Jews

“ Nearly 1900 years have rolled away, and the Jews are wanderers on the face of the earth without a king. Their having been scattered all these years, what a proof it is the word of God is true! May our prayer be to-day, His blood be upon us and our children, not to condemn us, but to save us. ”

“ In the next generation, when those who were familiar with the civilization of the Jews had passed away, their descent became more rapid, and we read of them as a cruel, degraded, dark-skinned race, living by the chase, feeding on raw meat, idle and ignorant and exceedingly loathsome in their habits. ”

“ Why, the hope that cheered the Jews through the many centuries of their persecution—the hope that a time would come when they could compel recognition from their persecutors, when, as a united people, they could stand forth before the world, pure and strong and upright, and exact credit for their due. ”

“ It nourished the Jews in their amazing obstinacy, and led to the annihilation of their State which, to the very end, they saw in their dreams bruising all other nations with a rod of iron, and breaking them in pieces like a potter's vessel. But, as any idealism is better than none, the Hebrew race has won remarkable triumphs, though of a kind which it never desired. ”

“ Here they lie, thousands upon thousands of dead Jews, great and small, rich and poor, wise and ignorant, neglected individually, but guarded as a whole with all the tenacious determination of the race to hold its own, and to preserve the sacredness of its dead. ”

“ Moral and Material Effects upon the Jews.—Walled off from the high roads of life, and shunned for shambling along its bypaths, the Jews of Germany, in these cruel circumstances, were slowly deteriorating in their manners and in their modes of living. Hemmed in by the ghetto, they were growing content with the ghetto. Meeting with contempt and hatred all round, they were beginning to hate back again, and to feel, in their turn, as bitter and as unreasoning a contempt for everything belonging to their persecutors. ”

“ The history of the Jews is the record of a continued struggle between pure Theism, supported by the most terrible sanctions, and the strangely fascinating desire of having some visible and tangible object of adoration. ”

“ I have been sorely disquieted by the doubt, whether the Jews are really to remain to the end of the world; and, in spite of the curse which lies upon them, scattered and oppressed as they are on earth, to continue for ever to cheat us so astonishingly as they do. ”

“ Jews at the present time appears to be somewhat less than seven millions—the very number which, so far as it is possible to determine, was that of the Jewish people when the Lord became incarnate upon earth. Can any man realize this astonishing fact, and yet doubt the living miracle which the history of the Jews presents? ”

“ Many years ago I met a Russian scholar, deeply read in literature and science—the pure Russian, without any associations with Jews—who told me he was engaged upon a work which set itself the task of tracing the origin of most of the great men in letters and science that were then living in Germany, and that he was coming to the conclusion that, not only were a great many of them actually Jews, but that a large proportion of the best known among the Christian dignitaries had also some admixture of Jewish blood. ”

“ 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? ”

“ And to entitle the American people to this proud distinction, the Jews have done as much as any other class of citizens—nay, I may repeat in their presence what I have frequently said in the presence of others—the Jews have, in proportion to their numbers, done far more. ”

“ Baptized Jews, who had been glad to disencumber themselves of their Judaism, shared in these feelings of aversion. They were the worldlings who valued wealth, rank, and luxury above religion, or the over-educated whose philosophy had led them to skepticism, and whose selfishness induced them to welcome a change which brought them out of the narrow confines of a small community, and opened up a wider world to them. ”

“ Is he the genuine Hebrew of the sixteenth century, or the mere embodiment of blind and inveterate prejudice?
What do travellers answer when asked whether the soil of the Holy Land is waste and barren, unable to support even its sparse population? They will tell us that it is naturally rich and fertile, but has become unproductive by long neglect and abuse. [149] As it has been with the land of the Jews, so it has been with themselves. Their true national character is among the noblest—if it is not the very noblest—that the world has seen. ”

“ Let us look at the Jews in the glass of prophecy. Our own dear selves not being in the scale, perhaps we can the more readily discern the equity of the balance, and afterwards venture to be weighed in the same, even though both Jew and Gentile should be found wanting. ”

“ Jews," to whom, and of whom, the Lord and His apostles speak ? There is, indeed, reference and mention of the Diaspora, "the dispersed among the Gentiles" (John vii. 35) , forming, as we have seen, the greater part of the nation, and some of them still settled in the ancient regions of Assyria and Babylon, but wherever they were, they are all interchangeably called " Jews," or " Israelites," who regarded Jerusalem, with which they were in constant communication as the centre, not only of their religion, but of their national hopes and destiny. ”

“ The native Jewish families in Jerusalem, as well as those in other parts of Palestine, present a marked difference to the Jews of Europe and America. They possess the same physical characteristics--the dark, oblong eye, the prominent nose, the strongly-marked cheek and jaw--but in the latter, these traits have become harsh and coarse. ”

“ The great bulk of the Jews were still gathered in Jerusalem as heretofore, and there were on one hand the intellectuals and on the other the parasitic or pauperized Jew, what would ordinarily be regarded as the very best and the very worst. Life in the colonies was often very sweet and very lovely, a wholesome, normal family life, and an exhibition in peace and prosperity of what religious Judaism at its best may be. ”

“ But to the Jews, a new light seemed to rise, joy, honour, and dancing.
8:17. And in all peoples, cities, and provinces, whithersoever the king's commandments came, there was wonderful rejoicing, feasts and banquets, and keeping holy day: Insomuch that many of other nations and religion, joined themselves to their worship and ceremonies. For a great dread of the name of the Jews had fallen upon all.
Esther Chapter 9
The Jews kill their enemies that would have killed them. The days of Phurim are appointed to be kept holy. ”

