Antisemitism

“ But the actions of the anti-Semites, deplorable as they are, are less deplorable than the social conditions which they illustrate. Anti-Semitism is a movement retrogressive in a twofold sense. Retrogressive inasmuch as it shows that the current of European humanism is flowing backwards, and retrogressive inasmuch as it has actually checked the gradual and voluntary assimilation of the Jew. It is a resurrection of the mediaeval monster of intolerance with a fresh face, and its effects are those which attended mediaeval persecution. ”

“ The Jews contend that anti-Semitism is a mere atavistic revival of the Jew-hatred of the middle ages. The extreme section of the anti-Semites, who have given the movement its quasi-scientific name, declare that it is a racial struggle—an incident of the eternal conflict between Europe and Asia—and that the anti-Semites are engaged in an effort to prevent what is called the Aryan race from being subjugated by a Semitic immigration, and to save Aryan ideals from being modified by an alien and demoralizing oriental Anschauung. ”

“ Despite its excesses and outrages, anti-Semitism is within its rightful province when it assails the worship of money, the scandalous barter of political influences, and the shameless exploitation of the people by the men whom they have elected; or, again, when it unmasks the hypocritical intolerance of inconsistent free-thinkers, who have erected irreligion and corruption into a method of government.
Modern society is ailing indeed, more ailing that the most honest anti-Semite imagines. The error of anti-Semitism lies in its misapprehension of the origin and the seat of the evil. ”

“ I have confidence that the anti-Semitic propaganda will be met by the stout resistance of the great mass of our citizens of Gentile birth and heritage who will fight and crush anti-Semitism in defense of Christian civilization and of American ideals, traditions, and institutions. That seems to me to be a rational faith; it affords firm anchorage. On the other hand, it is a stupendous and dangerous folly to believe that you can cultivate, as part of our national psychology, anti-Jewish fear and prejudice without reaping in due course a harvest of hatred and violence toward the Jewish people. ”

“ Disraeli once said that “Providence would deal good or ill fortune to nations according as they dealt well or ill by the Jews.”295 The saying, when stripped of its quasi-apocalyptic garb, will be found to conceal a great truth in it. Hatred towards the Jew has always abounded whenever and wherever barbarism has abounded. The amount of anti-Semitism in a country has generally been proportionate to the amount of bigotry, mental depravity, and moral callousness it contained. That so many now are willing to advocate anti-Semitism marks the precarious and superficial character of our civilisation. ”

“ There were other elements which had created a milieu peculiarly favourable to the transplantation of the German craze. In the first place the medieval anti-Semitism was still an integral part of the polity of the empire. The Jews were cooped up in one huge ghetto in the western provinces, “marked out to all their fellow-countrymen as aliens, and a pariah caste set apart for special and degrading treatment” (Persecution of the Jews in Russia, 1891, p. 5) . ”

“ Now, Germany has long been the home of modern "anti-Semitism." Although in every country and at every period, but more particularly in the East of Europe during the last century, the Jews have suffered from unpopularity, it was Germany that organized this aversion into a definite plan of campaign. If in Russia, Galicia, and Poland the Jews have met with sporadic violence at the hands of the peasants, in Germany they have been systematically held up by the authorities to hatred and contempt. Luther, Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Treitschke, successively inveighed against the Jewish race. ”

“ If these general principles of intolerance are true, we can apply them at once to the peculiar situation of the Jew—everywhere at home, yet everywhere the creature of prejudice; not so very different from the other white nations among whom he lives, yet always distinct from them and always the target of intolerance. Every movement of bigotry, aristocracy, militarism, junkerism in every land makes anti-semitism one of its cardinal shouting-cries, from the emigrés of Russia to the royalist anti-Dreyfusards of France. ”

“ While the main activity of anti-Semitism has manifested itself in Germany, Russia, Rumania, Austria-Hungary and France, its vibratory influences have been felt in other countries when conditions favourable to its extension have presented themselves. In England more than one Great Britain, &c.attempt to acclimatize the doctrines of Marr and Treitschke has been made. The circumstance that at the time of the rise of German anti-Semitism a premier of Hebrew race, Lord Beaconsfield, was in power first suggested the Jewish bogey to English political extremists. ”

“ Ethnographical speculations are in this case mainly interesting as having supplied a plausible explanation for the rise of anti-Semitism. Those who are able to see through new guises, and to detect what old things they conceal, know that anti-Semitism is little more than a new Protean manifestation of Jew-hatred. Divested of its academic paraphernalia, the movement is revealed in all its venerable vulgarity—a hoary-headed abomination long since excommunicated by the conscience of civilised mankind. ”

“ It is high time that the Jews should realise that few things do more to foster anti-Semite feeling than this very tendency to sail under false colours and conceal their true identity. The Zionist and the orthodox Jewish nationalist have long ago won the respect and admiration of the world. No race has ever defied assimilation so stubbornly and so successfully, and the modern tendency of individual Jews to repudiate what is one of their chief glories suggests an almost comic resolve to fight against the course of nature. ”

“ Heterogeneous elements might be absorbed, but if they could not be reduced to the national type they should be eliminated. This was the pseudo-scientific note of the new anti-Semitism, the theory which differentiated it from the old religious Jew-hatred and sought to give it a rational place in modern thought. Marr’s pamphlet, which reviewed the facts of the Jewish social concentration without noticing their essentially transitional character, proved the pioneer of this teaching. It was, however, in the passions of party politics that the new crusade found its chief sources of vitality. ”

