Ooit heb ik enkele stukjes gelezen uit dit 'beruchte'werk van Ford.
Ik herinner me dat ik het goed vond.
Bij Ron Unz (een joodse pundit) staat nu het hele 'boek' van Ford online.
De titel doet mij denken dat ook Ford (net als ik en net als Guyénot) het probleem vooral zien in de ambities van de 1% joden die 'de wereld willen en KUNNEN veroveren' ( inzoverre dat nu al niet het geval is...)
Ik zal hieronder de eerste 20 hoofdstukken (183 pagina's) van Ford's 80 hoofdstukken weergeven.
Hoofdstuk
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The
International Jew
The
World's Foremost Problem
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Volume 1 • The
International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem • (November, 1920)
Volume 2 • Jewish
Activities in the United States • (April,
1921)
Volume 3 • Jewish
Influences in American Life • (November,
1921)
§
Volume 4: Aspects of
Jewish Power in the United States • (May,
1922)
Volume 1 • The International Jew: The World’s Foremost
Problem
(November, 1920)
(November, 1920)
Preface
Why discuss the Jewish Question? Because
it is here, and because its emergence into American thought should contribute
to its solution, and not to a continuance of those bad conditions which
surround the Question in other countries.
The Jewish Question has existed in the
United States for a long time. Jews themselves have known this, even if
Gentiles have not. There have been periods in our own country when it has
broken forth with a sullen sort of strength which presaged darker things to
come. Many signs portend that it is approaching an acute stage.Not only does
the Jewish Question touch those matters that are of common knowledge, such as
financial and commercial control, usurpation of political power, monopoly of
necessities, and autocratic direction of the very news that the American people
read; but it reaches into cultural regions and so touches the very heart of
American life.This question reaches down into South America and threatens to
become an important factor in Pan-American relations. It is interwoven with
much of the menace of organized and calculated disorder which troubles the
nations today. It is not of recent growth, but its roots go deep, and the long
Past of this Problem is counterbalanced by prophetic hopes and programs which
involve a very deliberate and creative view of the Future.
This little book is the partial record of
an investigation of the Jewish Question. It is printed to enable interested
readers to inform themselves on the data published in The Dearborn Independent
prior to Oct. 1, 1920. The demand for back copies of the paper was so great
that the supply was exhausted early, as was also a large edition of a booklet
containing the first nine articles of the series. The investigation still
proceeds, and the articles will continue to appear as heretofore until the work
is done.
The motive of this work is simply a desire
to make facts known to the people. Other motives have, of course, been ascribed
to it. But the motive of prejudice or any form of antagonism is hardly strong
enough to support such an investigation as this. Moreover, had an unworthy
motive existed, some sign of it would inevitably appear in the work itself. We
confidently call the reader to witness that the tone of these articles is all
that it should be. The International Jew and his satellites, as the conscious
enemies of all that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization, are not spared, nor is that
unthinking mass which defends anything that a Jew does, simply because it has
been taught to believe that what Jewish leaders do is Jewish. Neither do these
articles proceed upon a false emotion of brotherhood and apology, as if this
stream of doubtful tendency in the world were only accidentally Jewish. We give
the facts as we find them; that of itself is sufficient protection against
prejudice or passion.
This volume does not complete the case by
any means. But it brings the reader along one step. In future compilations of
these and subsequent articles the entire scope of the inquiry will more clearly
appear.
October, 1920.
Chapter 1 • The
Jew in Character and Business
“Among the distinguishing mental and
moral traits of the Jews may be mentioned: distaste for hard or violent
physical labor; a strong family sense and philoprogenitiveness; a marked
religious instinct; the courage of the prophet and martyr rather than of the
pioneer and soldier; remarkable power to survive in adverse environments, combined
with great ability to retain racial solidarity; capacity for exploitation, both
individual and social; shrewdness and astuteness in speculation and money
matters generally; an Oriental love of display and a full appreciation of the
power and pleasure of social position; a very high average of intellectual
ability.”
—The New International Encyclopedia.
The Jew is again being singled out for
critical attention throughout the world. 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 instinctive
anti-Semitism of the other races, but this antagonism has never been
intelligent nor has it been able to make itself intelligible. Nowadays,
however, the Jew is being placed, as it were, under the microscope of economic
observation that the reasons for his power, the reasons for his separateness,
the reasons for his suffering may be defined and understood.
In Russia he is charged with being the
source of Bolshevism, an accusation which is serious or not according to the
circle in which it is made; we in America, hearing the fervid eloquence and
perceiving the prophetic ardor of young Jewish apostles of social and
industrial reform, can calmly estimate how it may be. In Germany he is charged
with being the cause of the Empire’s collapse and a very considerable
literature has sprung up, bearing with it a mass of circumstantial evidence
that gives the thinker pause. In England he is charged with being the real
world ruler, who rules as a super-nation over the nations, rules by the power
of gold, and who plays nation against nation for his own purposes, remaining
himself discreetly in the background. In America it is pointed out to what
extent the elder Jews of wealth and the younger Jews of ambition swarmed
through the war organizations — principally those departments which dealt with
the commercial and industrial business of war, and also the extent to which they
have clung to the advantage which their experience as agents of the government
gave them.
In simple words, the question of the Jews
has come to the fore, but like other questions which lend themselves to
prejudice, efforts will be made to hush it up as impolitic for open discussion.
If, however, experience has taught us anything it is that questions thus
suppressed will sooner or later break out in undesirable and unprofitable
forms.
The Jew is the world’s enigma. Poor in his
masses, he yet controls the world’s finances. Scattered abroad without country
or government, he yet presents a unity of race continuity which no other people
has achieved. Living under legal disabilities in almost every land, he has
become the power behind many a throne. There are ancient prophecies to the
effect that the Jew will return to his own land and from that center rule the
world, though not until he has undergone an assault by the united nations of
mankind.
The single description which will include
a larger percentage of Jews than members of any other race is this: he is in
business. It may be only gathering rags and selling them, but he is in
business. From the sale of old clothes to the control of international trade
and finance, the Jew is supremely gifted for business. More than any other race
he exhibits a decided aversion to industrial employment, which he balances by
an equally decided adaptability to trade. The Gentile boy works his way up,
taking employment in the productive or technical departments; but the Jewish boy
prefers to begin as messenger, salesman or clerk — anything — so long as it is
connected with the commercial side of the business. An early Prussian census
illustrates this characteristic: of a total population of 269,400, the Jews
comprised six per cent or 16,164. Of these, 12,000 were traders and 4,164 were
workmen. Of the Gentile population, the other 94 per cent, or 153,236 people,
there were only 17,000 traders.
A modern census would show a large
professional and literary class added to the traders, but no diminution of the
percentage of traders and not much if any increase in the number of wage
toilers. In America alone most of the big business, the trusts and the banks,
the natural resources and the chief agricultural products, especially tobacco, cotton
and sugar, are in the control of Jewish financiers or their agents. Jewish
journalists are a large and powerful group here. “Large numbers of department
stores are held by Jewish firms,” says the Jewish Encyclopedia, and many if not
most of them are run under Gentile names. Jews are the largest and most
numerous landlords of residence property in the country. They are supreme in
the theatrical world. They absolutely control the circulation of publications
throughout the country. Fewer than any race whose presence among us is
noticeable, they receive daily an amount of favorable publicity which would be
impossible did they not have the facilities for creating and distributing it
themselves. Werner Sombart, in his “Jew and Modern Capitalism” says, “If the
conditions in America continue to develop along the same lines as in the last
generation, if the immigration statistics and the proportion of births among
all the nationalities remain the same, our imagination may picture the United
States of fifty or a hundred years hence as a land inhabited only by Slavs,
Negroes and Jews, wherein the Jews will naturally occupy the position of
economic leadership.” Sombart is a pro-Jewish writer.
