schools, your laws and your
governments, and the very thoughts you think every day?
A clumsy Russian forges a set of papers and publishes them in a
book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which shows that
we plotted to bring on the late World War. You believe that book.
All right. For the sake of argument we will underwrite every word
of it. It is genuine and authentic.
But what is that beside the unquestionable historical conspiracy
which we have carried out, which we have never denied because you
never had the courage to charge us with it, and of which the full
record is extant for anybody to read?
If you really are serious when you talk of Jewish plots, may I not
direct your attention to one worth talking about? What use is it
wasting words on the alleged control of your public opinion by
Jewish financiers, newspaper owners and movie magnates, when you
might as well justly accuse us of the proved control of your whole
civilization by the Jewish Gospels?
You have not begun to appreciate the real depth of our guilt. We
are intruders. We are disturbers. We are subverters. We have taken
your natural world, your ideals, your destiny, and played havoc
with them. We have been at the bottom not merely of the latest
great war but of nearly all your wars, not only of the Russian but
of every other major revolution in your history. We have brought
discord and confusion and frustration into your personal and public
life. We are still doing it. No one can tell how long we shall go
on doing it.
Look back a little and see what has happened. Nineteen hundred
years ago you were an innocent, care- free, pagan race. You
worshipped countless gods and goddesses, the spirits of the air, of
the running streams and of the woodland. You took unblushing pride
in the glory of your naked bodies. You carved images of your gods
and of the tantalizing human figure. You delighted in the combats
of the field, the arena and the battle-ground. War and slavery were
fixed institutions in your systems.
Disporting yourselves on the hillsides and in the valleys of the
great outdoors, you took to speculating on the wonder and mystery
of life and laid the foundations of natural science and philosophy.
Yours was a noble, sensual culture, unirked by the prickings of a
social conscience or by any sentimental questionings about human
equality. Who knows what great and glorious destiny might have been
yours if we had left you alone.
But we did not leave you alone. We took you in hand and pulled down
the beautiful and generous structure you had reared, and changed
the whole course of your history. We conquered you as no empire of
yours ever subjugated Africa or Asia. And we did it all without
armies, without bullets, without blood or turmoil, without force of
any kind. We did it solely by the irresistible might of our spirit,
with ideas, with propaganda.
We made you the willing and unconscious bearers of our mission to
the whole world, to the barbarous races of the earth, to the
countless unborn generations. Without fully understanding what we
were doing to you, you became the agents at large of our racial
tradition, carrying our gospel to the unexplored ends of the earth.
Our tribal customs have become the core of your moral code. Our
tribal laws have furnished the basic groundwork of all your august
constitutions and legal systems. Our legends and our folk tales are
the sacred lore which you croon to your infants. Our poets have
filled your hymnals and your prayer books.
Our national history has become an indispensable part of your
pastors and priests and scholars. Our kings, our statesmen, our
prophets, our warriors are your heroes. Our ancient little country
is your Holy Land. Our national literature is your Holy Bible. What
our people thought and taught has become inextricably woven into
your very speech and tradition, until no one among you can be
called educated who is not familiar with our racial heritage.
Jewish artisans and Jewish fishermen are your teachers and your
saints, with countless statues carved in their image and
innumerable cathedrals raised to their memories. A Jewish maiden is
your ideal of womanhood. A Jewish rebel-prophet is the central
figure in your religious worship. We have pulled down your idols,
cast aside your racial inheritance, and substituted for them our
God and our traditions. No conquest in history can even remotely
compare with this clean sweep of our conquest over you.
How did we do it? Almost by accident. Two thousand years ago
nearly, in far-off Palestine, our religion had fallen into decay
and materialism. Money-changers were in possession of the temple.
Degenerate, selfish priests mulcted our people and grew fat. Then
a young patriot-idealist arose and went about the land calling for
a revival of faith. He had no thought of setting up a new church.
Like all the prophets before him, his only aim was to purify and
revitalize the old creed. He attacked the priests and drove the
money-changers from the temple. This brought him into conflict with
the established order and its supporting pillars. The Roman
authorities, who were in occupation of the country, fearing his
revolutionary agitation as a political effort to oust them,
arrested him, tried him and condemned him to death by crucifixion,
a common form of execution at that time.
