A SHORT HISTORY OF THE JEWS
Forward
The Jewish question is the most important question in the world
to-day. Every man should understand its nature, for it is the root of
many other problems.
All economic literature, for example, which
ignores the Jewishness of international finance and the Jewishness of
Socialism and Communism, is a mere beating of the air.
Throughout all history the presence of
any large number of Jews in a European country has let to strife and
friction. Britain has escaped having any very acute Jewish question as the
number of Jews in the country has been small.
There is now danger that the repressive
measures against Jews in Germany and Austria may lead to a great flood of
Jewish immigration into Britain and the British Dominions.
In many quarters it is held that the only
way to solve this difficult question is to provide the Jewish nation with a
home of its own big enough t accommodate it (which Palestine is not); and that
merely to shift Jews from one European country to another gets nowhere.
Madagascar has been suggested as most suited for a Jewish national home.
An endeavour is made in the following
pages to set out certain material facts as succinctly as possible, and give a
bird�s-eye view of this great problem. The object is to help the reader to
form an opinion whether Jewish immigration into British countries is
desirable.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE JEWS
By A.N. Field
Author of �The Truth About
the Slump� �All These Things� &c.
Some Ancient History
Nothing is more erroneous than the common
idea that Jewish dispersion was the result of Roman brutality; that friction
between Jew and non-Jew had its origin in Christian bigotry; and that the Jews
were driven to their trade of usury by being banned from other occupations.
The word �sojourner� always applied with
peculiar force to the people of Israel,� write the Rev. Drs. Foakes Jackson
and Kirsopp Lake in �The Beginnings of
Christianity� (Macmillan, 1920). The patriarchs were wanders: their
descendants endured not one but many captivities. In the sixth century B.C.
there was a voluntary migration of Jews into Egypt: Jews were numerous in the
Persian Empire. The Jews followed in the trail of the conquest of Alexander
the Great, which brought them into contact with the West, and spread them far
and wide. The Sybilline Oracles (second century, B.C.), declare �every land
and every sea is full of them.� Josephus says, �There is no people on earth
that has not portion of us.�
Professor S. Angus in �The Environment of
Early Christianity�(Duckworth, 1914), estimates their number in the Roman
Empire as about eight millions and adds: �The hostility of the Jew was the
greatest menace to the peace of the Empire�The Jew never amalgamated with
other races so as to lose his religion or racial consciousness. He met the
scorn and hate of the world with the pride of a superior people. Wherever the
Jew emigrated he sought out his brethren and formed a community�The terrible
uprisings under Vespasian, Trajan, and Hadrian bear ample testimony to their
power to shake the Empire.�
The same writer point out that Jewish
wealth was at this time considerable. Sometimes it took a thousand Jews to
carry the annual contributions of the Jews of Rome to the treasure in the
temple at Jerusalem. Jewish bank-books of the time of Xerxes (about 470 B.C.)
show them as bankers to their Persian conquerors. The corn export f Egypt was
largely in their hands, as was the trade of Mesopotamia.
Outbursts against the Jews occurred in
almost all the countries in which they settled before the Christian era.
�Many Roman writers,� states Angus. : speak disparagingly of the Jews. Horace
writes in mockery of their circumcision and the Sabbaths; Seneca calls them �a
most accursed race�; Tacitus accuses them of hatred to all men, of immorality,
of worshipping an ass�Cicero , Quintilian, Juvenal and Martial pour scorn upon
them. The fact that Roman writers are so much more anti-Semitic than Greek
bears testimony to the increased prominence of the Jew.�
The fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 merely
completed a dispersion that had begun centuries before. At the time of the
decline of the Roman Empire, from the latter half of the fourth century and
through the fifth century of the present era, Dean Milman�s �History of the
Jews� (4th edition, 1866) tells us the Jew were then settled in Belgium, along
the course of the Rhine an in such parts of Germany as were civilized, and in
Gaul. Italy and Spain. Council after Council denounced their traffic in
slaves in those disturbed times, and Milman says the slave traffic in Europe after the fall of Rome was
almost entirely conducted by Jews.
Jewish popularity soon evaporated in
Western Europe. They were expelled from country after country. But no sooner
did an expulsion take place than the Jews in many cases were back negotiating
for permission to return to the scene of their persecutions, and the monarchs
were willing to readmit them. Hilaire Belloc in his book �The Jews� says of
these happenings:
�It has been a series of cycles
invariably following the same steps. The Jew comes to an alien society at
first in small numbers. He thrives. His presence is not resented. He is
rather treated as a friend. Whether from mere contrasts in type�what I have
called �friction��or from some apparent divergence between his objects and
those of his hosts, or through his increasing numbers, he creates (or
discovers) a growing animosity. He resents it. He opposes his hosts. They
call themselves masters in their own house. The Jew resists their claim. It
comes to violence. It is always the same miserable sequence.�
II
In Modern Times
The only European country from which the
Jews were banished for any long period was England. There is no positive
record of Jews in Britain prior to the Norman Conquest. The Norman Kings brought them over to aid
in finance. They were hated by the people: their presence resulted in
perpetual out breaks against them. Finally, Edward I banished them from the
realm in 1290. That banishment continued until the year 1655. It is a
historically interesting fact that in the three and a half centuries in which
Jewish influences were absent from Britain nearly all our characteristically
British institutions were developed, the foundations of British sea-power and
commerce were laid, and English literature reached a very high point.
Cromwell desired to re-admit the Jews,
but no Council he called would pronounce in favour of any such step. Cromwell
thereupon allowed the Jews to return to Britain surreptitiously. The edict of
banishment ahs never been repealed to this day. In an article in the
�Quarterly Review� of October 1934, Mr. William Harbutt Dawson records that at
the Councils called by Cromwell the merchants were against admitting the Jews,
�insisting vehemently � that to do so would �enrich foreigners and impoverish
the natives of the land.� The clergy were equally opposed: �The most did fear
that if they should come many would be seduced and cheated by them, and little
good would be unto them,: and that they would not hesitate �to blaspheme
Christ and the Christian religion, to the pain and distress of all Godly
people.�
Prominent in stating the case against the
Jews was John Dury, a Presbyterian clergyman who had acted as chaplain to
British trading colonies in Northern Europe. In a pamphlet he said of the
Jews, �They have ways beyond all other men to undermine a State and to
insinuate into those that are in office, and prejudice the trade of others� He
warned his countrymen against the Jews� �covetous practices and biting usury�
and urged that if they were admitted they should be required to live by
themselves, and that offences against the Christian religion and blasphemy
against the person of Christ should be punished by death.
