The Ancient Scriptures and the Modern Jew/Chapter 10
THE GENERAL CONDITION OF THE JEWS AT THE CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY FROM A JEWISH POINT OF VIEW
'"THE following comprehensive survey was given JL by Dr. Max Nordau, at the first Zionist Con- gress in Basle, in August, 1897. It nas been translated by Mrs. Baron, from a special report in German. The footnotes are mine.
" This picture might almost be tinted as a monochrome, for wherever Jews are dwelling in any number among the nations, there Jewish misery prevails. This misery is not that of mere common poverty, which, according to the unchanging lot of earth, is ever our unfailing companion. It is a peculiar misery which befalls the Jews, not as men, but as Jews, and from which they would not suffer were they not Jews. Jewish distress is of two kinds, physical and moral.
"In Eastern Europe, in North Africa, in Western Asia, exactly in those lands where the overwhelming majority of Jews, probably nine-tenths of them dwell, Jewish misery is to be understood literally. It is a daily physical oppression, a terror of the day to follow, a torturous struggle to support a bare existence. In
Western Europe the battle of life is of late somewhat
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easier, although indications are not lacking to show that even here it may become more severe. But still, for the time being the question of food and shelter, of safety of body and life, is less anxious. Here the misery is of a moral description, and consists in daily mortifica- tion of self-respect and sense of honour, in the rough suppression of their effort to attain complete mental rest and satisfaction which none who is not a Jew need deny himself.
"In Russia, where the Jewish population is over five millions, and which is the home of more than half of the Jewish race, 1 our brethren are subject to many legal restraints. Only a small Jewish sect, the Karaites, enjoys the same privileges as the Christian subjects of the Czar. To the rest of the Jews residence in a number of the provinces is prohibited. Freedom of movement is only enjoyed by certain classes of Jews, such as merchants of the first guild, possessors of aca- demical titles, and so forth. But in order to belong to the first guild, a man must be rich, and there are few
1 This estimate of the number of Jews in the world, given at the first Zionist Congress in August, 1897, is considerably below the actual figure. At the fourth Congress in London in August, 1900, Dr. Nordau in a speech corrected his estimate in the fol- lowing passage : " When we began to preach Zionism, and to try to win followers and supporters for that movement, the wiseacres of our nation always urged the politico-anthropological argument, ' You speak of the Jewish nation ; there is no such thing ; Israel is not a nation.' We admit that as regards Western Jewry . . . that in those there is not left the slightest trace of Jewish national feeling, so speaking from their own sentiment they are right to deny the existence of a Jewish nation. But how many Jews are there in the world f According to the latest statistics, we muster about 12,000,000. Out of that number, perhaps, 300,000 have lost the national feeling. But the 11,700,000 who remain feel so con- vinced that they are a nation, that they would simply burst out into roars of laughter were anybody to seriously contend that they are not a nation."
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Russian Jews indeed who are rich ; and also very few are the Russian Jews who can obtain an academical title, for the State, middle, and high schools admit but a very limited number of Jewish students, and foreign diplomas are not recognised by the law. To Jews in Russia many trades are closed which are free to all Russians. These unhappy ones are packed together in a few provinces where no opportunity is permitted them to exercise their talents and to prove their cap- abilities by lawful means. Education as provided by the State is very little accessible to them ; schools of their own they cannot provide, they are too poor for that. Whoever can leaves the land to seek abroad the oppor- tunities which are denied to him at home ; he who is not sufficiently young and courageous for this, remains in his misery and pines away intellectually, morally, physically.
" Of Roumania, with its quarter of a million Jews, we learn that our brethren there are also without rights. They are only permitted to live in towns, and are at the mercy of every whim of the civil authorities, and even of the lower officials, and from time to time they suffer terribly from the bloodthirsty mob, and are in the worst possible circumstances. 1 Our Roumanian informant places the number of Roumanian Jews who are entirely without means of support at one-half of the Jewish population.
" Horrible are the conditions which our reporter from Galicia reveals to us. Of the 772,000 Jews of Galicia,
1 Since then the condition of things in Roumania has become still less tolerable, and the year 1900 has witnessed the sad and pathetic spectacle of a tremendous exodus of Jews from that Balkan State which has the unenviable fame of being the most anti-Jewish in Europe. Hundreds of these Roumanian refugees have wandered across the whole of Europe on foot, from the Black Sea to the North Sea, some of them dying by the way.