The question is, If the Jew is in control,
how did it happen? This is a free country. The Jew comprises only about three
per cent of the population; to every Jew there are 97 Gentiles; to the
3,000,000 Jews in the United States there are 97,000,000 Gentiles. If the Jew
is in control, is it because of his superior ability, or is it because of the
inferiority and don’t-care attitude of the Gentiles?
It would be very simple to answer that the
Jews came to America, took their chances like other people and proved more
successful in the competitive struggle. But that would not include all the
facts. And before a more adequate answer can be given, two points should be
made clear. This first is this: all Jews are not rich controllers of wealth.
There are poor Jews aplenty, though most of them even in their poverty are
their own masters. While it may be true that the chief financial controllers of
the country are Jews, it is not true that every Jew is one of the financial
controllers of the country. The classes must be kept distinct for a reason
which will appear when the methods of the rich Jews and the methods of the poor
Jews to gain power are differentiated. Secondly; the fact of Jewish solidarity
renders it difficult to measure Gentile and Jewish achievements by the same
standard. When a great block of wealth in America was made possible by the
lavish use of another block of wealth from across the seas; that is to say,
when certain Jewish immigrants came to the United States with the financial
backing of European Jewry behind them, it would be unfair to explain the rise
of that class of immigration by the same rules which account for the rise of,
say, the Germans or the Poles who came here with no resource but their ambition
and strength. To be sure, many individual Jews come in that way, too, with no
dependence but themselves, but it would not be true to say that the massive
control of affairs which is exercised by Jewish wealth was won by individual
initiative; it was rather the extension of financial control across the sea.
That, indeed, is where any explanation of
Jewish control must begin. Here is a race whose entire period of national
history saw them peasants on the land, whose ancient genius was spiritual
rather than material, bucolic rather than commercial, yet today, when they have
no country, no government, and are persecuted in one way or another everywhere
they go, they are declared to be the principal though unofficial rulers of the
earth. How does so strange a charge arise, and why do so many circumstances
seem to justify it?
Begin at the beginning. During the
formative period of their national character the Jews lived under a law which
made plutocracy and pauperism equally impossible among them. Modern reformers
who are constructing model social systems on paper would do well to look into
the social system under which the early Jews were organized. The Law of Moses
made a “money aristocracy,” such as Jewish financiers form today, impossible
because it forbade the taking of interest. It made impossible also the
continuous enjoyment of profit wrung out of another’s distress. Profiteering
and sheer speculation were not favored under the Jewish system. There could be
no land-hogging; the land was apportioned among the people, and though it might
be lost by debt or sold under stress, it was returned every 50 years to its
original family ownership, at which time, called “The Year of Jubilee,” there
was practically a new social beginning. The rise of great landlords and a
moneyed class was impossible under such a system, although the interim of 50
years gave ample scope for individual initiative to assert itself under fair
competitive conditions.
If, therefore, the Jews had retained their
status as a nation, and had remained in Palestine under the Law of Moses, they
would hardly have achieved the financial distinction which they have since won.
Jews never got rich out of one another. Even in modern times they have not
become rich out of each other but out of the nations among whom they dwelt.
Jewish law permitted the Jew to do business with a Gentile on a different basis
than that on which he did business with a brother Jew. What is called “the Law
of the Stranger” was defined thus: “unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon
usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury.”
Being dispersed among the nations, but
never merging themselves with the nations and never losing a very distinctive
identity, the Jew has had the opportunity to practice “the ethics of the
stranger” for many centuries. Being strangers among strangers, and often among
cruelly hostile strangers, they have found this law a compensating advantage.
Still, this alone would not account for the Jew’s preeminence in finance. The
explanation of that must be sought in the Jew himself, his vigor,
resourcefulness and special proclivities.
Very early in the Jewish story we discover
the tendency of Israel to be a master nation, with other nations as its
vassals. Notwithstanding the fact that the whole prophetic purpose with
reference to Israel seems to have been the moral enlightenment of the world
through its agency, Israel’s “will to mastery” apparently hindered that
purpose. At least such would seem to be the tone of the Old Testament. Divinely
ordered to drive out the Canaanites that their corrupt ideas might not
contaminate Israel, the Jews did not obey, according to the old record. They
looked over the Canaanitish people and perceived what great amount of man-power
would be wasted if they were expelled, and so Israel enslaved them — “And it
came to pass, when Israel was strong, that they put the Canaanites to tribute,
and did not utterly drive them out.” It was this form of disobedience, this
preference of material mastery over spiritual leadership, that marked the
beginning of Israel’s age-long disciplinary distress.
The Jews’ dispersion among the nations
temporarily (that is, for more than 25 centuries now) changed the program which
their scriptures declare was divinely planned, and that dispersion continues
until today. There are spiritual leaders in modern Judaism who still claim that
Israel’s mission to the nations is spiritual, but their assertions that Israel
is today fulfilling that mission are not as convincing as they might be if
accompanied by more evidence. Israel, throughout the modern centuries is still
looking at the Gentile world and estimating what its man-power can be made to
yield. But the discipline upon Israel still holds; he is an exile from his own
land, condemned to be discriminated against wherever he goes, until the time
when exile and homelessness shall end in a re-established Palestine, and
Jerusalem again the moral center of the earth, even as the elder prophets have
declared.
Had the Jew become an employee, a worker
for other men, his dispersion would not probably have been so wide. But
becoming a trader, his instincts drew him round the habitable earth. There were
Jews in China at an early date. They appeared as traders in England at the time
of the Saxons. Jewish traders were in South America 100 years before the
Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock. Jews established the sugar industry in
the Island of St. Thomas in 1492. They were well established in Brazil when
only a few villages dotted the eastern coast of what is now the United States.
And how far they penetrated when once they came here is indicated by the fact
that the first white child born in Georgia was a Jew — Isaac Minis. The Jew’s
presence round the earth, his clannishness with his own people, made him a
nation scattered among the nations, a corporation with agents everywhere.
Another talent, however, contributed
greatly to his rise in financial power — his ability to invent new devices for
doing business. Until the Jew was pitted against the world, business was very
crudely done. And when we trace the origins of many of the business methods
which simplify and facilitate trade today, more likely than not we find a
Jewish name at the end of the clue. Many of the indispensable instruments of
credit and exchange were thought out by Jewish merchants, not only for use
between themselves, but to check and hold the Gentiles with whom they dealt. The
oldest bill of exchange extant was drawn by a Jew — one Simon Rubens. The
promissory note was a Jewish invention, as was also the check “payable to
bearer.”
An interesting bit of history attaches to
the “payable to bearer” instrument. The Jews’ enemies were always stripping
them of their last ounce of wealth, yet strangely, the Jews recovered very
quickly and were soon rich again. How this sudden recovery from looting and
poverty? Their assets were concealed under “bearer” and so a goodly portion was
always saved. In an age when it was lawful for any pirate to seize goods
consigned to Jews, the Jews were able to protect themselves by consigning goods
on policies that bore no names.
The influence of the Jew was to center
business around goods instead of persons. Previously all claims had been
against persons; the Jew knew that the goods were more reliable than the
persons with whom he dealt, and so he contrived to have claims laid against
goods. Besides, this device enabled him to keep himself out of sight as much as
possible. This introduced an element of hardness into business, inasmuch as it
was goods which were being dealt in rather than men being dealt with, and this
hardness remains. Another tendency which survives and which is of advantage in
veiling the very large control which Jews have attained, is of the same origin
as “bearer” bills; it permits a business dominated by Jewish capital to appear
under a name that gives no hint of Jewish control.
