Jewish people

“ As long as the Jews were self-respecting and self-governing, they and their government and their religion had been respected and left alone. As soon as their leaders began to riot and quarrel among themselves the fate of the bundle of sticks fell upon the people. ”

“ Do you realize the present helplessness of poor Israel? We sometimes hear the Jews spoken of by Christians of a certain stamp, after this manner: "After all, they are not so badly off as the heathen. They are a moral, God-fearing people; they have the Old Testament Scriptures in their possession. They are intelligent, clever, influential, and certainly not so low and degraded as the heathen." ”

“ I find the antechambers filled with people, both Jews and Gentiles, nobles and common people, judges and bailiffs, friends and foes—a mixed multitude, who await the time of my return. I dismount from my animal, wash my hands, go forth to my patients, and entreat them to bear with me while I partake of some slight refreshment, the only meal I take in the twenty-four hours. ”

“ The Jewish entity is essentially the entity of a People. ‘Israelites,’ ‘Jews,’ ‘Hebrews’—all the terms used to denote the Jewish people bear a specifically historical meaning, and none of these terms has been convincingly superseded by one of purely sectarian nature. The external world has never completely subscribed to the view that the Jewish people constitute merely an ecclesiastical denomination. ”

“ The Jewish people are at present prevented by the diaspora from undertaking the management of their business for themselves. At the present time they are in a condition of more or less severe distress in many parts of the world. They need, above all things, a gestor. ”

“ It is therefore to be expected that the English-speaking people, which has never disregarded but has at all times recognised and appreciated the peculiar character of the Jewish race, will feel an increased sympathy for it, on reading the alternations of its sublime and tragical history. ”

“ This monstrous condition, which the government aims to impose upon its own subjects, the Jewish people will never accept. They prefer to wander about homeless and to die of starvation rather than to submit to demands which insult their self-respect as citizens and Jews. They have honestly performed their duty toward their country and will continue to do so to the very end. No sacrifices frighten them and no persecutions will make them swerve from the path of honor. ”

“ The entire Jewish people would cast out, with scorn and indignation, those base criminals who, forgetting duty and conscience, would, in this year of universal sacrifice, break their sacred vows of loyalty to the fatherland. Such treachery is alien to our faith and was never known to exist among Jews to any greater extent than among other peoples. ”

“ They accepted their mission; ‘All that the Lord has spoken will we do,’ came up a responsive cry from ‘all the people answering together,’ and in that supreme moment the ill-fed and so recently ill-treated groups were transformed into a nation. ‘I will make of thee a great people’; ‘Through thee shall all families of the earth be blessed’; the meaning of such predictions was borne in upon them in one bewildering flash, and in that flash the national idea of Judaism{149} found its dawn; they, the despised and the downtrodden, were to become trustees of civilisation. ”

“ Just so the Jewish people were driven by their drunkenness and plumpness to the ultimate evil; they kicked about, they failed to accept the yoke of Christ, nor did they pull the plow of his teaching. Another prophet hinted at this when he said: "Israel is as obstinate as a stubborn heifer". And still another called the Jews "an untamed calf".
(6) Although such beasts are unfit for work, they are fit for killing. And this is what happened to the Jews: while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit for slaughter. This is why Christ said: ”

“ One inclines, perhaps, to accentuate the facts of history and to moralise over the might-have-beens where these fit into a theory; but so much as this at least seems indisputable—that those who would dissociate the national from the religious, or the religious from the national element in Judaism attempt the impossible. The ideal of the Jews must always be ‘from Zion shall come forth instruction, and the Word{156} of God from Jerusalem’; and to this end—‘that all people of the earth may know Thy name, as do thy people Israel.’ This is the goal of Jewish separateness. ”

“ I have tried to meet certain objections; but I know that many more will be made, based on high grounds and low.
To the first class of objections belongs the remark that the Jews are not the only people in the world who are in a condition of distress. Here I would reply that we may as well begin by removing a little of this misery, even if it should at first be no more than our own.
It might further be said that we ought not to create new distinctions between people; we ought not to raise fresh barriers, we should rather make the old disappear. ”

“ When reading the history of the Jewish people, of their flight from slavery to death, of their exchange of tyrants, I must confess that my sympathies are all aroused in their behalf. They were cheated, deceived and abused. Their god was quick-tempered, unreasonable, cruel, revengeful and dishonest. He was always promising but never performed. He wasted time in ceremony and childish detail, and in the exaggeration of what he had done. It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god. ”

“ "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." ”

“ And often, in order that the royal treasury might be kept well filled, and the ‘protection’ of the king secured, the Jews were forced to prey upon the people. Their neighbours could not have liked them if they would, and thus, Jews were quite alone in the kingdom, left to themselves, without the chance of making a friend among the populace, or the priests, or the nobles. ”

“ For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith Jehovah; because they called thee an outcast, saying, This is Zion, whom no man seeketh after" (Jeremiah xxx. 16, 17) .
What a picture of Israel! Some people are fond of drawing gloomy outlines of the present state of the Jews; and this may suit their tastes, for surely they could not present a darker one than what is here portrayed by God's own hand. The Jew is represented here as in a helpless and hopeless condition. He is helpless. ”

“ The men who made starlight in the long night of Jewish history were not of the sort who mostly make epochs in national history. It has been well said that there are some great men, who are not doers nor speakers, but influences. Among a dispersed people there was small room for doers or for speakers. For warriors or for statesmen there was no place, and but little opportunity for ‘heroes’ in any generally received sense of the word, and thus, the names of eminent Jews, from the fifth to the fifteenth century, include no doers of startling deeds. ”