All modern revolutions have resulted in great
increases of Jewish power. The execution of Charles I was followed by the
admission of the Jews to Britain. The Revolution of 1688 resulted in a great
influx of Jews from Amsterdam with William of Orange. Banking, a business of
Jewish origin, then grew up by the founding of the Bank of England in 1694,
and the finances of the State were thereafter conducted on a basis of Jewish
usury by the founding of the National Debt. In the reign of Queen Anne it was
discovered that a Jewish army contractor, Sir Solomon Medina, had been bribing
the great Duke of Marlborough to the tune of �6000 to �7000 a
year over a period of ten or eleven years A Jew named Sampson Gideon (Sampson
de Rehuel Abudiente) was Walpole�s financial adviser through a period of
notorious corruption.
When the American Revolution broke out
the Jewish family of Salvador are stated in Hyamson�s �History of the Jews in
England� (Methuen, 1928) to have been the leading financiers of London; and
the same historian relates that Francis Salvador of this family emigrated to
Georgia in 1773 and became a leader on the revolutionary side. The American
Revolution resulted in the Jews getting full civic rights in the United States
from the start, the first country on earth to give these to them. According
to the diaries of Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, one of the framers of the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin protested
very strongly against admitting the Jews. Franklin is reported as saying at the
Constitution convention:*
�In whatever country Jews have settled in
any great numbers, they have lowered its moral tone, depreciated its
commercial integrity; have segregated themselves and not been assimilated;
have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian religion upon which that
nation is founded by objecting to its restrictions: have built up a state
within a state, and when opposed, have tried to strangle that country to death
financially, as in the case of Spain and Portugal� If you do not exclude them
from the United States in this Constitution, in less than 200 years they will
have swarmed in such great numbers that they will dominate, for which we
Americans have shed our blood, given our lives and our substances, and
jeopardized our liberty. If you do not exclude them, in less than 200 years
our descendants will be working in the fields to furnish them substance, while
they will be in the counting houses rubbing their hands. I warn you,
gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews for all time, your children will
curse you in your graves. Jews, gentlemen, are Asiatics, let them be born
where they will, or how many generations they are away from Asia, they will never be
otherwise.�
The French Revolution resulted in the
emancipation of the Jews in France: and the revolution of 1848 did the same
for them in Germany. Finally, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 made them the
masters of Russia.
III
Finance and Revolution
In Britain, France, and the United States
today Jews exercise an influence in politics wholly disproportionate to their
numbers in the population of these countries. Particulars showing the Jewishness of these Governments were given in the No. 3 issue of the
�Examiner.�
Ownership of the Bank of England being
secret it cannot be positively described as Jewish; but Jewish international
finance is prominently represented on its directorate. The deflation program,
which plunged British industry into difficulty after the war, and threw
millions of workers into the streets, was formulated in 1918 by a committee
presided over by the then Governor of the Bank, who was partner in a Jewish
banking house. Furthermore, the present Governor of the Bank of England has
been busy establishing Reserve Banks throughout the world modeled on the
Jew-created U.S. Federal Reserve system.
The United States Federal Reserve system
was created at the end of 1913 as the result of prolonged agitation by Paul
Warburg Jacob H. Schiff, two German-born Jews. The people of America were
told that it was designed to prevent financial crises. Actually, its
operation has been accompanied by greater financial crises than were ever
before known in the history of the world. Te minutes of a secret Federal
Reserve conference in Washington in May 1920, ordering a curtailment of credit
and forcing sown of prices, were in after years published in United States
Government documents. Almost simultaneously with this conference, the Bank of
England commenced deflation in Britain. Bankruptcy and unemployment followed
in both countries and throughout a great part of the world. This was what
smashed New Zealand�s soldier settlers. It has been alleged by competent
observers that the world depression of 1929-34 was also do to deliberate
action by the U.S. Federal Reserve. The world slump was precipitated by an
enormous withdrawal of funds from the American short term loan market in the
last week of October, 1929. Jewish international finance can create slumps at
will and throw millions on the streets.
�The Federal Reserve Act is the work of
Mr. Warburg more than any other man,� said Professor E.R.A. Seligman in a
foreword to a book written about the Federal Reserve by Mr. Warburg, shortly
before his death in 1932. The Federal Reserve followed on a campaign by
President Wilson and the Democrats to put the U.S. Money Trust in its place.
A Congressional Committee had reported in 1912 that a Money Trust existed, and
was dominated by four firms, one of which was the Jewish international bank of
Kuhn, Loeb and Company, in which Messrs. Schiff, Paul and Felix Warburg, and
Otto H. Kahn were partners.
The Jewish Encyclopedia describes the
Schiff family as the oldest contemporary Jewish family of which there is a
record. �The much beloved leader of the Jews�. Is how Mr. Jacob H. Schiff was
described in �All in a Lifetime� (1923), the memoirs of Mr. Henry Morgenthau,
Senior, another eminent Jewish financier, a former U.S. Ambassador, and father
of the present Secretary of the Treasury in President Roosevelt�s
Administration. Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British Ambassador to the United States
during the war to February, 1918, called Mr. Schiff �the arch Jew�, and said
that he and Mr. Warburg dominated the Wilson Administration financially, and
were toiling to compass the destruction of Britain (�The Letters and
Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice,� 1929).
Other members of the Warburg family
conducted the banking house of M. Warburg and Company, Hamburg, controlling
German shipping and the Hamburg-America line in particular. The memoirs of
Prince Max of Baden, last German Imperial Chancellor, show that Herr Max
Warburg, head of this bank, helped to draft the proclamation setting up the
German Republic in 1918. Dr. Carl Melchoir, another partner in the bank, was later
active in establishing the Bank for International Settlements, the world
central bank of all the reserve banks.
Connected with the Warburgs was another
Jew, Albert Ballin, head of the Hamburg-America line and closest adviser of
the Kaiser. The �Dictionary of National Biography� records that Sir Ernest
Cassel, Jewish financier, close friend of King Edward VII and founder of the
Vickers armament combine, was a lifelong friend of Mr. Schiff, and former
partner with him in forming a railway combine in the United States. This
group of international financiers thus had close contact and great influence
with the Governments of Britain, France and Germany.