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Dr. Salz estimates that 70 per cent, are literally beggars by profession, who ask alms mostly without receiving them.
"Of Western Austria, with its 400,000 Jews, Dr. Mintz informs us that of 25,000 Jewish householders in Vienna, 15,000, on account of poverty, cannot be assessed at all for Jewish communal purposes. Of the 10,000 who are so assessed, 90 per cent, have only the lowest possible tax laid upon them, and of this category of the lowest assessed, three-quarters are un- equal to fulfil their obligation. The written law in Austria, unlike that of Russia and Roumania, knows no difference between Jew and Christian. But the public authorities boldly treat the law as a dead letter, and custom recreates the Jewish ban, which the law had abolished. The sentiment of society which is inimical to the Jew makes it exceedingly difficult for him to make a living, and in the near future this will become wholly impossible.
"The same cry of distress greets us from Bulgaria. Again we find a hypocritical law which recognises no difference of privilege on account of difference of creed, but which is set aside by the authorities ; again an enmity in all circles which everywhere repulses the Jews ; again misery and wretchedness, with no hope of improvement.
"In Hungary the Jews make no complaint. They enjoy full rights of citizenship, can work and trade freely, and their condition continually improves. It is true that this happy state of things has not lasted sufficiently long for the majority of the Jews in Hun- gary to have worked their way out of the deepest poverty and attained to even a commencement of comfort. And we are assured by observers of the times that in Hungary also hatred of the Jew begins
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to make its appearance, which may break out destruc- tively at the first opportunity.
"The 1 50,000 Jews of Morocco,* and the Jews of Persia, whose number is unknown to me, I must leave out of count. Those whose plight is most miserable are power- less even to resist their wretchedness. They bear it with a dull endurance, and do not complain or attract our notice except when the rabble storms their Ghetto, plundering, abusing, and murdering.
" The lands of which I have made mention determine the lot of over seven millions of Jews, and, with the exception of Hungary, they all oppress the Jew, and official and social disfavour reduce him to a condition of wretchedness and professional beggary, without pos- sible hope either by personal or united effort of being able to rise a single grade in the social scale. Those ' practical ' people who will have nothing whatever to do with useless visions, and direct all their effort to the seemingly attainable, imagine that the cessation of legal oppression would terminate the woes of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Galicia is itself a contradic- tion of this view ; and not Galicia only, for salvation by means of legal emancipation has been attempted in all the higher civilised states. Let us see what the experiment teaches.
"The Jews of Western Europe suffer from no legal restrictions. They are free to go and come and develop their resources in the same way as their Christian compatriots. The social consequences of such free- dom ought without doubt to be the most favourable. Diligence, endurance, sobriety, and thrift, which are characteristics of the Jews, quickly brought about an amendment of their extreme poverty, which in many
1 The actual number of Jews in Morocco is at least 200,000.
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lands would be entirely at an end were it not for Jewish immigration from the East.
" The emancipated Jews of the past succeeded in a fairly short time in attaining to a measure of prosperity ; at any rate, the struggle for daily bread does not assume such dreadful forms as have been described in Russia, Roumania, and Galicia. But among these the second phase of Jewish misery appears, i.e., the moral.
" The Jew of the West has daily bread but man does not live by bread alone. The Western Jew no longer finds his body and life endangered by the mob, but wounds of the flesh are not the only ones which give pain, and of which one may bleed to death.
"The Western Jew looked on emancipation as truly effecting his deliverance, and hastened to draw from it all possible inferences. The nations let him know that he was mistaken in being so ingeniously logical. The law magnanimously established the theory of equality. Government and society so practised this equality as to make it a mockery, corresponding to the appointment of Sancho Panza to the brilliant post of viceroy of the island Barataria. The Jew naively remarks, "I am a man, and to me no man is a stranger." The answer returned is, " Softly ; your manhood is matter for cir- cumspection ; you lack a right sense of honour, the sense of duty, of morality, love of Fatherland, and love of the ideal. On account of this we must withhold our- selves from dealings with you which presuppose these qualities." None have ever attempted to substantially prove these accusations. At the most, now and again some individual Jew, an outcast from his race, and a reproach to humanity, has been triumphantly pointed out as a sample of Jewish character. But this is in accordance with a well-known law of psychology.