The Jew is the only and original
international capitalist, but as a rule he prefers not to emblazon that fact
upon the skies; he prefers to use Gentile banks and trust companies as his
agents and instruments. The suggestive term “Gentile front” often appears in
connection with this practice.
The invention of the stock exchange is
also credited to Jewish financial talent. In Berlin, Paris, London, Frankfort,
and Hamburg, Jews were in control of the first stock exchanges, while Venice
and Genoa were openly referred to in the talk of the day as “Jew cities” where
great trading and banking facilities might be found. The Bank of England was
established upon the counsel and assistance of Jewish emigrants from Holland.
The Bank of Amsterdam and the Bank of Hamburg both arose through Jewish
influence.
There is a curious fact to be noted in
connection with the persecution and consequent wanderings of the Jews about
Europe and that is: wherever they wandered, the center of business seemed to go
with them. When the Jews were free in Spain, there was the world’s gold center.
When Spain drove out the Jews, Spain lost financial leadership and has never
regained it. Students of the economic history of Europe have always been
puzzled to discover why the center of trade should have shifted from Spain,
Portugal and Italy, up to the northern countries of Holland, Germany, and
England. They have sought for the cause in many things, but none has proved
completely explanatory. When, however, it is known that the change was
coincident with the expulsion of the Jews from the South and their flight to
the North, when it is known that upon the Jews’ arrival the northern countries
began a commercial life which has flourished until our day, the explanation
does not seem difficult. Time and again it has proved to be the fact that when
the Jews were forced to move, the center of the world’s precious metals moved
with them.
This distribution of the Jews over Europe
and the world, each Jewish community linked in a fellowship of blood, faith and
suffering with every other group, made it possible for the Jew to be
international in the sense that no other race or group of merchants could be at
that time. Not only were they everywhere (Americans and Russians are
everywhere, too) but they were in touch. They were organized before the days of
conscious international commercial organizations, they were bound together by
the sinews of a common life. It was observed by many writers in the Middle Ages
that the Jews knew more of what was transpiring in Europe than the governments
did. They also had better knowledge of what was likely to occur. They knew more
about conditions than the statesmen did. This information they imparted by
letter from group to group, country to country. Indeed, they may be said thus
to have originated unconsciously the financial news-letter. Certainly the
information they were able to obtain and thus distribute was invaluable to them
in their speculative enterprises. Advance knowledge was an immense advantage in
the days when news was scarce, slow and unreliable.
This enabled Jewish financiers to become
the agents of national loans, a form of business which they encouraged wherever
possible. The Jew has always desired to have nations for his customers.
National loans were facilitated by the presence of members of the same family
of financiers in various countries, thus making an interlocking directorate by
which king could be played against king, government against government, and the
shrewdest use made of national prejudices and fears, all to the no small profit
of the fiscal agent.
One of the charges most commonly made
against Jewish financiers today is that they still favor this larger field of
finance. Indeed, in all the criticism that is heard regarding the Jew as a
business man, there is comparatively little said against him as an individual
merchant serving individual customers. Thousands of small Jewish merchants are
highly respected by their trade, just as tens of thousands of Jewish families
are respected as our neighbors. The criticism, insofar as it respects the more
important financiers, is not racial at all. Unfortunately the element of race,
which so easily lends itself to misinterpretation as racial prejudice, is
injected into the question by the mere fact that the chain of international
finance as it is traced around the world discloses at every link a Jewish
capitalist, financial family, or a Jewish-controlled banking system. Many have
professed to see in this circumstance a conscious organization of Jewish power
for Gentile control, while others have attributed the circumstance to Jewish
racial sympathies, to the continuity of their family affairs down the line of
descent, and to the increase of collateral branches. In the old Scriptural
phrase, Israel grows as the vine grows, ever shooting out new branches and
deepening old roots, but always part of the one vine.
The Jew’s aptitude for dealing with
governments may also be traced to the years of his persecution. He early
learned the power of gold in dealing with mercenary enemies. Wherever he went
there followed him like a curse the aroused antipathy of other peoples. The Jew
was never popular as a race; even the most fervid Jew will not deny that,
howsoever he may explain it. Individuals have been popular, of course; many
phases of Jewish nature are found to be very lovable when known; but
nevertheless one of the burdens the Jews have had to bear as a race is this
burden of racial unpopularity. Even in modern times, in civilized countries, in
conditions which render persecution absolutely impossible, this unpopularity
exists. And what is more, the Jew has not seemed to care to cultivate the
friendship of the Gentile masses, due perhaps to the failures of experience,
but due more likely to his inborn persuasion that he belongs to a superior
race. Whatever the true reason, he has always placed his main dependence on
cultivating friendship with kings and nobles. What cared the Jew if the people
gnashed their teeth against him, so long as the king and the court were his
friends? Thus there was always, even through most of the severely trying times,
“a court Jew,” one who had bought by loans and held by the stranglehold of debt
an entrance to the king’s chamber. The policy of the Jews has always been to
“go to headquarters.” They never tried to placate the Russian people, but they
did endeavor to enlist the Russian court. They never tried to placate the
German people, but they did succeed in permeating the German court. In England
they shrug their shoulders at the outspoken anti-Jew reactions of the British
populace — what care they? Have they not all of lorddom at their heels, do they
not hold the strings of Britain’s purse?
Through this ability of theirs to “go to
headquarters” it is possible to account for the stronghold they got upon
various governments and nations. Added to this ability was, of course, the
ability to produce what the governments wanted. If a government wanted a loan,
the Jew at court could arrange it through Jews at other financial centers and
political capitals. If one government wanted to pay another government a debt
without risking the precious metal to a mule train through a robber-infested
country, the Jew at court arranged that too. He transferred a piece of paper
and the debt was paid by the banking house at the foreign capital. The first
time an army was ever fed in the modern commissary way, it was done by a Jew —
he had the capital and he had the system; moreover he had the delight of having
a nation for his customer.
And this tendency, which served the race
so well throughout the troublous centuries, shows no sign of abatement.
Certainly, seeing to what an extent a race numerically so unimportant
influences the various governments of the world today, the Jew who reflects
upon the disparity between his people’s numbers and their power may be pardoned
if he sees in that fact a proof of their racial superiority.
It may be said also that Jewish
inventiveness in business devices continues to the present time, as well as
Jewish adaptability to changing conditions. The Jew is credited with being the
first to establish branch houses in foreign countries in order that responsible
representatives of the home office might be on the ground taking instant
advantage of every opening. During the war a great deal was said about the
“peaceful penetration” which the “German Government” had effected in the United
States by establishing here branch offices and factories of German firms. The
fact that there were many German branch houses here is unquestionable. It
should be known, however, that they were not the evidence of German enterprise
but of Jewish enterprise. The old German business houses were too conservative
to “run after customers” even in the hustling United States, but the Jewish
firms were not, and they came straight to America and hustled. In due time the
competition forced the more conservative German firms to follow suit. But the
idea was Jewish in its origin, not German.
Another modern business method whose
origin is credited to Jewish financiers is that by which related industries are
brought together, as for example, if an electrical power company is acquired,
then the street railway company using the electricity would be acquired too,
one purpose being in this way to conserve all the profit accruing along the
line, from the origination of the power down to the delivery of the street car
ride; but perhaps the main purpose being that, by the control of the power
house the price of current could be increased to the car company, and by the
control of the car company the cost of a ride could be increased to the public,
the controllers thus receiving an additional profit all down the line. There is
much of this going on in the world today, and in the United States
particularly. The portion of the business immediately next to the ultimate
consumer explains that its costs have risen, but it does not explain that the
costs were increased by the owners and not by outsiders who were forced to do
so by economic pressure.