“ We had a curiosity to see if there were here any real Jews of the type that inhabited the city in the time of our Lord, and we saw many with fair skin and light hair, with straight nose and regular features. The persons whom we are accustomed to call Jews, and who were found dispersed about Europe at a very early period of modern history, have the Assyrian features, the hook nose, dark hair and eyes, and not at all the faces of the fair-haired race from which our Saviour is supposed to have sprung. ”

“ THE JEWS IN GERMANY AND CENTRAL EUROPE. The condition of the Jews during the sixteenth century in those parts of Germany and Central Europe where their presence was still tolerated, does not materially differ from what it had been for many previous generations. We hear of fewer outbreaks of lawless violence, and the atrocities committed on them seem a shade less barbarous. But the history is in the main such as the Christian chronicler must record, and the Christian reader peruse, with feelings of shame and sorrow. ”

“ But, says my honourable friend, it has been prophesied that the Jews are to be wanderers on the face of the earth, and that they are not to mix on terms of equality with the people of the countries in which they sojourn. ”

“ What has been said of the condition of the Jews in England, applies also to all other European countries, where the Jews were richer, more fond of learning, and more polished—that is, more civil and gentle in their manners—than any other people. ”

“ I have also omitted the other small section of black Jews, namely, the Beni-Israel in India, whose origin is likewise a subject of doubt, many Western Jews even disputing their geniune Israelitish descent.
The whole Jewish nation, at any rate in Europe, is usually divided into two great bodies or families. ”

“ Let us consider the real worldly Jews, not the Sabbath Jews, as Bauer does, but the every-day Jews.
We will not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but we will look for the secret of religion in the real Jew.
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical needs, egoism.
What is the secular cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his secular God? Money.
Very well. Emancipation from huckstering and from money, and therefore from practical, real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our epoch.
An organization of society, which would abolish the fundamental conditions of huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would render the Jew impossible. ”

“ We allude to that most undeservedly-persecuted race, the Jews—a race endowed with many virtues and generous qualities, but whose characters have been blackened by a host of writers whose narrow minds and illiberal prejudices have induced them to preserve all the exaggerations and misrepresentations which tradition hands down in the Christian world relative to the cruelly-treated Israelite. ”

“ The Israelites, or Jews, as they were collectively known, thus stood apart among the nations as proud possessors of superior knowledge, with a lineage and a literature, with a priestly organization and a system of laws, that separated and distinguished them as a people at once peculiar and exclusive. While the Jews regarded their idolatrous neighbors with abhorrence and contempt, they in turn were treated with derision as fanatics and inferiors. ”

“ The Jews of the East, like their brethren of Europe, are the people of the country who spend their sabbath the most strictly; and who are the most conscientious in the exercise of their religious observances, and the most obedient to its professors. ”

“ The Jews, as I have before mentioned, are the most important, both in consequence of their number and of their superior wealth; they belong to the tribe of Judah, and are very industrious, being the manufacturers of the place. ”

“ The Jews are there represented as murmuring against the good man of the house, on account of his rewarding the more late and early laborers, the ancient Jews and the newly converted Gentiles, by giving each of them a penny, "saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, who have borne the burden and heat of the day. ”

“ I’m not a pro-German, Marcus, but there’s a kinship between English Jews and German Jews and Russian Jews and Italian and American and Polish and Roumanian and Austrian Jews, that no war ever waged can entirely destroy. ”

“ With the extreme activity of mind which has always characterized the Jews, such an institution, notwithstanding the arbitrary rigors it tolerated, could not fail to give rise to very animated discussions. ”

“ The Jews—a people "born for slavery," as Tacitus and the whole ancient world say of them; "the chosen people among the nations," as they themselves say and believe—the Jews performed the miracle of the inversion of valuations, by means of which life on earth obtained a new and dangerous charm for a couple of millenniums. ”

“ The Jews.—Of all the races that have found asylum in America none have felt abroad the heavy hand of oppression more than the Jew. He has been the world's outcast through nineteen centuries, but in America he has found freedom to expand. ”

“ Although the Jews in general, and especially their leaders, the rabbis and sages, were, as a rule, superior to the Christian and Mahometan peoples in devotion to God, in morality, in refinement and knowledge, yet those to whom the earth belonged imagined themselves on a higher level, and with lordly haughtiness looked down upon the Jews as common slaves. ”

“ It is good to be able to ‘write injuries in dust, and kindnesses in marble.’ In 1492, the Jews were wickedly expelled from the land in which they had been, for centuries, so happy, and 200 years later we hear of descendants of those cruelly exiled Jews sending secretly to Spain and Portugal for citrons and branches of the palm, that their ‏סוּכּוֹת‎ might look ‘homelike’ in the bleak north lands in which their lot was cast. ”

“ The distinguished German Imperialist informs us that the Jews are pre-eminently a servile people, and he draws, amongst many other conclusions, the startling inference that Christ was not a Jew, but an Aryan. ”

“ Whenever a paragraph appears in a newspaper touching the Jews resident in Jerusalem, it is read with general interest, and is sure of being extensively quoted; but of the Jews resident among us nothing is ever heard, and probably very few persons indeed are aware of the extent to which they adhere to ancient forms and ceremonies. ”