" It is the usual practice of the human conscience to
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seek some apparently reasonable foundation for the prejudices which have stirred up its passions. Folk-lore has long recognised this law of psychology, and has intentionally embodied it in expressive form.
" The proverb runs thus : ' If a man wants to drown a dog, he says it is mad.' All manner of crimes are imputed to the Jews because their enemies would justify themselves in their abhorrence of the Jew.
" I must give utterance to the painful truth : the nations who have emancipated the Jews have been self-deceived as to their true sentiments. In order for the emancipa- tion to have been complete it must have been perfected in goodwill ere ever it found expression in law. But this was not the case. The opposite was the case. The history of Jewish emancipation is one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of European thought. It is not come of the perception that a race has been shamefully sinned against, and that it is high time to atone for a thousand years of injustice ; it is simply the outcome of the straight-ruled geometrical manner of thought of French rationalism of the eighteenth century. This rationalism was simply bare logic without the slightest reference to living sensibility ; its principles were of the certainty of a mathematical axiom, and consisted in efforts to realise these visions of pure reason and to make them of account in the world. "Sooner let the colonies perish than one principle of reason," was the well-known cry, which shows the effect of rationalism on politics.
" The philosophy of Rousseau and the encyclopaedists had led to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. From the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the inflexible logic of the men of the great Revolution had led on to Jewish emancipation. They established a legalised equality. To every man by nature certain rights belong ;
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Jews are men ; it follows that they have human rights- And so the equal right of the Jew was proclaimed in France, and this from no sentiment of brotherly feeling for the Jew, but because logic required that it should be. Popular sentiment was against it, but the philosophy of the Revolution commanded that principle should rule over sentiment. Forgive me the expression which is free from any ingratitude, the men of 1792 emancipated the Jews purely from chivalry of principle.
" The rest of Western Europe imitated the example of France, again, not from the force of sentiment, but because the civilised nations experienced a kind of moral obligation to make the attainments of the great Revolution their own. As France at the great Revolution gave to the world the metrical system of weights and measures, so it created also a kind of intellectual measure, which was willingly or unwillingly accepted by the other lands as the normal standard of civilisation.
" A state which laid claim to a high grade of civilisation must necessarily have accepted some of the reforms of the great Revolution, such as representation of the people, freedom of the press, trial by jury, division of power, and so forth. Jewish emancipation became one of the indispensable signs of a highly civilised state, something like the piano which on no account must be missing in the drawing-room, though no single member of the family can play it. Thus in Eastern Europe Jewish emancipation came to pass not from heart com- pulsion, but merely in imitation of a fashion of the period ; not because the nations had resolved to extend the hand of brotherhood to the Jew, but because the leading spirits had recognised a certain European ideal of civilisation which required that their statutes should embrace Jewish emancipation.
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" One land only remained uninfluenced by European thought, and this land was England. The English nation does not endure that important changes should be im- posed upon it from without ; it develops them from within. In England Jewish emancipation is a reality it is not merely decreed, but it is experienced. Long before it had become law it was perfected in the con- science of the nation. Without doubt a great and thoughtful nation will not be diverted from its course whether good or evil by any intellectual tendency of the time, and so it comes to pass that in England there are still individual instances of anti-Semitism. But then it is but an imitation of an old-world fashion re-dressed in modern foppish garb, giving itself out as the latest novelty from abroad and as something worthy of note. The account given by Mr. de Haas in his interesting report on the condition of the Jews in England is the most comforting in detail of all which will be laid before you.
" Emancipation has wrought a complete change in the character of the Jew and made an entirely different man of him.
" In pre-emancipation times the Jew without rights was an alien among the nations, but he never for a moment thought of resenting this. He felt himself to belong to a peculiar people who had nothing in common with the races of the lands in which they dwelt. He did not love the prescribed yellow badge on his mantle which proclaimed his nationality, because it excited the mob to treat him with violence, and justified their excesses in advance to the magistrates ; but of his own will he accentuated his peculiarity far more than the yellow badge could ever have done for him. When he was not confined in Ghetto walls by the civil authorities he made himself a Ghetto. He desired to dwell with his own,
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and to have none other than business connection with the Christian people of the lands.