The Jewish Encyclopedia states that Mr.
Schiff financed Japan in her war against Russia in
1904-5, and in Congress on June 10, 1932, the late Mr. Louis T. McFadden, long
Republican chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee, asserted that the
same financial interests had financed the Russian revolutionary outbreak in
1905. At a meeting reported in the �New York Times� of March 24, 1917, Mr.
George Kennan related that Mr. Schiff had heavily financed revolutionary
propaganda amongst the 50,000 Russian prisoners of war in Japan at this time,
many of them being turned into ardent revolutionaries.
This New York meeting was held in
celebration of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, and at it a message was
read from Mr. Schiff expressing his pleasure at the achievement of �what we
had hoped and strived for these long years.� In his memoirs �Through Thirty
Years� (1924), Mr. H. Wickham Steed, editor of the London �Times� through the
war, described Messrs, Schiff and Warburg, as �akin to, if not identical with�
the men who shipped Trotsky and a cargo of fellow desperadoes to Russia in
1917.
A report made by the French High
Commissioner in the United States early in 1919 from material supplied the
U.S. Secret Service, stated that Kuhn Loeb and Coy, and other Jewish bankers
had fomented and financed the Bolshevik revolution, and that �the Bolshevik
movement is a certain measure the expression of a general Jewish movement.�
The full text of this document has been published in many quarters.
Just before the Revolution it was alleged
in a stormy debate in the Russian Duma that M. Protopopoff, head of the last
Tsarist Government had been bribed by one of the Warburgs at Stockholm. The
memoirs of Sir George Buchanan, British Ambassador to Russia to 1918, state
that Rasputin, the Charlatan monk called in to attend the sickly Tsarevitch,
and whose ascendancy over the Empress brought the Russian Royal Family into
disrepute, was �largely financed by certain Jewish bankers.�
The �War Memoirs� of Mr. Lloyd George
contain a report from the British observer with the Russian army, made in the
summer of 1915, and stating that the total failure of the Vickers firm to
supply munitions as contracted was mainly responsible for the 3,800,000
casualties out of the 7,000,000 men put into the line; had resulted in large
units being sent under fire unequipped with rifles; and was creating a
revolutionary situation. As stated, Vickers was founded and financed by Sir
Ernest Cassel, friend and associate of Mr. Schiff, and another Jew, Sir Basil
Zaharoff, was prominent in it through the war. Documents seized from the
Bolsheviks by the Kerensky Government and later published in the Sisson Report
in the United States named the Warburg�s Bank as providing large funds for
munitions for Trotsky.
After the war numerous statements were
made by Mr. McFadden, Mr. James W. Gerard (former U.S. Ambassador to Germany),
and others, that Bolshevism was being financed by Britain and America lending
money to Germany, which money was immediately re-lent to Russia.
International finance found the money for the Five Year Plan. The London
�Daily Express� of January 16, 1932, for instance, said that international
financiers in the City of London had borrowed � 50,000,000 in France and at 2
percent, let it to Germany at 8 percent, and Germany had lent it to Russia at
15 percent. More recent Britain gave Russia a great Government-guaranteed
trade credit, which Russia did not need for trade purposes as she was selling
more in Britain than she bought there. International finance and
international revolution tie up from start to finish.
IV
The Gospel of Slaughter
The Jewishness of Bolshevism was widely
noted at the start. The Netherlands Minister in Petrograd in a dispatch of September 6,
1918, warned the British Government, for whom he was acting, that Bolshevism
�is organized and worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object
is to destroy for their own ends, the existing order of things.� Americans in
Petrograd at the time of the revolution testified before a Senate Committee in
1919 as to its Jewishness. One witness said that of 388 Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd all but 17 were Jews,
and 265 of these Jews came from New York, Mr., Victor E. Marsden later
published a list of the early Bolshevik Commissars, showing 454 out of 545 as
Jews.
Pages of testimony to the continuance of
this state of things could be assembled. As recently noted, M. Theodor
Butenko, the Soviet diplomat who fled from Bucharest to Italy was saying in
the �Giornale d� Italia� of February 17 last that: "In place of the former
capitalists a new �bourgeoisie� has been formed, composed of 100% Jews,� and
that these Jews controlled all the big industries, railways and trading, while
the Russian people themselves existed �in the most awful servitude which human
history has ever seen and registered.�
Once the Jewishness of the Bolshevism is
understood its otherwise puzzling features become understandable. Hatred of
Christianity, for instance, is not a Russian characteristic: it is a Jewish
characteristic. Russians have nothing to gain by pulling in their belts and
living in poverty while huge sums are being expended by their government in
propagating Communism throughout the world and urging workers everywhere to
rise and slaughter their racial leaders and destroy their racial
institutions. This is purely a Jewish interest. Russians rose in this way,
and the rising enabled Jews to rule their country. If other workers will do
it, Jews can then rule the world.
This slaughter was part and parcel of
Socialism from the start. Socialism and Communism are just variations on the
same tune: though many Socialists quite fail to realize this. �That which is
generally termed Socialism,� said Lenin in his book �The State and
Revolution�, �is termed by Marx the firs or lower phase of Communist
society.� Constitutional Socialism�s task is to bankrupt the existing order
and so to pave the way for later violent overthrow. Such is the view of the
high priests of the whole movement.
According to the London �Times� of
September 1, 1922, Bolshevik official gave 1,766,118 persons as the total
executed by the Cheka up to February of that year. This was only a portion of
the slaughter. The late Lord Sydenham in the House of Lords in 1923 put the
sum total, including those who died of starvation and disease, as about 30
million up to that early date. �This is the most horrible crime in all
history,� he said.
Fifteen more years of murder and
terrorism have gone by since then. Estimates of the loss of life in the
famine in the Ukraine in 1932-33 range from three to seven million. The
Soviet officials took away the foodstuff the peasants required to live o
during the winter. Mr. W. H. Chamberlin, �Christian Science Monitor�
correspondent in Russia, called it �organized famine� in his book �Russia�s
Iron Age� (1935), as did Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge former British Communist in
his �Winter in Moscow� (1934). Mr. Eugene Lyons, American United Press
correspondent, in his �Assignment in Utopia� (1938), similarly described the
famine as easily preventable, and like Mr. Chamberlin tells how the most rigid
censorship concealed its existence from the outside world until all was over.