There is apparently in the world today a
central financial force which is playing a vast and closely organized game,
with the world for its table and universal control for its stakes. The people
of civilized countries have lost all confidence in the explanation that
“economic conditions” are responsible for all the changes that occur. Under the
camouflage of “economic law” a great many phenomena have been accounted for
which were not due to any law whatever except the law of the selfish human will
as operated by a few men who have the purpose and the power to work on a wide
scale with nations as their vassals.
Whatever else may be national, no one
today believes that finance is national. Finance is international. Nobody today
believes that international finance is in any way competitive. There are some
independent banking houses, but few strong independent ones. The great masters,
the few whose minds see clearly the entire play of the plan, control numerous
banking houses and trust companies, and one is used for this while another is
used for that, but there is no disharmony between them, no correction of each other’s
methods, no competition in the interests of the business world. There is as
much unity of policy between the principal banking houses of every country as
there is between the various branches of the United States Post Office — and
for the same reason, namely, they are all operated from the same source and for
the same purpose.
Just before the war Germany bought very
heavily in American cotton and had huge quantities of it tied up here for
export. When war came, the ownership of that mountainous mass of cotton wealth
changed in one night from Jewish names in Hamburg to Jewish names in London. At
this writing cotton is selling in England for less than it is selling in the
United States, and the effect of that is to lower the American price. When the
price lowers sufficiently, the market is cleared of cotton by buyers previously
prepared, and then the price soars to high figures again. In the meantime, the
same powers that have engineered the apparently causeless strengthening and
weakening of the cotton market, have seized upon stricken Germany to be the
sweatshop of the world. Certain groups control the cotton, lend it to Germany
to be manufactured, leave a pittance of it there in payment for the labor that
was used, and then profiteer the length and breadth of the world on the lie
that “cotton is scarce.” And when, tracing all these anti-social and colossally
unfair methods to their source, it is found that the responsible parties all
have a common characteristic, is it any wonder that the warning which comes
across the sea — “Wait until America becomes awake to the Jew!” — has a new
meaning?
Certainly, economic reasons no longer
explain the condition in which the world finds itself today. Neither does the
ordinary explanation of “the heartlessness of capital.” Capital has endeavored
as never before to meet the demands of labor, and labor has gone to extremes in
leading capital to new concessions — but what has it advantaged either of them?
Labor has heretofore thought that capital was the sky over it, and it made the
sky yield, but behold, there was yet an higher sky which neither capital nor
labor had seen in their struggles one with another. That sky is so far
unyielding.
That which we call capital here in America
is usually money used in production, and we mistakenly refer to the
manufacturer, the manager of work, the provider of tools and jobs — we refer to
him as the “capitalist.” Oh, no. He is not the capitalist in the real sense.
Why, he himself must go to capitalists for the money with which to finance his
plans. There is a power yet above him — a power which treats him far more
callously and holds him in a more ruthless hand than he would ever dare display
to labor. That, indeed, is one of the tragedies of these times, that “labor”
and “capital” are fighting each other, when the conditions against which each
one of them protests, and from which each one of them suffers, is not within
their power to remedy at all, unless they find a way to wrest world control
from that group of international financiers who create and control both these
conditions.
There is a super-capitalism which is
supported wholly by the fiction that gold is wealth. There is a
super-government which is allied to no government, which is free from them all,
and yet which has its hand in them all. There is a race, a part of humanity,
which has never yet been received as a welcome part, and which has succeeded in
raising itself to a power that the proudest Gentile race has never claimed —
not even Rome in the days of her proudest power. It is becoming more and more
the conviction of men all over the world that the labor question, the wage
question, the land question cannot be settled until first of all this matter of
an international super-capitalistic government is settled.
“To the victor belongs the spoils” is an
old saying. And in a sense it is true that if all this power of control has
been gained and held by a few men of a long-despised race, then either they are
super-men whom it is powerless to resist, or they are ordinary men whom the
rest of the world has permitted to obtain an undue and unsafe degree of power.
Unless the Jews are super-men, the Gentiles will have themselves to blame for
what has transpired, and they can look for rectification in a new scrutiny of
the situation and a candid examination of the experiences of other countries.
Chapter 2 •
Germany’s Reaction Against the Jew
Humanity has become wise enough to discuss
those forms of physical sickness over which it formerly drew the veil of shame
and secrecy, but political hygiene is not so far advanced. The main source of
the sickness of the German national body is charged to be the influence of the
Jews, and although this was apparent to acute minds years ago, it is now said
to have gone so far as to be apparent to the least observing. The eruption has
broken out on the surface of the body politic, and no further concealment of
this fact is possible. It is the belief of all classes of the German people
that the collapse which has come since the armistice, and the revolution from
which they are being prevented a recovery, are the result of Jewish intrigue
and purpose. They declare it with assurance; they offer a mass of facts to
confirm it; they believe that history will provide the fullest proof.
The Jew in Germany is regarded as only a
guest of the people; he has offended by trying to turn himself into the host.
There are no stronger contrasts in the world than the pure Germanic and pure
Semitic races; therefore, there has been no harmony between the two in Germany;
the German has regarded the Jew strictly as a guest, while the Jew, indignant
at not being given the privileges of the nation-family, has cherished animosity
against his host. In other countries the Jew is permitted to mix more readily
with the people, he can amass his control unchallenged; but in Germany the case
was different. Therefore, the Jew hated the German people; therefore, the
countries of the world which were most dominated by the Jews showed the
greatest hatred of Germany during the recent regrettable war.
Jewish hands were in almost exclusive
control of the engines of publicity by which public opinion concerning the
German people was molded. The sole winners of the war were Jews. But assertion
is not enough; proof is wanted; therefore, consider the evidence. What occurred
immediately upon the change from the old regime to the new? The cabinet
composed of six men, which substituted the Minister of State, was dominated by
the Jews Haase and Landsberg. Haase had control of foreign affairs; his
assistant was the Jew Kautsky, a Czech, who in 1918 was not even a German
citizen.
Also associated with Haase were the Jews
Cohn and Herzfeld. The Jew Schiffer was Financial Minister of State, assisted
by the Jew Bernstein. The Secretary of the Interior was the Jew Preuss, with
the Jew Dr. Freund for his assistant. The Jew Fritz Max Cohen, who was
correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung in Copenhagen, was made government
publicity agent. The kingdom of Prussia duplicated this condition of affairs.
The Jews Hirsch and Rosenfeld dominated the cabinet, with Rosenfeld controlling
the Department of Justice, and Hirsch in the Department of the Interior. The
Jew Simon was in charge of the Treasury Department. The Prussian Department of
Justice was wholly manned and operated by Jews. The Director of Education was
the Jew Furtran with the assistance of the Jew Arndt. The Director of the
Colonial Office was the Jew Meyer-Gerhard. The Jew Kastenberg was the director
of the Department of Art. The War Food Supply Department was directed by the
Jew Wurm, while in the State Food Department were the Jews Prof. Dr. Hirsch and
the Geheimrat Dr. Stadthagen. The Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Committee was
directed by the Jew Cohen, with the Jews Stern, Herz, Lowenberg, Frankel,
Israelowicz, Laubenheim, Seligsohn, Katzenstein, Laufenberg, Heimann,
Schlesinger, Merz and Weyl having control of various activities of that
committee.
The Jew Ernst is chief of police at
Berlin; in the same office at Frankfurt is the Jew Sinzheimer; in Munich the
Jew Steiner; in Essen the Jew Levy. It will be remembered that the Jew Eisner
was President of Bavaria, his financial minister being the Jew Jaffe. Bavaria’s
trade, commerce and industry were in control of the half-Jew Brentano. The Jews
Lipsinsky and Schwarz were active in the government of Saxony; the Jews
Thalheimer and Heiman in Wurtemberg; the Jew Fulda in Hessen.