" To-day there is a suggestion of disgrace and humilia- tion in the word Ghetto, but whatever may have been its sense in the intention of the nations, it is not difficult to perceive that to the Jew of the past the Ghetto was no prison but a place of refuge. It expresses an historical truth to say that the Ghetto alone gave a chance to the Jew of surviving the horrible persecutions of the Middle Ages. Here he lived in a world of his own, where he dwelt apart, and which mentally and morally was his Fatherland. Here there dwelt also those for whose good esteem he cared, and with whom he could be of account ; here also was that public opinion whose approval was the aim of his ambition and whose contempt or disfavour was the punishment of unworthiness. Here all virtues peculiarly Jewish were appreciated, and more especially by their development was that admiration to be attained which is the eager desire of the human heart. What did it matter to them that outside the Ghetto men despised what they valued so much. They cared nothing for the opinion of those outside, for it was the opinion of ignorant foes. The Jew strove to please his own people, and the approval of these brethren was to him the whole sum of life. And thus the life of the Ghetto Jew was not stunted or crippled, but whole. Their condition outside the Ghetto was insecure, often seriously endangered, but within they developed their own peculiar life and thought, and there was nothing incomplete about them. They were harmonious beings in whom none of the usual elements of ordinary social life were wanting. The Jews were painfully aware of the value of the Ghetto as regards their religious life, and their one care was to compass it about with an invisible wall far higher and more impenetrable than the
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stone walls which met the eye. All Jewish customs and practices were unconsciously directed to this one object of keeping the Jews distinct from the other peoples, to cherish the Jewish community, and to keep continually before the individual Jew the thought that to give up his distinctive peculiarities were to perish and be utterly lost
"The aim at enforced separation was the origin of most of the ritual laws, the observation of which was considered by the average Jew as equivalent to his religion, and other purely external and strange marks of difference, principally of garb, and personal appear- ance which are common among Jews, were, when first received, religiously imposed, in order the more surely to guard their isolation. The Kaftan, temple locks, fur caps, and jargon, have certainly nothing in common with religion, yet in the East if a Jew attire himself in Western habit, and speak any language correctly, he is regarded with mistrust, as already almost an apostate from the faith, for he has destroyed those links which united him to his race, and they are aware that these alone secure adherence to their community, apart from which the individual Jew must perish morally and spiritually beyond hope of recovery.
" This was the pyschology of the Jew of the Ghetto. Then came emancipation.
" The law assured them that they were fully recognised citizens of the land of their birth. During its brief existence, it gave rise to expressions of sentiment from Christians, which gave the law a sound of hearty good- will.
" Intoxicated with joy, the Jew hastened to break all bridges behind him. He had now another home, and no longer needed the Ghetto ; he had other associations, and needed no more to cling to the community of his
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own faith. He adjusted his life immediately to the new order of things. Formerly all his effort was directed towards maintaining the strictest separation, now he did his utmost to approach, and to be in outward seeming like his neighbours. Instead of finding his safety, as hereto- fore, in legal observance, he gave himself up to mimicry of his Gentile countrymen. For one or two generations, according to the land in which he dwelt, this worked exceedingly well. The Jew might believe himself German, French, Italian, &c., and drew all the require- ments of his life from the same national source as his Gentile compatriots, a thing indispensable for the all- round development of the individual.
" After a slumber of from thirty to sixty years anti- Semitism broke out afresh in the heart of the nations of Western Europe, revealing to the terrified Jew his actual position. He could still vote at the election of repre- sentatives of the people, but he found himself rudely excluded from all societies and assemblies of his Christian countrymen. He could still go where he would, but everywhere he met the warning : " No entrance to the Jew." He could still fulfil his duties as a citizen, but those privileges which are far more esteemed than the power to vote the acknowledged rights of talent and ability were unceremoniously denied to him.
" This is the present condition of the emancipated Jew of Western Europe. His Jewish separatism is lost, but the nations make it plain to him that they still hold aloof from him. He shuns his fellow- Jew, for anti- Semitism has made him sick of them ; and his fellow- countrymen repulse him when he would be one with them.
" He has lost his Ghetto home, and the land of his birth denies him a home. He has no ground beneath
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his feet, no claim on any society to which he can belong as a full privileged and welcome member. Neither his personality or his services give him any claim on the justice, not to say goodwill of his Christian countrymen, while he has lost cohesion with his Jewish compatriots. He feels that the world is cruel to him, that there is no place on earth where he can find true sympathy when he desires and longs for it.