Bloodshed has been an integral part of
Marxian Socialism from the beginning. A recent American writer* prints
extracts from early writing on this point by Karl Marx�real name Mordecai, a
descendant of a line o Jewish rabbis. In the last issue of his paper, �Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung� of May 19, 1849, Marx said: �We are ruthless and want
no consideration from you (the bourgeoisie). When our turn comes
revolutionary terrorism will not be sugar-coated�There is but one way
of�.concentration the death agony of the old society as well as the bloody
labour of the new world�s birth�revolutionary Terror.� The same writer notes
Marx at it the next year, laying id down that �so far from stopping so-called
excesses�one must not only tolerate these examples, but lead and conduct
them.�
As noted on a previous occasion, former
Detective Inspector Herbert T. Finch of Scotland Yard testifies in his book
�Traitors Within� (1933) to having heard Lenin declaim at a secret meeting in
London thirty years before: �It must be bloodshed on a colossal scale. We
must revolt, and when we revolt there shall be no mercy�In Russia first, and
then from one side of Europe to the other�They must perish, down to the man who keeps a stall in the
street!�
Although the Jewishness of Lenin is not
definitely established, his appearance was Jewish; he took part in debates in
a Jewish students� club in his youth; his wife was a Jewess; and he spoke
Yiddish in the family circle.
Detailed accounts of the Bolshevik
massacres in Russia show them as conducted in many cases with sadistic cruelty. Prominent
in directing them were many Jews, including Bela Kun, who also ran the
short-lived and bloody Communist revolution in Hungary in 1919. Bela Kun and other Jews from
Moscow have also taken part in directing the Spanish revolution. This
Moscow-promoted revolution has been run on similar lines, with wholesale
massacres of priests and nuns, many being first mutilated and then burned
alive after being soaked in petrol. Estimates of the numbers massacred by the
Reds in Spain range from 150,000 to 300,000. Innumerable witnesses of all
kinds have testified to the fiendish brutality of many of the killings.
Fear is the basis of Communistic rule.
Even disgusted Jewish Commissars testify to this. A former Soviet Commissar
for Justice named Steinberg thus described Bolshevik methods in Russia in the
�New York Times� of February 23, 1930:
�All the psycho logic elements of a
regime of force and inequality manifest themselves in the atmosphere
engendered by terror. On the one side we have intoxication with power and a
realization that anything done by him who wields power will go unpunished, and
on the other, fear, depression, silent hatred, and sycophancy; the rise of two
classes, masters and slaves. In turn, the relations among the suspects
themselves become perverted. In the struggle to win the favour of the
authorities, treachery assumes appalling dimensions. All become slaves with
respect to the government, wolves with respect to one another,�
�Everyone underneath the Communists in
Russia is so low as to be practically not human,� said Morris Gordin, son of a
rabbi and former head of the Soviet Press Bureau from about 1921 to 1924, in
an address in Detroit on January 16, 1931. �Sovietism,� he declared, �is
dragging mankind into the darkness of the jungle, into the mouth of chaos.�
Summing up his impressions of Soviet
Russia after about ten years there as an American press correspondent Mr.
Eugene Lyons said in his recent book �Assignment in Utopia�: �Above all, I had
the sense of leaving behind me a nation trapped.� That is what has happened.
A nation of 160,000,000 has been trapped by Jews. The trapping was effected
by making the Russians think that something quite different was taking place.
Europe is to-day being trapped into another war by similar hidden agencies
stirring Gentile nation against Gentile nation, to pave the way to domination
of the world, just as the last war paved the way to domination of Russia.
V
The Religious Background
The Jewish question runs much deeper than
the matter of France and Revolution. Many subsidiary movements working with disintegrating
effect upon religion, patriotism, and the family are largely Jewish in their
personnel and inspiration. Jewish combines and monopolies exist in many
directions and the entire machinery of publicity in all its forms--the press,
book publishing, the cinema, radio control, etc. are subject to pronounced
Jewish influences. Without being aware of it, millions of people daily think
the thoughts that Jewish propagandist wish them to think.
Jewish power has grown at a great pace
since the outbreak of war in 1914, an event from which the Jews gained
enormously. At the same time this growth of Jewish power has been accompanied
by an increasing instability in every direction. Jewish aims and objects thus
deserve the closet scrutiny.
The first thing to consider is the nature
of the Jewish religion. An article in the Jewish Encyclopedia on �Liberal
Judaism� tells us that Judaism is not based upon a creed like Christianity,
�but is one inseparable connection with the Jewish nation as the depository
and guardian of the truth held by it for mankind.�
We further learn that Judaism insists on
�its pure monotheistic doctrine.� At the same time �Satan has his place among
the angels of heaven�and in the end can work only for good.� Moreover, �the Midrash boldly proclaim that the world was (or is) a process of selection and
evolution.� Judaism �refutes the idea of an inherent impurity in the flesh,�
and rejects the doctrine of original sin. Nor does it regard the body as
prison-house of the soul.
Furthermore, �Judaism�s scope lies not in
the world beyond�its sole aim and purpose is to render the world that now is a
divine kingdom of truth and righteousness.� The Messianic Age to which
Judaism looks forward is regarded as �the one when the heathen (non-Jewish)
world will join Judah.�
�Judaism,� it is laid down, �points forward to
a state of human perfection and bliss to be brought about by the complete
enfoldment of the divine in man�and herein lies its great distinction also
from Christianity.� Its ultimate end is proclaimed to be �to unite all mankind
into one bond.�
Such is one interpretation of the Jewish
religion as given by Jews in a great Jewish work of reference. A Gentile who
wishes to make first-hand acquaintance with the subject mater, however, will
not find it an easy task. The Old Testament is only part of the Jewish
religion, and orthodox Jewish teaching is that it is the less important part.
To the Jews the five Books of Moses are the Torah, or written law. It is
taught, however, that God also gave to Moses the oral law, and that this oral
law is of greater validity than the written law. This was the view of the
Pharisees, but writers on the subject state that it was rejected by the
Sadducees. Finally, after the fall of Jerusalem the Pharisees became supreme
and the oral law was at last set down in writing in the Talmud.