Two delegates sent to the Peace Conference
were Jews and a third was notoriously the tool of Jewish purposes. In addition
Jews swarmed through the German delegation as experts and advisors — Max
Warburg, Dr. Von Strauss, Merton, Oskar Oppenheimer, Dr. Jaffe, Deutsch,
Brentano, Bernstein, Struck, Rathenau, Wassermann, and Mendelsohn-Bartholdi.
As to the part which Jews from other
countries had in the Peace Conference, German observers declare that any candid
student may discover by reading the accounts of impartial non-Jewish recorders
ofthat event. Only the non-Jewish historians seem to have been struck by the
fact; the multitude of Jewish writers apparently judged it wise to conceal it.
Jewish influence in German affairs came
strongly to the front during the war. It came with all the directness and
attack of a flying wedge, as if previously prepared. The Jews of Germany were
not German patriots during the war, and although this will not appear a crime
in the eyes of the nations who were opposed to Germany, it may throw some light
on the Jew’s assertion of patriotic loyalty to the land where he lives.
Thoughtful Germans hold that it is impossible for a Jew to be a patriot, for
reasons which will presently be given.
The point to be considered is the general
claim that the persons already named would not have obtained the positions in
which they were found had it not been for the Revolution, and the Revolution
would not have come had not they brought it. It is true that there were
unsatisfactory conditions in Germany, but they could and would have been
adjusted by the people themselves; the conditions which destroyed the people’s
morale and were made impossible of reform were in control of the Jews.
The principal Jewish influences which are
charged with bringing about the downfall of German order may be named under
three heads:
·
(a) the spirit of Bolshevism which
masqueraded under the name of German Socialism;
·
(b) Jewish ownership and control of the
Press;
·
(c) Jewish control of the food supply
and the industrial machinery of the country.
There was a fourth, “higher up,” but these
worked upon the German people directly.
As it is possible that German conclusions
upon this matter may be received doubtfully by people whose public opinion has
been shaped by Jewish influence, it may help to quote George Pitter-Wilson, of
the London Globe, who wrote early in April, 1919, “Bolshevism is the
dispossession of the Christian nations of the world to such an extent that no
capital will remain in the hands of the Christians, that all Jews may jointly
hold the world in their hands and reign wherever they choose.” As early as the
second year of the war, German Jews were preaching that Germany’s defeat was
necessary to the rise of the proletariat, at which time Strobel declared, “I openly
admit that a full victory of the country would not be in the interest of the
Social Democrats.” Everywhere it was preached that “the exaltation of the
proletariat after a won victory is an impossibility.” These instances, out of
many, are cited not to reopen the military question but to show how the
so-called German Jew forgot loyalty to the country in which he lived and joined
the outside Jews in accomplishing the collapse of Germany, and not merely, as
we shall see, to rid Germany of militarism, which every thoughtful German
desired, but to throw the country into such confusion as to permit them to
seize control.
The press of Germany echoed this plan of
the Jewish spokesmen, at first faintly, then boldly. The Berliner Tageblatt and
the Munchner Neuester Nachrichten were during the whole war official and
semiofficial organs of the government. They were owned and controlled by Jews,
as was also the Frankfurter Zeitung and a host of smaller papers that were
their spiritual dependents. These papers, it is charged, were really German
editions of the Jew-controlled press of the Allied countries, and their purpose
was the same. One of the great pieces of research that ought to be undertaken
for the purpose of showing the world how its thought is manufactured for it
every day, and for what ulterior purposes, is this union of the Jewish press,
which passes for the Public Press, throughout the world.
The food and supplies of the people
quickly passed into Jewish hands as soon as the war emergency came, and then began
a period of dishonesty which destroyed the confidence of the bravest.
Like all other patriotic people, the
German people knew that war meant sacrifice and suffering, and like other
people they were willing to share the common lot. But they found themselves
preyed upon by a class of Jews who had prepared everything to make profit out
of the common distress. Immediately Jews appeared in banks, war companies,
distribution societies, and the ministries of supplies — wherever the life of
the people could be speculated in or taxed. Articles that were plentiful
disappeared, only to reappear again at high prices. The war companies were
exclusively Jewish, and although the government attempted to regulate the outgo
of food in the interests of all the people, it became notorious that those with
money could get all of anything they wanted, regardless of the food cards.
The Jews simply trebled the price of the
goods they let go without the cards, and so kept a stream of the nation’s gold
flowing into their private treasuries. None of the government’s estimates of
the food stocks could be depended on, because of the hidden hoards on which
these speculators drew. This began to disturb the morale of the people, and
complaints were made and prosecutions started; but as soon as the cases came up
it was discovered that the prosecutor appointed to charge and the commissioner
appointed to judge were also Jews, and so the cases usually wore themselves out
without results. When, however, a German merchant was caught, great noise was
made about it, and the penalty placed upon him was equal to what all the others
should have had. Go the length and breadth of Germany today, say the reports,
study the temper of the people, and you will discover that the abuse of power
by the Jews has burned across Germany’s memory like a hot iron.
While these influences were undermining
the mass of the people, higher influences of Jewish origin were operating upon
the government. The advisors of the Bethmann-Hollweg government were the great
ship magnate Ballin, a Jew; Theodor Wolff, of the Berliner Tageblatt and member
of the Pan-Jewish press; Von Gwinner, director of the German Bank who is
connected by marriage with the great Jew bankers, the Speyers; and Rathenau,
the leader of Jewish Industrial-financial activities. These men were at the
source of things and were bending the government as the other influences were
bending the people.
The rich German Jew could buy the
recognition he desired by acquiring financial power over those interests which
most directly affected the ruling class of Germany, but how was the poor Jew to
gain the recognition he desired? — for all Jews are actuated by the same
desire; it is in them; they feel the spur to mastery. Having explored the
conquest of the higher circles by Jewish money-power, there is yet to explore
the conquest of the body of the nation by Jews who had no money except what
they could seize in the disorder which they caused. The analysis that is given,
follows: The Jew is not an anarchist. He is not a destructionist. All this is
true, notwithstanding he is the world’s Bolshevist and preeminently Germany’s
revolutionist. His anarchy is not ingrain, it is a device which he uses for a
purpose. The rich Jew is not an anarchist, because he can achieve what he desires
by more subtle methods. The poor Jew has no other recourse. But rich and poor
go jointly for a long stretch; the bond of sympathy between them never breaks;
for, if the anarchy is successful, then the poor Jew shall take his place with
the rich Jew; and if the anarchy is not successful, it has nevertheless served
to break up new fields in which the rich Jew may operate.
In Germany it was possible for the poor
Jew to thrust himself up through the wall of Germanism above him only by
breaking it up. In Russia the same was true. The social system had encrusted
around the Jew, keeping him in a position where, as the nations knew by
experience, he would be less harmful.
As nature encysts the harmful foreign
element in the flesh, building a wall around it, so nations have found it
expedient to do with the Jew. In modern times, however, the Jew has found a
means of knocking down the walls and throwing the whole national house into
confusion, and in the darkness and riot that follows, seize the place he has long
coveted. When Russia broke, who came first to light? Kerensky, who is a Jew.
But his plans were not radical enough, and then came Trotsky,
another Jew. Trotsky found the system too strong for him to break in America —
he broke through the weak spot in Russia and would extend that weakness round
the world. Every commissar in Russia today is a Jew.
Publicists are accustomed to speak of
Russia as if it were in disorder. It may be that Russia is, but the Jewish
government of Russia is not. From a mass of underlings, the Jews of Russia came
up a perfect phalanx, a flying wedge through the superinduced disorder, as if
every man’s place had been previously prepared for him.
That also is the way it was in Germany.
The German ceiling had to be broken, as it were, before the poor Jews could
realize their ambition. When the break was made they swarmed through and
settled in places of control above the nation.