The followers of Jesus of Nazareth, mainly slaves and poor workmen,
in their bereavement and disappointment, turned away from the world
and formed themselves into a brotherhood of pacifist non-
resisters, sharing the memory of their crucified leader and living
together communistically. They were merely a new sect in Judea,
without power or consequence, neither the first nor the last.
Only after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans did the new
creed come into prominence. Then a patriotic Jew named Paul or Saul
conceived the idea of humbling the Roman power by destroying the
morale or its soldiery with the doctrines of love and
non-resistance preached by the little sect of Jewish Christians.
He became the Apostle to the Gentiles, he who hitherto had been one
of the most active persecutors of the band. And so well did Paul do
his work that within four centuries the great empire which had
subjugated Palestine along with half of the world, was a heap of
ruins. And the law which went forth from Zion became the official
religion of Rome.
This was the beginning of our dominance in your world. But it was
only a beginning. From this time forth your history is little more
than a struggle for mastery between your own old pagan spirit and
our Jewish spirit. Half your wars, great and little, are religious
wars, fought over the interpretation of one thing or another in our
teachings.
You no sooner broke free from your primitive religious simplicity
and attempted the practice of the pagan Roman learning than Luther
armed with our gospels arose to down you and enthrone our heritage.
Take the three principal revolutions in modern times -- the French,
the American and the Russian. What are they but the triumph of the
Jewish idea of social, political and economic justice?
And the end is still a long way off. We still dominate you. At this
very moment your churches are torn asunder by a civil war between
Fundamentalists and Modernists, that is to say between those who
cling to our teachings and traditions literally and those who are
striving by slow steps to dispossess us.
In Dayton, Tennessee, a Bible-bred community forbids the teaching
of your science because it conflicts with our ancient Jewish
account of the origin of life; and Mr. Bryan, the leader of the
anti-Jewish Ku Klux Klan in the Democratic National Convention,
makes the supreme fight of his life in our behalf, without noticing
the contradiction.
Again and again the Puritan heritage of Judea breaks out in waves
of stage censorship, Sunday blue laws and national prohibition
acts. And while these things are happening you twaddle about Jewish
influence in the movies!
Is it any wonder you resent us? We have put a clog upon your
progress. we have imposed upon you an alien book and an alien faith
which you cannot swallow or digest, which is at cross-purposes with
your native spirit, which keeps you everlastingly ill-at-ease, and
which you lack either to reject or to accept in full.
In full, of course, you never have accepted our Christian
teachings. In your hearts you still are pagans. You still love war
and graven images and strife. You still take pride in the glory of
the nude human figure. Your social conscience, in spit of all
democracy and all your social revolutions, is still a pitifully
imperfect thing.
We have merely divided your soul, confused your impulses, paralyzed
your desires. In the midst of battle you are obliged to kneel down
to him who commanded you to turn the other cheek, who said Resist
not evil and Blessed are the peacemakers. In your lust for gain you
are suddenly disturbed by a memory from your Sunday-school days
about taking no thought for the morrow.
In your industrial struggles, when you would smash a strike without
compunction, you are suddenly reminded that the poor are blessed
and that men are brothers in the Fatherhood of the Lord. And as you
are about to yield to temptation, your Jewish training puts a
deterrent hand on your shoulder and dashes the brimming cup from
your lips. You Christians have never become Christianized. To that
extent we have failed with you. But we have forever spoiled the fun
of paganism for you.
So why should you not resent us? If we were in your place we should
probably dislike you more cordially than you do us. But we should
make no bones about telling you why. We should not resort to
subterfuges and transparent pretexts. With millions of painfully
respectable Jewish shopkeepers all about us we should not insult
your intelligence and our own honesty by talking about communism as
a Jewish philosophy.
And with millions of hard-working impecunious Jewish peddlers and
laborers we should not make ourselves ridiculous by talking about
international capitalism as a Jewish monopoly. No, we should go
straight to the point. We should contemplate this confused,
ineffectual muddle which we call civilization, this half-Christian
half-pagan medley, and -- were our places reversed -- we should say
to you point-blank: For this mess thanks to you, to your prophets
and to your Bible.