In addition to the Talmud, the holy books
of the Jews include the Kabbalah, a work which teaches that the words and
letters of the Books of Moses have secret meanings. The Kabbalah also treats
of necromancy. It is said to have been reduced to writing by Simeon ben Jochai
(or Yachai), who lived at the time of the destruction of the second temple.
The Talmud is described as consisting of
twelve folio volumes. No complete translations exist in English so far as the
writer knows. Eight volumes of an English translation�stated to be one
quarter of the whole�were published in 1935 at a price of nine guineas.
Something however, appeared to be lacking in this translation, for the London
�Jewish students desirous of understanding the spirit of the great work will
have to go to the original.�
From all accounts the Talmud is a
labyrinth devoid of orderly arrangement. It consists of two parts, the Mischna and the Gemara. The Mischna is a commentary on the Books of Moses (or
Torah) written by different Rabbis, and the Gemara is a commentary on the
Mischna written by a later lot of Rabbis. There are two Talmud�s, the
Palestinian or Jerusalem Talmud, completed about A.D. 350; and the Babylonian
Talmud, completed about A.D. 500. The Mischna is the same in both, but the
Gemara is different. The Babylonian Talmud is the most important, and is the
one usually quoted unless the other is specified.
In the latter half of the sixteenth
century the Rabbi Joseph Caro wrote the Schulchan Aruch (or �prepared table�)
embodying the more important passages in the Talmud.
A little book �The Talmud� (Williams and Norgate, 1932) tells how the Talmud was written. The author is Mr. Dudley
Wright, editor of various Masonic publications and a staunch admirer of the
Jews. Mr. H.M. J. Loewe, Reader in Rabbinic�s at Cambridge University, and he a Jew, highly commends this book, and especially the
completeness of its concluding chapter dealing with �The Burnings of the
Talmud.�
From this particular chapter one learns
that in bygone days Popes and Kings, after investigation by commissions and
tribunals, repeatedly ordered the seizing and burning of all copies of the
Talmud they could lay hands on. The inquires into the contents of the Talmud
appears to have been of a most searching nature in many cases. One
investigation in France, occupied forty examiners from August, 1247, to May, 1248, and resulted
in a report that the Talmud was �full of errors and horrible blasphemies and
by no means to be tolerated.� Another begun in Spain in 1412 lasted over eighteen months with
sixty-eight sessions and with evidence in defense by about twenty of the
leading Jews.
Mr. Wright tells us that the condemnation
of Talmudic teaching began among the Jews themselves away back in the Second
century B.C. long before the Talmud has been reduced to writing. The Roman
Emperors Hadrian Antoninus Pius and Justinian also endeavoured to suppress
Talmudic teaching.
VI
What Converts Have Said
It is a very curious thing that in
Christian days many of the burnings of the Talmud followed on appeals by Jews
converted to Christianity. The Talmud, the converts urged, should be
destroyed as evil. Mr. Wright in his book takes the view that these converted
Jews were one and all inspired by bad motives. He writes of �the machinations
of apostates from the Jewish faith, who seemed with their change of religion
to have lost all sense of honesty and truthfulness�; refers to the converts as
�renegades� actuated by �revenge and self-seeking�; and places the adjective
�converted� in quotation marks indicating doubt of the genuiness of their
Christianity. The �converts�, we are told, �repeated the old slanderous
charges against the Jews and manufactured fresh accusations.� The reader
however has to take the author�s word for it that the charges were �slanderous
�and the accusations �manufactured�.
The first of these denunciatory converts
was a Jew of France named Donin, who in 1238 felt so strongly on the matter
that he journeyed to Rome, and obtained an audience of the Pope in which he
denounced the Talmud in a document of thirty-five articles. Mr. Wright tells
us that Donin affirmed that the Talmud �distorted the words of the Bible;�
that it was filled with abuse against Jesus and the Virgin; that it taught
that is was meritorious to kill the best men among the Christians; that it was
lawful to deceive a Christian without any scruple; and that it was permitted
to a Jew to break a promise made on oath.�
In 1264 appeared Pablo Christiani (Paul
Christian of Montpelier) another converted Jew, and he again denounced the
Talmud, �reviving the well-worn theme that it contained passages of hostile
import directed against Jesus and Mary.�
In 1412 Joseph Halorqui, known after his
conversion to Christianity as Geronimo de Santa Fe, accused the Talmud �of
containing all kinds of abominations, immoralities, and heresies,� and
asserted that it �countenanced the beating of parents, blasphemy, and the
practice of idolatry, also the breaking of oaths, provided that on the
preceding Day of Atonement the precaution had been taken to declare them
invalid.�
In 1507 appeared a pamphlet by Joseph
(afterwards baptized John) Pfefferkorn, �a Moravian Jewish convert to
Christianity, a butcher by trade, who, it is said, embraced the Christian
religion on his release from prison, whither he had been committed for
burglary, a fact which has been established by documentary evidence.� Beyond
telling us that Pfefferkorn urged that Jewish usury should be checked, Mr.
Wright remarks: �A notorious persecutor of the Talmud in the seventeenth
century was one, John Andreas Eisenmenger, who devoted almost the whole of his
life to the attempt to destroy the Talmud.� Eisenmenger, however does not
appear to have been a Jew. The last consignment to the flames seems to have
been in Poland in 1757 when a thousand copies of the Talmud were publicly burned by the
hangman.