This may explain why Jews the world over
supply the energy of disruptive movements. It is understood that the young Jews
of the United States are propagandists of an ideal that would practically
abolish the United States. The attack is aimed, of course, against
“capitalism,” which means the present government of the world by the Gentile.
The true capitalists of the world are Jews, who are capitalists for capital’s
sake. It is hard to believe that they wish to destroy capital; they wish to
obtain sole control of it, and their wish has long been in fair way to
fulfillment.
In Germany, therefore, as in Russia,
distinction is made between the methods of the rich and of the poor Jews,
because one method affects the government and the other the morale of the
people, but both converge on the same objective. It is not only desire to
escape oppression that actuates the lower classes of Jews, but desire to gain
control — for the spirit of mastery pulses strong within them. German
convictions on this question have reached the place where they may be expressed
thus: Revolution is the expression of the Jews’ will to power. Parties such as
the socialists, democrats, and freethinkers are but tools for the Jewish plan
to power. The so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” is really and
practically the dictatorship of Jews.
So suddenly have German eyes been opened,
so stormfully wrathful has been the reaction, that the word has gone out
through German Judaism to retire to the second trench. There has been a sudden
and concerted abandonment of office wherever the office made direct contact
with the public; there has, however, been no abandonment of power. What will
happen in Germany is not now known. Some regrettable things have already
happened. But the Germans will doubtless prove themselves equal to the
situation by devising methods of control at once unobjectionable and effective.
But as to Russia, it is hardly doubtful any longer what will happen there. When
Russia, turns, a shudder will run through the earth.
How Gentile Germany and Russia look at the
entire question may be summarized as follows: Judaism is the most closely
organized power on earth, even more than the British Empire. It forms a State
whose citizens are unconditionally loyal wherever they may be and whether rich
or poor.
The name which is given in Germany to this
State which circulates among all the states is “All-Judaan.”
The means of power of the State of
All-Judaan are capital and journalism, or money and propaganda.
All-Judaan is the only State that exercises
world government; all the other States can and may exercise national government
only.
The principal culture of All-Judaan is
journalistic; the technical, scientific, literary performances of the modern
Jew are throughout journalistic performances. They are due to the marvelous
talent of the Jews for receptivity of others’ ideas. Capital and Journalism are
joined in the Press to create a political and spiritual medium of Jewish power.
The government of this state of All-Judaan
is wonderfully organized. Paris was its first seat, but has now been moved to
third place. Before the war London was its first, and New York its second
capital. It remains to be seen whether New York will now supplant London — the
drift is toward America.
As All-Judaan is not in a position to have
a standing army and navy, other states supply these for it. Its fleet is the
British fleet, which guards from hindrance the progress of all-Jewish world
economy, or that part of it which depends on the sea. In return, All-Judaan
assures Britain an undisturbed political and territorial world rule. All-Judaan
has added Palestine to British control. Wherever there was an All-Judaan land
force (whatever national uniform it might wear), it worked with the British
navy.
All-Judaan is willing to entrust the
government of various strips of the world to the nationalistic governments; it
only asks to control the governments. Judaism is passionately in favor of
perpetuating nationalistic divisions for the Gentile world. For themselves,
Jews never become assimilated with any nation. They are a separate people,
always were and always will be. All-Judaan’s only quarrel with any nation
occurs when that nation makes it impossible for All-Judaan to control that
nation’s industrial and financial profits. It can make war, it can make peace;
it can command anarchy in stubborn cases, it can restore order. It holds the
sinews of world power in its hand and it apportions them among the nations in
such ways as will best support All-Judaan’s plan.
Controlling the world’s sources of news,
All-Judaan can always prepare the minds of the people for its next move. The
greatest exposure yet to be made is the way that news is manufactured and the
way in which the mind of whole nations is molded for a purpose. When the powerful
Jew is at last traced and his hand revealed, then comes the ready cry of
persecution and it echoes through the world press. The real causes of the
persecution (which is the oppression of the people by the financial practices
of the Jews) are never given publicity.
All-Judaan has its vice-governments in
London and New York. Having wreaked its revenge on Germany it will now go forth
to conquer other nations. Britain it already has. Russia it is struggling for,
but the chances are against it. The United States, with its good-natured
tolerance of all races, offers a promising field. The scene of operations
changes, but the Jew is the same throughout the centuries.
Chapter 3 •
Jewish History in the United States
[THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT, issue of 5 June
1920]
The story of the Jews in America begins
with Christopher Columbus. On August 2, 1492, more than 300,000 Jews were
expelled from Spain, with which event Spain’s prestige began its long decline,
and on August 3, the next day, Columbus set sail for the West, taking a group
of Jews with him. They were not, however, refugees, for the prophetic
navigator’s plans had aroused the sympathy of influential Jews for a long
period previously. Columbus himself tells us that he consorted much with Jews.
The first letter he wrote detailing his discoveries was to a Jew. Indeed, the
eventful voyage itself which added to men’s knowledge and wealth “the other
half of the earth” was made possible by Jews.
The pleasant story that it was Queen
Isabella’s jewels which financed the voyage has disappeared under cool
research. There were three Maranos or “secret Jews” who wielded great influence
at the Spanish court: Luis de Santagel, who was an important merchant of
Valencia and who was “farmer” of the royal taxes; his relative, Gabriel
Sanchez, who was the royal treasurer; and their friend, the royal chamberlain,
Juan Cabrero. These worked unceasingly on Queen Isabella’s imagination,
picturing to her the depletion of the royal treasury and the likelihood of
Columbus discovering the fabulous gold of the Indies, until the Queen was ready
to offer her jewels in pawn for the funds. But Santagel craved permission to
advance the money himself, which he did, 17,000 ducats in all, about $20,000,
perhaps equal to $160,000 today. It is probable that the loan exceeded the
expedition’s cost.
Associated with Columbus in the voyage
were at least five Jews: Luis de Torres, interpreter; Marco, the surgeon;
Bernal, the physician; Alonzo de la Calle, and Gabriel Sanchez. The
astronomical instruments and maps which the navigators used were of Jewish
origin. Luis de Torres was the first man ashore, the first to discover the use
of tobacco; he settled in Cuba and may be said to be the father of Jewish
control of the tobacco business as it exists today.
Columbus’ old patrons, Luis de Santagel
and Gabriel Sanchez, received many privileges for the part they played in the
work, but Columbus himself became the victim of a conspiracy fostered by
Bernal, the ship’s doctor, and suffered injustice and imprisonment as his
reward.
From that beginning, Jews looked more and
more to America as a fruitful field, and immigration set in strongly toward
South America, principally Brazil. But because of military participation in a
disagreement between the Brazilians and the Dutch, the Jews of Brazil found it
necessary to emigrate, which they did in the direction of the Dutch colony of
what is now New York. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor, did not entirely
approve of their settling among his people and ordered them to leave, but the
Jews had evidently taken the precaution to assure their being received even if
not welcomed, because upon revoking the order of Stuyvesant, the Directors gave
as one of the reasons for the Jews being received, “the large amount of capital
which they have invested in the shares of the Company.” Nevertheless they were
forbidden to enter public service and to open retail shops, which had the
effect of driving them into foreign trade in which they were soon exercising
all but a monopoly because of their European connections.
This is only one of the thousand
illustrations which can be given of the resourcefulness of the Jew. Forbid him
in one direction, he will excel in another. When he was forbidden to deal in
new clothes, he sold old clothes—that was the beginning of the organized
traffic in secondhand clothing. When he was forbidden to deal in merchandise,
he dealt in waste—the Jew is the originator of the waste product business of
the world; he was the originator of the salvage system; he found wealth in the
debris of civilization. He taught people how to use old rags, how to clean old
feathers, how to use gall nuts and rabbit skins. He has always had a taste for
the furrier trade, which he now controls, and to him is due the multitude of
common skins which now pass under various alluring trade names as furs of high
origin. The idea of renovation gained commercial value through the Jew. In the
“rag men” who blow tin horns through our cities and save the old iron, old
bottles, old paper and old fabrics, we have the commercial descendants of those
earlier Jews who turned adversity into success by converting the rubbish of the
earth into material of value.