“ Its agitation generally, coinciding with the revival of interest in Jewish history, has helped to transfer Jewish solidarity from a religious to a racial basis. The bond of a common race, vitalized by a new pride in Hebrew history and spurred on to resistance by the insults of the anti-Semites, has given a new spirit and a new source of strength to Judaism at a moment when the approximation of ethical systems and the revolt against dogma were sapping its essentially religious foundations. ”

“ National exclusivism and international finance, and not religious intolerance, are the root causes of anti-Semitism, and as long as those causes are operative the effect will remain. As long as the Jews constitute distinct colonies within the community, as long as the Jews specialize in the predatory and parasitic activities of finance, so long shall we witness outbursts of anti-Semitic feeling. ”

“ I have lived to see people who accused me of Anti-Semitism become far more Anti-Semitic than I am or ever was. I have heard people talking with real injustice about the Jews, who once seemed to think it an injustice to talk about them at all. ”

“ The contamination of anti-Semitism has also reached our own country. Infamous and false propaganda is being spread from plague centres within our own borders. We have hitherto belittled this danger. Now we see to where it is leading. It is time for us to wake up! We must also at this hour think of the mass persecution of Jews which is taking place in other countries. From available information it appears that the anti-Semitic wave is still rising. The threat now also concerns half-Jews. Our taking a stand might seem meaningless to all of these. We cannot stop violence. ”

“ Despite the strong anti-Semitic feeling displayed by the Christian inhabitants of those countries, the more advanced representatives of the race offer a vigorous opposition to Zionism and its separatist tendencies, holding that the re-animation of Jewish national sentiment is a temporary infatuation due to the cruel treatment of the Jews and destined to die out with it. These Jews also have abandoned the old Jewish national ideals, convinced that a man may frequent a Jewish synagogue and have a Semitic nose and yet be as good a Polish or Russian patriot as any other. ”

“ At the moment when the terrible persecution of the Jewish population in Germany and in other Central European countries has come to a violent climax, it is our duty to remind ourselves of the stand which we have taken as an ecumenical movement against anti-Semitism in all its forms. ”

“ We call upon our fellow citizens to remember that anti-Semitism is a threat to democracy and a denial of the fundamental principles upon which this nation is founded. We extend to our brethren and fellow citizens of Jewish race and blood our solemn assurance that by the constraint of our deepest Christian conviction we shall oppose unceasingly 'the sin of anti-Semitism' and we shall strive continuously for the realization of that brotherhood which humanity needs, democracy requires and Christianity demands. ”

“ In some parts of the world at various times this feeling of hatred has broken into murderous violence, which has roused, as wholesale physical outrage always does, the horror and resentment of humanity. This is the extreme form in which anti-Semitism has exhibited itself, and it is the charge of intending to stimulate it here and elsewhere which every public discussion of the Jewish Question has to bear. ”

“ Into that class all their strength was thrown, and owing to their ghetto preparation, they rapidly took a leading place in it, politically and socially. When the mid-century revolutions made the bourgeoisie the ruling power in Europe, the semblance of a Hebrew domination presented itself. It was the exaggeration of this apparent domination, not by the bourgeoisie itself, but by its enemies among the vanquished reactionaries on the one hand, and by the extreme Radicals on the other, which created modern anti-Semitism as a political force. ”

“ Anti-Semitism is sin against God and man. Only as we give convincing evidence to our Jewish neighbours that we seek for them the common rights and dignities which God wills for his children, can we come to such a meeting with them as would make it possible to share with them the best which God has given us in Christ.' The Assembly renews this plea in view of the fact that situations continue to exist in which the Jews are subject to discrimination and even persecution. The Assembly urges its member Churches to do all in their power to resist every form of anti-Semitism. ”

“ There is a recrudescence of Anti-Semitism all over Europe, especially in Neustria. The great Lutetian preacher is delivering a course of sermons against the Jews, and the ‘Petite Parole’ opens its columns daily to correspondents urging the most atrocious measures. All the other papers are following suit, members of the Government have denounced the Palestine scheme in the Chamber, and there are signs that the different political parties are willing to meet on the common ground of hatred of the Jews. ”

“ Jews have been hated for 3000 years. They are hated wherever they go. Instead of pointing the finger at those are anti-semtic, they should ask themselves why they are anti-semitic; why do they persistently attract an anti-semitic reaction. The answer is that they provoke the anti-semitism by their own actions. Irving cited examples, including claims for huge compensation from the Germans for the Holocaust and dishonesty on the part of Jewish financiers. The Jews have brought the anti-semitism on themselves by their own conduct and attitudes. ”

“ His emergence in the financial, political and social spheres has been so complete and spectacular since the war, that his place, power and purpose in the world are being given a new scrutiny, much of it unfriendly. Persecution is not a new experience to the Jew, but intensive scrutiny of his nature and super-nationality is. He has suffered for more than 2,000 years from what may be called the instinctive anti-Semitism of the other races, but this antagonism has never been intelligent nor has it been able to make itself intelligible. ”

“ No, you are not a vulgar, you are a very enlightened, critic of our Race. For there is an anti-Semitism, I hope and trust, which does the Jews more justice than any blind philo-Semitism, than does that merely sentimental “Let-them-all-come Liberalism” which in itself is nothing but the Semitic Ideology over again. ”

“ That the people of Israel should be hated and persecuted with fanatical passion and systematically annihilated with malice aforethought, is a phenomenon which has never before appeared in history in this form; for in the last resort there are no strategic, economic or cultural reasons to be adduced for this; the basis of anti-Semitism lies deeper, and this the Church should clearly perceive. The boundless and unrestrained hatred of the Jews comes from natural aversion to the 'Jewish God' and the 'Jewish Bible'. ”