Condemnations of the Talmud have bee made
by numerous later converts from Judaism. The former Rabbi Drach, for example,
is quoted by various authors as saying in a book written by him and published
in France in 1844 that the Talmud contains �a great number of dreamings,
ridiculous exaggerations, very revolting indecencies, and above all horrible
blasphemies against everything which the Christian religion holds most sacred
and most dear.�
Whatever the motive inspiring these
converts to Christianity, one notes many writers on the question quoting from
the London �Jewish World� of March 15, 1923, the statement, �Fundamentally,
Judaism is anti-Christian�; and from the New York Yiddish daily �Morning Freheit� of January 10, 1937, editorial pronounced that, Jewish religion, be
it remembered, is opposed to Christianity in general, to the Catholic Church
in particular.�
VII
Some Non-Jewish Views
Although Mr. Wright in his book
attributes hostility to the Talmud entirely to �a general hatred of the Jew,
which has existed through the ages on the part of certain fanatical
Christians�, his Jewish commentator is not so positive on the point. In his
foreword to the Wright book Mr. Loewe tacitly admits that there are passages
in the Talmud that may not be palatable to non-Jews. He says:
�People do not realize that the Talmud is
a Hansard and that you can cite from it contrary opinions on the subjects of
which it treats. People talk about �The attitude of the Talmud towards
non-Jews.� Translate the situation as follows: for Talmud� read �Parliament�
and for non-Jew read �alien�. What historian would dip into Hansard and
produce the speech on an individual member as evidence of what �Parliament
says�?�
Mr. Loewe goes on to say that a Rabbi who
lived in a community where Jews were well treated may be found writing
cordially about non-Jews; but one who lived under other conditions may write
otherwise. The question must always be asked with respect to any extract,
�Who said it?� �When did he say?� and �Where did he live?�
A standard work on Jewish history is Dean Milman�s �History of the Jews�, first published in 1830, and friendly in its
tone towards the Jewish people. In the course of this Milman refers to the
researches of John Andreas Eisenmenger, professor of Oriental languages at
Heidelberg University, who in 1700 produced a collection of extracts from the Talmud. Of this
we are told:
�Eisenmenger undertook the hateful task
of disclosing all the mysteries of Rabbinical learning�It is, according to Eisenmenger, a profound and true statement of the frightful manner in which
the obdurate Jews curse and scoff at the Holy Trinity, God the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Ghost, mock at the Holy Mother of Christ, throughout insult
the New Testament, the Apostles and Evangelists, the whole religion of
Christ. Odious as was the spirit intention of Eisenmenger, his reading was
vast, his industry indefatigable (two enormously thick quarto volumes are
crowed with citations in the original, and with translations). I have never
heard his accuracy seriously impeached.�
Milman goes on to say that the defect of
Eisenmenger book is that �passage from the Talmud are heaped together
indiscriminately with passages from the modern writings, writings of times
when cruel persecution as well as contempt, had for centuries goaded the
miserable Jews to the only vengeance in which, besides overreaching in trade,
they could indulge, writings in their own secret unintelligible language��
A more recent writer, Professor Werner Sombart, of Breslau University, in his great book �The Jews and Modern Capitalism� (English
translation, Fisher Unwin, 1913) discusses the same point. This book is
generally eulogistic of the Jews, and prominent Jewish writer, Mr. Israel
Cohen, in his �Jewish Life in Modern Times: (1929) refers to it as �a very
notable work.� Sombart says of the Talmud:
�It is a harder task to determine to what
extent this or that doctrine still finds acceptance. Does, for example, the
Talmudic adage, �Kill even the best of the Gentiles,� still hold good? Do the
other terrible aphorisms ferreted out in Jewish religious literature by Pfefferkorn, Eisenmenger, Roehling, Dr. Justus, and they rest of that
fraternity, still fond credence, or are they as the Rabbis of to-day
indignantly protest, entirely obsolete? It is obvious, of course, that the
single doctrines were differently expressed in different ages, and if the
whole literature, but more especially the Talmud�There is nothing surprising
in this when it is remembered that to a great extent the Talmud in nothing but
a collection of controversies of the different Rabbinical scholars�.
In another passage Sombart Says: �All
nations were struck by their hatred of others�even in the earliest collection
of laws interest was allowed to be taken from �strangers��Apart from this
particular question, the stranger was accorded no special consideration in the
Jewish legal code. Duties towards him were never as binding as towards your
�neighbour� towards your fellow Jew. Only ignorance or a desire to distort
the facts will assert the contrary�With Jews he will scrupulously see to it
that he has just weights and just measure; but as for his dealings with
non-Jews his conscience will be at ease even though he had an unfair
advantage. It is not to be denied that in some cases honesty towards non-Jews
was inculcated. But to think that this should have been necessary!�
A much more critical view of the Talmud
is taken in �The Riddle of the Jews� Success� (Hammer Verlag, Leipzig, 1927),
a book written under the pen-name of F.Roderich-Stoltheim by the late Theodor
Fritsch. Herr Fritsch, who died in September 1933, aged eighty, spent a great
part of his long life writing in criticism of the Jews. The book in question
is a running commentary on Professor Werner Sombart�s book, which the author
regards as taking an unwarrantably rosy view of Jewish activities. He says of
the Talmud:
�All that is correct is, that in the
Talmud with its commentaries, the most divergent opinions of the Rabbis find
utterance, and that the doctrines and expositions contained therein,
frequently contradict one another; that, however, is only equivalent to saying
that it is open to every faithful Jew to accept as authentic whatever doctrine
and exposition may best suit his purpose for the time being. Thus, when a
passage reads: �You must not lie to, deceive, or rob the Goy (non-Jew),� and
another Rabbi says� �Under circumstances you may do so,� more latitude is
allowed to the conscience of the Jew who believes in his Talmud. He can act
in ether this way, or in that, and will still fond himself in agreement with
the law, will still remain a pious and orthodox Jew�
�The morality of the Talmud is like a
conjurer�s box with a false bottom, from which the moral and the immoral can
be produced according to wish�And one is bound to admit this is a very empty
kind of morality. Sombart adds: �Since everything, in this case is divine
revelation, one passage is just as valuable as another.� Quite correct! Here
we have the morality with a double bottom��
VII
The Disputed Passages
The reader has now heard a considerable
amount about the Talmud, and will naturally desire knowledge of the passages
over which so much controversy has raged. In considering them it is necessary
to bear in mind that they stand torn from their context, that the Talmud is an
immense work of twelve great volumes, and that it is impossible for the
ordinary Englishman to form an independent opinion of its contents until and
exact and impartial translation of the work is available.
On the other hand, there remains the
highly significant fact that in passages such as are cited below Jewish
international finance can find full approval for its proceedings in stripping
Gentiles of their property; and Jewish revolutionaries can find in them
similar commendation of their programs of slaughter and rapine.
It has been frequently alleged on the
Jewish side that translations of the disputed passages made by Gentiles are
inaccurate and misleading. However, there are numbers of cases in which the
matter has been tested in the law courts and the translations upheld as
exactly conveying the meaning of the original text.