" This is Jewish suffering in its moral aspect, which is far more bitter to endure than the physical, because it touches men of finer calibre and greater pride.
"The emancipated Jew is unstable, uncertain in his relations with other men ; anxious in dealing with strangers, mistrustful even of the secret feelings of friends. He misuses his best powers in the wearisome attempt to conceal his own proper being, for he fears to be known as a Jew, and has never the joy of confessing himself for what he is in truth, which every thought and sentiment, every tone of voice, and every gesture of eye or finger, proclaims him to be. He is crippled in soul ; his outer life is not genuine, and consequently he is ridiculous, and abhorrent to all right-mindecl people, as everything that is false must be. All the Jews of Western Europe groan under this burden, and seek reliefer escape from it. They no longer hold that faith which gives patience to endure all trial because it recognises in it punishment from the hand of God who nevertheless loves them. They cherish no more the hope of the coming of Messiah, who should miraculously deliver and raise them to glory. Many seek to save themselves by forsaking Judaism, but anti-Semitism has no faith in the power of baptism to change the Jew, and even this hope of safety is but a poor one. Neither is it exactly recommendable that those whom it concerns should enter the Christian Church mostly still unbelievers
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at heart with a blasphemous lie upon their lips. Of the minority of true believers I say nothing. 1 A new sect of Marranos has thus come into existence, of far worse character than the old, in whom there was a yearning after truth, heart-breaking pangs of conscience and repentance, which frequently led them to seek atone- ment and purification by giving themselves up delibe- rately and of their own free-will to the sufferings of martyrdom. 2
"The new Marranos take leave of Judaism in anger and exasperation, and at heart, unconsciously to them- selves, and to their own shame and humiliation, they carry over towards the Christian Church the hatred which impelled them to that lie. I dread the future
1 It is well that Dr. Nordau acknowledges that there is at least "a minority" among Jews who have become Christians from conviction. For the rest he may be assured that right- minded Protestant Christians deplore even more than he does, the fact that Jews should nominally profess Christianity for the sake of worldly advantage and be received into the Church with minds unconvinced and hearts unsubdued to the gospel. Hypo- crisy is detestable, whether practised by Jew or Gentile.
' The Marranos were those who in Spain at the time of the Inquisition nominally adopted Christianity, but in their hearts remained Jews and hated the Romish system which compelled them to live a lie. Many of them afterwards escaped more particularly to Holland, where they threw off the mask and went to the other extreme of Jewish fanaticism. Many of them were put to most cruel deaths by the Inquisition. Most of the Sep- hardi (or " Spanish") Jews in Holland and England are descen- dants of Marranos. It is a sad fact that thousands of Jews, who, however, have long ceased to cherish the Hope of Israel- harassed by legal and social disabilities are being baptized and received into the Greek and Roman Catholic communions, without a spark of faith in their hearts and without any real-acquaintance with the doctrines of Christianity. This can be no matter of congratulation to earnest-minded Christians, but rather of humiliation, that Churches which claim to be " Christian " should have sunk so low as to be satisfied with such a mere outward adherence.
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development of this new sect of Marranos, whose mind is poisoned alike against those of its own blood and those who are not of kin, and whose self-esteem is disturbed by the consciousness of a lie at heart. Other Jews there are who anticipate relief from Zionism, which, to them, is no fulfilment of a mystic passage of Scripture, but the way to an existence in which the Jew at last shall acquire the right to enjoy these simplest original necessities of being which are matter of course to all men beside himself in both hemispheres, i.e., a secure social standing ; a kindly fellowship : the possi- bility of using his energies to develop his own proper being, instead of misusing them to his own suppression, falsification, or disguisement.
" Finally, there are other Jews who are indignant at the lies of the Marranos, but who are too much attached to the lands of their birth not to feel the renunciation which Zionism involves, as too hard and cruel for them to accept.
" These madly throw themselves away with the hidden hope that in the remodelling which must follow the dissolution of the present order of things, hatred of the Jew may not be considered a commodity worth retain- ing. Such is the aspect which Israel presents at the close of the nineteenth century.
" To put it in one word, the Jews in their majority are a race of despised beggars. More diligent and inventive than the generality of Europeans, not to speak of lazy Asiatics and Africans, the Jew is condemned to the direst poverty, since he is not permitted the free use of his abilities. Consumed with the fever of uncontrol- lable thirst for knowledge, wherever this knowledge is attainable to others, he finds himself repulsed, a very Tantalus of knowledge in our most matter-of-fact times.