Unwittingly, old Peter Stuyvesant
compelled the Jew to make New York the principal port of America, and though a
majority of New York Jews had fled to Philadelphia at the time of the American
Revolution, most of them returned to New York at the earliest opportunity,
instinct seeming to make them aware that in New York was to be their principal
paradise of gain. And so it has proved. New York is the greatest center of
Jewish population in the world. It is the gateway where the bulk of American
imports and exports are taxed, and where practically all the business done in
America pays tribute to the masters of money. The very land of the city is
practically the holdings of the Jews. A list of the property owners of the
metropolis reveals only at rare intervals a Gentile name. No wonder that Jewish
writers, viewing this unprecedented prosperity, this unchecked growth in wealth
and power, exclaim enthusiastically that the United States is the Promised Land
foretold by the prophets, and New York the New Jerusalem. Some have gone even
further and described the peaks of the Rockies as “the mountains of Zion,” and
with reason, too, if the mining and coastal wealth of the Jews is considered.
The new waterways proposal, which will
make an ocean port of practically every great city on the Great Lakes and take
from New York the prestige she has maintained by being the gateway toward which
the principal railways narrowed, is being strongly protested at this time. And
the strongest motive in opposing this most obvious betterment is that so much
wealth counted in New York is not wealth at all, but fictitious values
depending solely on New York remaining New York. When anything comes which will
make New York merely a city on the coast, and not the city where the great
taxers sit to levy their tribute, much Jewish wealth will decrease. It was
fabulous before the war. What it is now the statisticians will hardly undertake
to say.
In fifty years the increase in the Jewish
population of the United States has been from 50,000 to more than 3,300,000. In
the British Isles there are only 300,000, in Palestine only 100,000. It is
fortunate for the Jew himself that in Great Britain his numbers are not
greater, for the large and evident control he exercises in great matters would
sometimes make it inconvenient for the poorer Jew, if he were abroad in England
in large numbers. An unusually well-informed Briton says that anti-Semitism is
always ready to break out in England upon sufficient cause, but it cannot break
out against the inaccessible rich Jews who control in politics and
international finance. It us probably true that the commonest real cause of
anti-Semitism is the action of the international Jew who is often unknown and
always secure, but the innocent victim of it is the poor Jew. Anti-Semitism,
however, will be considered in the next article.
The figures representing Jewish population
in Great Britain and the United States indicate that the colossal power wielded
by international Jewish financiers is neither consequent nor dependent upon
their number. The arresting fact about the Jew is his world-wide unchallenged
power, coupled with comparative numerical inferiority. There are only about
14,000,000 Jews in the world; they are about as numerous as the Koreans. This
comparison of their numbers with the Koreans will illustrate still more vividly
the phenomenon of their power.
In the time of George Washington there
were about 4,000 Jews in the country, most of them well-to-do traders. For the
most part they favored the American side. Haym Salomon helped the Colonies out
with the loan of his entire fortune at a critical moment. But they never
assimilated, they did not take up the usual employments nor farming, they never
seemed to care for the worry of manufacturing things, but only for the selling
of them after they were made.
It is only of recent years the Jew has
shown any capacity for manufacturing, and most of what he now engages in has
grown up as an adjunct to his merchandising plans. By manufacturing, he saves a
profit. The result has not been a decrease in cost to the public, but an
increase. It is characteristic of Jewish business methods that economies are
for the sake of the business, not for the sake of the public. The commodities
in which there have been the most inexcusable and exorbitant increases in
prices to the public, and the lines of business which have been most quickly frightened
into lower prices without any explanatory change in the general situation, have
been those lines in which Jews exercise the widest control.
Business to the Jewish mind is money; what
the successful Jew may do with the money after he gets it is another matter,
but in the getting of it he never permits “idealistic slush” to interfere with
the dollar. His dollar of profit is never “clipped” by any of the voluntary
reforms by which a few men are trying to ameliorate the condition of the
workers.
This is not by any means due to the
hardness of the Jewish heart, but to the hardness of the Jewish view of
business. Business is to it a matter of goods and money, not of people. If you
are in distress and suffering, the Jewish heart would have sympathy for you;
but if your house were involved in the matter, you and your house would be two
separate entities; the Jew would naturally find it difficult, in his theory of
business, to humanize the house; he would deal with it after a manner which
other people would call “hard,” but he would not feel the charge to be just; he
would say that it was only “business.”
It is probably this way that the Jewish
“sweatshops” of New York may be explained. When the susceptible people of the
nation commiserated the poor Jews of the New York sweatshops, they for the most
part did not know that the inventors and operators of the “sweatshop” method
were themselves Jews. Indeed, while it is the boast of our country that no race
or color or creed is persecuted here, but liberty is insured to all, still it
is a fact which every special investigator has noted that the only heartless
treatment ever accorded the Jew in the United States came from his own people,
his overseers and masters. And yet there is no evidence that either the “sweater”
or the “sweated” ever thought of it as inhumanity or as “heartless.” It was
“business.” The “sweated” lived in the hope of having a roomful of people
sewing for him or her some day. Their endlessly vital interest in “business”
and their unflagging ambition to get further up the ladder and become masters
in their own sweatshop, enabled them to work without the slightest sense of
oppression or injustice which, after all, is the sorest thing about poverty.
The Jews never regard work as a calamity, but neither do they regard
subordinate positions as permanently theirs. Thus, they spend their energies in
getting up and out rather than in lamenting the inconveniences of the place
where they are and trying to improve it.
All this is individually excellent but socially
harmful. The result is that, until recently, the lower ranges of employment
were wholly unsupervised, and the higher circles never felt the necessity of
devising industrial reforms and benefits. The record of the great Jews in
charity is very noble; their record in industrial reforms is nil. With
commendable sympathy toward their own people, they will donate a part of their
profits to rectify some of the human need resulting from the method by which
they made their profits, but as for reforming the method by which they get
their profits in order that the resulting need might be diminished or
prevented, apparently it has never occurred to them. At least, while there are
many charitable names among the wealthier Jews, there are no names that stand
for an actual, practical humanizing of industry, its methods and its returns.
This, of course, is unfortunate; but it is
intelligible; more than that, it is explanatory of many things for which the
Jew is blamed by those who do not understand his nature. The Jew will go part
way in sharing the results of his prosperity; he has not gone any length, save
upon outer compulsion, in sharing the processes, or sharing wealth in the
making. And while the social effect is the same as if this were done out of
cruel insensibility and inhumanity, still it must be said that mostly it is
done not out of such feelings, but out of the Jew’s ingrain conception of the
game of business. Some proposals of industrial reform appear as crazy to him as
would a proposal to credit one baseball batter’s hit to his opponent’s score,
just as a matter of humanity.
The American Jew does not assimilate. This
is stated, not to blame him, but merely as a fact. The Jew could merge with the
people of America if he desired, but he doesn’t. If there is any prejudice
existing against him in America, aside from the sense of inquiry which his
colossal success engenders, it is because of his aloofness. The Jew is not
objectionable in his person, creed, or race. His spiritual ideals are shared by
the world. But still he does not assimilate; he cultivates by his exclusiveness
the feeling that he does not “belong.” This is his privilege, and from one
point of view it may indicate excellent judgement, but he must not make it one
of the grounds of his complaint against Gentiles in general, as he has a
tendency to do. It is better that he should make it clear to Gentiles once and
for all where true Jews stand in the matter, as when a young Jew said—“There is
all the difference in the world between an American Jew and a Jewish American.