One of the most notable of these cases in
recent years was heard in Hungary. Dr. Alfred Luzsensky in 1910 translated
about 400 passages from the Talmud into Hungarian; In 1923 Luzsensky was
charged in a Government prosecution with �pornography� and �corruption of
public morals� by circulation of his work, which was ordered to be
confiscated. Luzensky, however, was acquitted by the Courts and the
confiscation suspended. According to Warren Weston�s book �Father of Lies�
(Militant Christian Patriots, London, 1938), the Hungarian Court in the course
of its judgment said:
�The horrors contained in the translation
of Alfred Luzensky are without exception found in the Talmud. His translation
is accurate, for it renders these passages which are really in the text of the
Talmud, in their exact meaning.�
The testimony of the court expert, Dr. Kmosko, is also of interest. According to Erfurt �World Service� of June 1,
1937, he said: �To the first question asked by the court as to whether
Luzensky�s translation corresponds to the original Talmud, I must answer with
definite �Yes�. The underlying principle of the Gemara is that the non-Jews
are not human beings, but beasts.�
In 1932 Dr. Luzsensky published a German
translation of his book, and in Warren Weston�s book referred to above appear
a number of passages from the Talmud which he states are taken from this
German translation of Luzsensky. The texts are in agreement with what has
appeared in many other publications. The following are typical specimens:
�Whosoever is uncircumcised belongs to
the sons of Belial, to the children of doom and eternal perdition.� (The book
of Jubiee,xv, 26-27).
�The Jew is to say on Purium Day: Cursed
be Haman, blessed be Mardochai; cursed be Seresh. Blessed be Esther: cursed be
all non-Jews, blessed be all Jews.� (Orach Chaim, 660, 16).
�Theft, robbery and rape of a beautiful
woman and similar deeds are forbidden to every Gentile toward another Gentile
and also toward a Jew. But they are allowed to a Jew against a non-Jew.�
(Sanhedrin, 57 a; also Abodah Zara, 13b).
�A heretic Gentile you may kill outright
with your own hands.� (Aboda Zara 4b).
�Those who do not own the Torah must all
be killed. Whoever has power to kill them openly with the sword, if not let
him use artifices until they are all done away with.� (Choschen ha-Mischpat,
425, 5).
�If a Jew has a suit with anon-Jew, you
(Jewish judge) will take the Jew�s side as far as possible, and you will say
to the non-Jew: Thus it is according to your law. If neither of these
alternatives is possible, then you must cheat.� (Bab Kama, 113a.
�It is allowed to cheat a Gentile and
take usury from him�. (Baba Mezia, 61 a.)
�God has commanded us to take usury from
the Gentile and lend him only when he consents to repay with usury, in order
that we do not create profit for him, even if there accrued no profit to us.�
(Sepher Mizwoth, 73 a)
�A thing lost by a Gentile may not only
be kept by the man who found it, but it is even forbidden to give it back to
him.� (Choschen ha-Mischpat, 159, 1.)
�A Jew may rob a Gentile, that is, he may
cheat him over a bill if unlikely to be detected.� (Choschen ha-Mischpat, 348,
1.)
The following quotations from the Talmud
appear in other reputable publications:
�You are human beings but the nations of
the world are not human beings, but beasts.� (Baba Mecia, 114, 6.)
�On the house of the Goy (non-Jew) one
looks as on a fold of cattle.� (Tosefta, Erubin, viii.)
�The estates of the Goy are like
wilderness, who first settles in them has a right to them. (Baba Batra, 54 b.)
�The property of the Goys is like a thing
without a master.� (Schulchan Aruch: Choschen ha-Mischpat, 156, 5.)
�Who took an oath in the presence of the
Goys, the robbers, and the custom-house officer, is not responsible.� (Tosefta
Szebnot, 11.)
�A human form is only given to those who
are not Jews in order that the Jews may not be waited upon by beasts.� (Schene-tuchoth-habberith.)
�If a Jew can deceive idolaters by making
them think he is a follower of their cult, it is permitted to do.� (Yore de�ah,
157, 2.),
�One should and must make false oath,
when the Goys (non-Jews) ask if our books contain anything against them. Then
we are bound to state on oath that there is nothing like that.� (Szaalot-Utszabot.
The Book of Jore d�a., 17.)
�Every Goy who studies Talmud, and every
Jew who helps him in it, ought to die: (Sanhedrin, 59 a, Aboda Zara, 8-6,
Szagiga, 13.)
�To communicate anything to a Goy about
our religious relations would be equal to the killing of all the Jews�� (Book
of Libbre David, 37.)
That the Talmud inculcates hatred both of
Christianity and Christians, was the view of the late Monsignor Jouin, founder
in 1912 of the �Revue International des Spcoetoes Secretes� and editor of it
up to his death in 1932. Translations of article by Monsignor Jonin appeared
in the London �Free Press� of September and October, 1937, and February, 1938,
and in these the whole matter was fully discussed with many citations.
As has been already stated, there is much
controversy as to how such passages as have been cited above are regarded by
Jews to-day. The London �Free Press� of February, 1938, for instance, printed
an extract from the �Jewish Chronicle� of January 3 last reporting the
newly-installed president of the Council of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations in
London as saying �his guide would always be the Schulcan Aruch.� In Warren
Weston�s book, �Father of Lies�, it stated that Professor Cohen, as sworn
expert before the Court at Marburg in April. 1888, testified that, �The
religious Jew considers himself bound by the whole contents of the Talmud.�
IX
An Amazing Prayer
A further point in the Jewish religion around
which much controversy has centered is the �Kol Nidre� Prayer. This is stated
to be recited on the Day of Atonement each year with great solemnity in all
synagogues. The �Free Press� of February, 1938, published what it stated was
a Photostat reproduction of the prayer in English and Hebrew from the Jewish
prayer book for the Day of Atonement, published in London under the authority
of the late Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, The prayer reads as follows:
�All vows, bonds, devotions, promises,
obligations, penalties and oaths: Wherewith we have vowed, sworn, devoted and
bound ourselves: from this Day of Atonement unto the next Day of Atonement,
may it come unto us for good: lo, all these we repent us in them. They shall
be absolved, released, annulled, made void, and of none effect: they shall not
be binding nor shall they have any power. Our vows shall not be vows: our
bonds shall not be bonds: and our oaths shall not be vows: our bonds shall not
be bonds: and our oaths shall not be oaths.�
According to an article in the Ford
�Dearborn Independent� of November 5, 1921 (as reprinted in �The Jewish
Question�, 1931) and English rendering of the prayer in similar words appeared
in the revised �Festival prayers� issued in 1919 by the Hebrew Publishing
Company, New York.