“ In words too, as in action, not a loquacious people, taciturn rather, but eloquent, gifted when they do speak, an earnest, truthful kind of men, of Jewish kindred indeed, but with that deadly terrible earnestness of the Jews they seem to combine something graceful, brilliant, which is not Jewish. ”

“ The Jewish females were brought up, at the period of which we treat, with the utmost strictness, and kept in great seclusion, scarcely ever associating but with their own people, and enduring many privations in consequence of never mixing in general society. ”

“ In the northern parts of Arabia these Jews were wandering herdsmen like their Ishmaelitish brethren, but in the south and east they carried on a considerable trade with India and Persia and the Byzantine Empire. They were much more civilised than the native Arabs among whom they dwelt. The Jews were people with a past, which is in itself impressive. They could tell tales without end, of heroic ancestry, or could speak of the higher life with the authority befitting descendants of seers and prophets. ”

“ Moreover, no matter how prone a modern generation may be to disregard such things, the mere fact that they may have existed as a secret racial ideal for centuries is a powerful argument for their respectable acceptance, if not active execution, by the generation that now is. There is no idea deeper in Judaism than that Jews constitute a Chosen People and that their future is to be more glorious than their past. ”

“ There have been few Jews in history who have been able to look back on a life of useful and beneficial activity with so much gratification as he, or who were so entitled to feel proud of the fact that throughout their lives they had done their duty not only to the country in which they lived, but to the ancient land of their fathers, to the English people as English patriots and to the Jewish nation as faithful sons of their race. ”

“ In the Bible, Israel is the Chosen People of Blessing, and the time is announced when Judah shall walk to Israel and recognize them and become one with them. There is a chosen racial breed, a select seed, a superior strain of blood and soul in the world, but it is not Judah. One thing, therefore, that Christians can do, as a contribution to the solution of the Jewish Question, is to read their Bibles carefully. ”

“ It is enough to point to the Septuagint, or the Greek translation of the Scriptures, the product of Israel's contact with the Hellenistic civilization dominating the world at that time; to the Arabic translation by the Gaon Saadya, when the great majority of the Jewish people came under the sceptre of Mohammedan rulers; and to the German translation by Mendelssohn and his school, at the dawn of a new epoch, which brought the Jews in Europe, most of whom spoke a German dialect, into closer contact with their neighbours. ”

“ There is no race in the world more enigmatic, more fatal, and therefore more interesting than the Jews.
Every writer, who, like yourself, is oppressed by the aspect of the present and embarrassed by his anxiety for the future, MUST try to elucidate the Jewish Question and its bearing upon our Age. ”

“ If the authorities really desire to return the Jewish people to the places from which they were driven away by order of the authorities they must take cognizance of this feeling which I can testify under oath, on the basis of many conversations and observations, is universal among us. ”

“ In and out of offices presided over by men with Jewish faces I trudged all day. Most of these men, I subsequently learned, belonged to New Thought, Christian Cultist and other up-to-date churches and societies—it was good for their business. They called themselves Christians, but nature’s marks cannot be changed like one’s clothes.
In the great theatrical districts I found thousands of my fellow Jews who had grown rich overnight by coining perhaps a popular song that had pleased the cabaret-mad crowd or by ridiculous impersonations of their race upon the music hall stages. ”

“ Prayers will be offered up for the success of our work in temples and in churches also; for it will bring relief from an old burden, which all have suffered.
But we must first bring enlightenment to men's minds. The idea must make its way into the most distant, miserable holes where our people dwell. They will awaken from gloomy brooding, for into their lives will come a new significance. Every man need think only of himself, and the movement will assume vast proportions.
And what glory awaits those who fight unselfishly for the cause!
Therefore I believe that a wondrous generation of Jews ”

“ In the remarkable position occupied by Israel in the early Christian Church for our Lord and His apostles were Jews, and the majority of the early evangelists were men of this nation in the wonderful fact that the Jews, though politically crushed beneath the Gentile yoke, con quered the nations of the earth by means of that religion which sprang from their midst in such facts this prophecy, and other similar prophecies, found a most glorious and real fulfilment. The nations have been enlightened by the Jews, and books written by Jewish pens have become the laws and oracles of the world. ”

“ It does not matter that they are no longer accustomed to bear arms and to decide with the sword their differences and quarrels. This people has learned to draw to itself the gold of the world. It is like a sponge.... It has learned caution and foresight and is organized into a powerful international force. Under the conditions of the present war the Jews are a power not to reckon with which is to be politically blind. ”

“ The mothers and fathers stay at home blessing God every hour of the day and night for guiding them to such a country as this, while the sons and daughters are out at the theaters, in the halls and cabarets singing songs of Dixie. Passing by in this great throng are prominent actors, critics and playwrights, many under assumed names, simply because their own names are Jewish. ”

“ We must continue, as before, to point out, firmly and persistently, that there is only one path to a brighter future for Russia, the same path along which the entire civilized world has traveled, and that along this road there is only one solution of the Jewish question—a solution demanded by the most elementary principles of civilized government—and that is to grant them, as individuals, full civic rights, and as a people, the right to free racial and cultural self-development. ”

“ The element of distinction between Jews and other citizens remains and is even more emphasized. The principle of equality of rights for Jews has not been realized and without it no material benefits promised by the new act will find their way to the soul of the people. Only acknowledgment of the right of Jews to all rights of Russian citizenship will melt the ice of that cold disappointment which has seized all Russian Jews. ”