Max Nordau

“ Jewish misery has two forms, the material and the moral. In Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia — those regions which shelter the vast majority, probably nine-tenths of our race — the misery of the Jews is understood literally. It is the daily distress of the body, anxiety for every following day, the painful fight for the maintenance of a bare existence. In Western Europe, the struggle for existence has been made somewhat lighter for the Jews, aithough of late the tendency has become visible even there to render it difficult for them again. ”

“ Everywhere, where the Jews have settled in comparatively large numbers among the nations, Jewish misery prevails. It is not the ordinary misery which is probably the unalterable fate of mankind. It is a peculiar misery, which the Jews do not suffer as human beings, but as Jews, and from which they would be free, were they not Jews. ”

“ The Western Jew has bread, but man does not live on bread alone. The life of the Western Jew is no longer endangered through the enmity of the mob; but bodily wounds are not the only wounds that cause pain, and from which one may bleed to death. The Western Jew meant emancipation to be real liberation, and hastened to draw the final conclusions therefrom. ”

“ Out of this declaration, the strict logic of the men of the Great Revolution deduced Jewish emancipation. They formulated a regular equation: Every man is born with certain rights; the Jews are human beings, consequently the Jews are born to own the rights of man. In this manner, the emancipation of the Jews was pronounced, not through a fraternal feeling for the Jews, but because logic demanded it. Popular sentiment rebelled, but the philosophy of the Revolution decreed that principles must be placed higher than sentiment. ”

“ No-one has ever tried to justify these terrible accusations by facts. At most, now and then, an individual Jew, the scum of his race and of mankind, is triumphantly cited as an example, and contrary to all laws of logic, the example is made general. This tendency is psychologically correct. It is the practice of human intellect to invent for the prejudices, which sentiment has called forth, a cause seemingly reasonable. ”

“ The English people does not allow its progress to be forced upon it from without; it develops progress from its inner self. In England emancipation is a truth. It is not alone written, it is living. It had already been completed in the heart before legislation expressly confirmed it. Out of respect to tradition, one hesitated in England to abolish the legal restrictions of the Nonconformists, at a time when the English had already for more than an age made no difference in Society between Christians and Jews. ”

“ They were human beings in harmony, who were not in want of the elements of normal social life. They also felt instinctively the whole importance of the Ghetto for their inner life, and therefore, they had the one sole care: to make its existence secure through invisible walls which were much thicker and higher than the stone walls that visibly shut them in. ”

“ I think with horror of the future development of this race of new Marranos, who are normally sustained by no tradition and whose soul is poisoned by hostility toward their own and strange blood, and whose self-respect is destroyed through the ever present consciousness of a fundamental lie. ”

“ The Jew says naively: "I am a human being, and I regard nothing human as alien," the answer he meets is: "Softly, your rights as a man must be enjoyed cautiously; you lack the right notion of honour, feeling for duty, morality, patriotism, idealism. ”

“ Emancipation has totally changed the nature of the Jew, and made him another being. The Jew without any rights did not love the prescribed yellow Jewish badge on his coat, because it was an official invitation to the mob to commit brutalities, and justified them in anticipation. ”

“ He has no ground under his feet and he has no community to which he belongs as a full member. With his Christian countrymen neither his character nor his intentions can reckon on justice, still less on kindly feeling. With his Jewish countrymen he has lost touch: necessarily he feels that the world hates him and he sees no place where he can find warmth when he seeks for it. This is the moral Jewish misery which is more bitter than the physical, because it befalls men who are differently situated, prouder and possess the finer feelings. ”

“ For he fears that this character might be recognized as Jewish, and he has never the satisfaction of showing himself as he is in all his thoughts and sentiments. He becomes an inner cripple, and externally unreal, and thereby always ridiculous and hateful to all higher feeling men, as is everything that is unreal. All the better Jews in Western Europe groan under this, or seek for alleviation. They no longer possess the belief which gives the patience necessary to bear sufferings, because it sees in them the will of a punishing but not loving God. ”

“ The majority of the Jews are a race of accursed beggars. More industrious and more able than the average European, not to speak at all of the inert Asiatic and African, the Jew is condemned to the most extreme pauperism, because he is not allowed to use his powers freely. ”

“ Yet others, who rebel against the lie of the Marranos, and who feel themselves too intimately connected with the land of their birth not to feel what Zionism means, throw themselves into the arms of the wildest revolution, with an indefinite arriere penste that with the destruction of everything in existence and the construction of a new world Jew-hatred may not be one of the precious articles transferred from the debris of the old conditions into the new. ”

“ Like scarcely any other social being — whom even his belief teaches that it is a meritorious and God-pleasing action for three to take meals together and for ten to pray together — he is excluded from the society of his countrymen and is condemned to a tragic isolation. One complains of Jews intruding everywhere, but they only strive after superiority, because they are denied equality. ”

“ This poverty grinds down his character, and destroys his body. Fevered by the thirst for higher education, he sees himself repelled from the places where knowledge is attainable — a real intellectual tantalus of our non-mythical times. ”

“ Others hope for the salvation from Zionism, which is for them, not the fulfillment of a mystic promise of the Scripture, but the way to an existence wherein the Jew finds at last the simplest but most elementary conditions of life, that are a matter of course for every Jew of both hemispheres: viz, an assured social existence in a well meaning community, the possibility of employing all his powers for the developments of his real being instead of abusing them for the suppression and falsification of self. ”

“ As the French Revolution gave to the world the metric and the decimal systems, so it also created a kind of normal spiritual system which other countries, either willingly or unwillingly, accepted as the normal measure for their State of culture. A country which claimed to be at the height of culture had to possess several institutions created or developed by the Great Revolution ”

“ They no longer hope in the advent of the Messiah, who will one day raise them to Glory. Many try to save themselves by flight from Judaism. But racial anti-Semitism denies the power of change by baptism, and this mode of salvation does not seem to have much prospect. It is but a slight recommendation for those concerned, who are mostly without belief (I am not speaking naturally of the minority of true believers) that they enter with a blasphemous lie into the Christian community. ”

“ Because, a great nation, with a most intense spiritual life, does not allow itself to be guided by any spiritual current or blunder of the time, in England;l anti-Semitism is only noticeable in a few instances, and then only it has the importance of an imitation of Continental fashion. ”