This amazing prayer, in the ordinary
meaning of words, is an advance notice by the Jews, secretly made in their
synagogues, that no promise to be made by them during the ensuing year shall
be binding. �Indefensibly immoral as the Kol Nidre� is,� wrote the Ford
journal in 1920, �utterly destructible of all social confidence, yet the most
earnest efforts of a few really spiritual Jews have utterly failed to remove
it from the prayer-books, save I a few isolated instances.
A State Within The State
Enough has been now said to indicate that
a considerable immigration of Jews from Germany and Austria into British
communities is not a matter to be lightly regarded. Although a fringe of Jews
intermarries with Gentiles and becomes absorbed in the general population, the
Jews are a definitely non-assimilable race. They remain Jews at all time, and
in all places. Their presence in large numbers in European communities had
always created problems of the most difficult nature. As one writer tersely
put it, the Jews represent a wedge of Asia driven into the heart of Europe.
Any racial or other minority in a
community naturally tends to become clannish. It is impossible to regard the
Jews merely as a clannish religious minority. Zionism is and open declaration
of the racial unity of Jews as Jews. The Jews are not only a race, but a
highly political race with an enormous international solidarity. Every Jew
necessarily had a divided allegiance, on the one side to the community in
which he lives, and on the other to international Jewry. Nothing can ever
wipe away that fact. Jewish ascendancy in a non-Jewish community necessarily
carries with it the danger of subtle sacrifice of national interest to Jewish
interest. For example, the recent drift in Britain towards alliance with
Bolshevik Russia may be a Jewish interest, but is most distinctly not a
British interest.
A Jewish invasion from Europe in the last fifty years has monopolized a great part of the East End of
London. Of the amount of work these Jews provide for the police courts ample
evidence will be found in Lieut. Col. A.H. Lane�s �Alien Menace� (4th
Editon, 1933). As far back as 1919 Sir Ernest Wild, now Recorder of London,
said in Parliament: �You cannot be in the criminal courts without realizing
what an enormous amount of the work of our courts is caused by aliens and
their crimes� Vice! Why they are at the bottom of one-half, at least of the
vice of the metropolis and this country!� The �Jewish chronicle� of April 1, 1910, has been quoted as
saying: �All who know anything of the white slave traffic are agreed that if
the Jew could be eliminated, it would shrink and shrivel to comparatively
small dimensions.�
On the economic side Jewish clannishness
presents a perpetual danger to national interest and under cover of anonymous
ownership under our present vicious company laws on Jewish monopoly after
another has been built up.
A great mass of evidence as to the extent
to which the Jews will sometimes combine for business purposes was collected
and published by a former Jewish rabbi, Jacom Brafmann, of Minsk in Russia.
At the age of thirty-four Brafmann was
converted to Christianity. In 1858 he presented a memorial to the Tsar urging
that some steps should be taken to overcome the tremendous obstacles which he
alleged Jews interposed on any of their number who declared there intention of
becoming Christians Brafmann was directed to report on the whole Jewish
question. He wrote two books, �The Jewish Brotherhoods� (1868), and �The Book
of the Kahal� (1869)
In the latter book he asserted that it
was the custom in Russia in the Jewish Kahals, or community councils, secretly to sell at auction
documents called Khazakas and meropies. A khazaka gave the purchaser the
right to acquire a house or other specified property belonging to a certain
Gentile �by any means whatsoever�, and no other Jew must interfere with the
proceedings in any way. A meopie gave the purchaser the exclusive right to
lend money and do business with the Gentile named therein, and to gain
possession of his property. In the second volume of his book Brafmann printed
290 of these documents with names and full particulars, and relating to
transactions in the Minsk district (in
which he lived and wrote) during the years 1794 to 1803.
The Jewish Encyclopedia says Brafmann was
a convert �seeking notoriety�, and that �his falsehoods were repeatedly
exposed.� If Brafmann was a forger he was a most bold and audacious one.
Transactions such as Brafmann sets out
simply amount, in essence, to traders parceling out territory among them.
Their significance is their open recognition that gaining possession of the
debtor�s property is the end and culmination of money lending transactions.
Gentiles in the mass are still pathetically unable to recognize this as
inseparable from the basis of interest-bearing debt on which the unstable
fabric of modern civilization has been reared. �Usury,� said Lord Bacon
�bringeth the treasure of a realm into a few hands.�
That something very similar to what Brafmann described in Russia existed in the Levant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is clear from a recent
work. In his �History of the Levant Company� (Oxford University Press, 1935),
Dr.A.C. Wood relates how the British factors of the company in different ports
in the Eastern Mediterranean found themselves obliged, willy-nilly, to put all
their business through certain Jewish brokers, and quite unable to do direct
business with the producers with whom they wished to deal. He quotes old
reports as relating that:�
�Wherever a new factor appeared in any of
the ports he was immediately laid hold of by the first Jew that could secure
him, and henceforth he was obliged to do business through that Jew, for by
compact among themselves no other Jew would interpose or accept his
commissions; so that, as North put it: �The merchant can no more shake off his
Jew than his skin: he sticks like a burr, and whether well used or ill-used
will be at every turn in with him and no remedy.��
Whatever its precise form, this
solidarity persists among the Jews, and wherever and large numbers exist in a
country this economic cohesion among a non-assimilable element in the
population creates a situation of ever-increasing difficulty. As Mr. Hilaire
Belloc noted in his book �The Jews�, in almost every field they touch the Jews
are rarely satisfied until they have built up a monopoly. �This tendency to
monopoly,� he wrote, �is spreading like a disease.�
The difficult Jewish problem will not be
solved by transporting masses of unwanted Jews from one European community
into another. The only hope of any lasting and durable solution is for the
nations by international agreement to provide the Jews with a suitable
national home of their own, sufficient in area and resources to accommodate
them, and to which their emigration can be encouraged from those countries
where their presence is the cause of strife and friction.
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