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" Gifted with enormous energy, by means of which he always rises from the miry depths into which he has been thrown, and in which his foes would fain bury him once for all, he dashes his skull against the impene- trable icy barrier of hatred and scorn which encompasses him. Essentially a social being, whose very religion recommends eating with three and praying in company with ten, as pleasing to God, he finds himself excluded from ordinary intercourse with his fellow-countrymen, and condemned to a tragic isolation.
" One charge brought against the Jew is that he is ambitious. He, however, only strives for superiority because equality is denied him. He is reproached for his fellow-feeling with Jews the wide world over, but it is rather his misfortune that all Jewish solidarity ceased with the first sweet word of emancipation ; that in order to make room for the sole sway of love of fatherland he tore the last rays of Jewish unity from his heart.
" Dazed with the storm of anti-Semitic accusations, he is beside himself, and often nigh believing himself the physical and mental monster which his deadly enemies represent him to be. Not seldom do we hear him say that he must learn from his foes, and seek to cure himself of the evils which they point out, not considering that the reproaches of the anti-Semites can work him no good, since they are not the result of observation of actual characteristics, but come of the working out of a law of psychology by which children, savages, and fools make other beings or things responsible for their own sufferings, and visit ill-will upon them. At the time of the Black Death the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells ; to-day the corn merchants accuse them of beating down the price of grain ; the artisans, of destroying small trades ; and the Conservatives that
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they are in their principles opposed to a constitutional form of government.
"Where no Jews exist, other associations, mostly foreigners, or even native minorities or societies, are accused of these evils.
" In truth this hatred of the Jews proves nothing against the accused ; it proves only that they were already hated when their enemies, in their misfortune, began to look about for a scapegoat.
" This picture would be imperfect were I not to add another feature. A saying held to be true by grave and thoughtful men, not necessarily anti-Semites, is that the Jews possess all the riches of the earth, and have all power and rule in their hands. These unhappy ones the possessors of power ! These who are not even in a position to protect their co-religionists against a miser- able rabble of Arabs, Moors, or Persians, who thirst for their blood ! These Jews, the personification of Mam- mon, of whom by far the greater number own not even a stone whereon to lay their head, or rag to cover their nakedness ! This is the mockery which drops poison into the wound which hatred has struck. True, there are some few Jews superfluously rich whose rumoured millions attract attention far and wide, but what has Israel to do with these? Most of them a minority, I willingly except belong to the lowest grades in Jewry, with a moral adaptation for callings in which millions are quickly made ask me not how !
" In an ordinary independent Jewish community such men could never rise to the esteem of their brethren, or receive from them titles of honour such as those with which they are decorated by Christian societies.
" These money-pots, who despise what we honour and honour what we despise, know nothing of the Judaism of the prophets and the Tanaim ; of Hillel, Philo,
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Ibn Gabirol, Jehuda Halevy, Ben Maimon, Spinoza, and Heine.
"These Jews are the principal excuse for this new Jew-hatred, the causes of which are more economic than religious in their nature. For Judaism which suffers on their account, they have done nothing beyond throwing an alms which cost them nothing, and which keeps alive the cancer of Schnorring from which Judaism suffers. For ideal purposes they have never stretched out a helping hand, nor ever will.
" Many of them forsake Judaism, and we wish them good speed, only regretting that they are at all of Jewish blood, though but of the dregs.
" No one should be indifferent to the suffering of the Jews, neither Christian nor Jew. It is a great sin to let a nation whose worst enemies do not deny that it is highly gifted to perish mentally and physically. It is a sin against the nation, and a sin against civilisation in general, in whose service it would be no indifferent co-worker.
"It may also become a grave danger to the nations to have embittered men of indomitable will, the weight of whose influence for good or evil is far above that of average men, and thus to render them opposed to the constituted order of things.
" Micro-biology tells us that there exist tiny organisms which are perfectly harmless, so long as they live in the open air, but become the cause of frightful disease when deprived of oxygen.
" Governments and nations may well beware lest the Jews in like case become a cause of danger to them. Sorely may they have to repent any attempt to exter- minate the Jew, who, as a result of their own guilt, has become an occasion of hurt to them."