A Jewish American is a mere amateur Gentile, doomed to be a parasite forever.”
The ghetto is not an American product but
the Jews’ own importation. They have separated themselves into a distinct
community. Speaking of this matter the Jewish Encyclopedia says: “The social
organization of the Jews resident in America has differed little from that in
other countries * * * in the main, and without any compulsion, Jews preferred
to live in close proximity to one another, a peculiarity which still prevails.”
To make a list of the lines of business
controlled by the Jews of the United States would be to touch most of the vital
industries of the country—those which are really vital, and those which
cultivated habit has made to seem vital. The theatrical business, of course, as
everyone knows, is exclusively Jewish. Play-producing, booking, theater
operation are all in the hands of Jews. This perhaps accounts for the fact that
in almost every production today can be detected propaganda, sometimes
glaringly commercial advertisement, which does not originate with playwrights,
but with producers.
·
The motion picture industry.
·
The sugar industry.
·
The tobacco industry.
·
Fifty per cent or more of the meat
packing industry.
·
Upward of 60 per cent of the shoemaking
industry.
·
Men’s and women’s ready-made clothing.
·
Most of the musical purveying done in
the country.
·
Jewelry.
·
Grain.
·
More recently, cotton.
·
The Colorado smelting industry.
·
Magazine authorship.
·
News distribution.
·
The liquor business.
·
The loan business.
These, only to name the industries with
national and international sweep, are in control of the Jews of the United
States, either alone or in association with Jews overseas.
The American people would be vastly
surprised if they could see a line-up of some of the “American business men”
who hold up our commercial prestige overseas. They are mostly Jews. They have a
keen sense of the value of the American name, and when in a foreign port you
stroll up to the office which bears the sign, “American Importing Company,” or
“American Commercial Company,” or other similarly non-committal names, hoping
to find a countryman, an American, you usually find a Jew whose sojourn in
America appears to have been all too brief. This may throw a sidelight on the
regard in which “American business methods” are held in some parts of the
world. When 30 or 40 different races of people can carry on business under the
name “American,” and do it legally, too, it is not surprising that Americans do
not recognize some of the descriptions of American methods which appear in the
foreign press. The Germans long ago complained that the rest of the world was
judging them by the German-speaking Jewish commercial traveler.
Instances of Jewish prosperity in the
United States are commonplace, but prosperity, the just reward of foresight and
application, is not to be confounded with control. The prosperity of the Jews
can be had by anyone who is willing to pay the price which the Jews pay for
it—a very, very high price, as a rule, all things considered—but it would be
impossible for any Gentile coalition under similar circumstances to attain the
control which the Jews have won, for the reason that there is lacking in the
Gentile a certain quality of working-togetherness, a certain conspiracy of
objective, and the adhesiveness of intense raciality, which characterizes the
Jew. It is nothing to a Gentile that another man is a Gentile; it is next to
everything to a Jew that the man at his door is another Jew. So, if instances
of Jewish prosperity were needed, the case of the Temple Emmanu-el, New York,
might be cited, which in 1846 could scarcely raise $1,520 for its budget, but
in 1868, following the Civil War, raised $708,755 from the rental of 231 pews.
And the rise of the Jewish clothing monopoly as one of the results of the same
Civil War might be cited as an instance of prosperity plus national and
international control.
Indeed, it might be said that the Jew has
succeeded in everything he has attempted in the United States, except farming.
The explanation usually made in Jewish publications is that ordinary farming is
far too simple to engage the Jew’s intellect and therefore he is not enough
interested in it to succeed, but that in dairy and cattle farming where the
“brain” is more necessary he has made a success. Numerous attempts have been
made in various parts of the United States to start Jewish farming colonies,
but their story is a series of failures. Some have blamed the failures on the
Jew’s lack of knowledge of scientific farming, others on his distaste for
manual labor, others on the lack of the speculative element in agriculture. In
any case, he stands higher in the non-productive employments than in this
basically productive one. Some students of the question state that the Jew never
was a man of the land, but always a trader, for which assertion one of the
proofs offered is the Jews’ selection of Palestine as their country, that strip
of land which formed a gateway between East and West and over which the
overland traffic of the world passed.
Chapter 4 • The
Jewish Question — Fact or Fancy?
THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT, issue of 12 June
1920
The chief difficulty in writing about the
Jewish Question is the supersensitiveness of Jews and non-Jews concerning the
whole matter. There is a vague feeling that even to openly use the word “Jew,”
or to expose it nakedly to print, is somehow improper. Polite evasions like
“Hebrew” and “Semite,” both of which are subject to the criticism of
inaccuracy, are timidly essayed, and people pick their way gingerly as if the
whole subject were forbidden, until some courageous Jewish thinker comes
straight out with the good old word “Jew,” and then the constraint is relieved
and the air cleared. The word “Jew” is not an epithet; it is a name, ancient
and honorable, with significance for every period of human history, past,
present and to come.
There is extreme sensitiveness about the
public discussion of the Jewish Question on the part of Gentiles. They would
prefer to keep it in the hazy borderlands of their thought, shrouded in
silence. Their heritage of tolerance has something to do with their attitude,
but perhaps their instinctive sense of the difficulty involved has more to do
with it. The principal public Gentile pronouncements upon the Jewish Question
are in the manner of the truckling politician or the pleasant after-dinner
speaker; the great Jewish names in philosophy, medicine, literature, music and
finance are named over, the energy, ability and thrift of the race are dwelt
upon, and everyone goes home feeling that a difficult place has been rather
neatly negotiated. But nothing is changed thereby. The Jew is not changed. The
Gentile is not changed. The Jew still remains the enigma of the world.
Gentile sensitiveness on this point is
best expressed by the desire for silence—“Why discuss it at all?” is the
attitude. Such an attitude is itself a proof that there is a problem which we
would evade if we could. “Why discuss it at all?”—the keen thinker clearly sees
in the implications of such a question, the existence of a problem whose
discussion or suppression will not always be within the choice of easy-going minds.
Is there a Jewish Question in Russia?
Unquestionably, in its most virulent form. Is it necessary to meet that
Question in Russia? Undoubtedly, meet it from every angle along which light and
healing may come.
Well, the percentage of the Jewish population
of Russia is just one per cent more than it is in the United States. The
majority of the Jews themselves are not less well-behaved in Russia than they
are here; they lived under restrictions which do not exist here; yet in Russia
their genius has enabled them to attain a degree of power which has completely
baffled the Russian mind. Whether you go to Rumania, Russia, Austria or
Germany, or anywhere else that the Jewish Question has come to the forefront as
a vital issue, you will discover that the principal cause is the outworking of
the Jewish genius to achieve the power of control.
Here in the United States it is the fact
of this remarkable minority—a sparse Jewish ingredient of three per cent in a
nation of 110,000,000—attaining in 50 years a degree of control that would be
impossible to a ten times larger group of any other race, that creates the
Jewish Question here. Three per cent of any other people would scarcely
occasion comment, because we could not meet with a representative of them
wherever we went in high places—in the innermost secrecy of the councils of the
Big Four at Versailles; in the supreme court; in the councils of the White
House; in the vast dispositions of world finance—wherever there is power to get
or use. Yet we meet the Jew everywhere in the upper circles, literally
everywhere there is power. He has the brains, the initiative, the penetrative
vision which almost automatically project him to the top, and as a consequence
he is more marked than any other race.
And that is where the Jewish Question
begins. It begins in very simple terms—How does the Jew so habitually and so
resistlessly gravitate to the highest places? What puts him there? Why is he
put there? What does he do there? What does the fact of his being there mean to
the world?
That is the Jewish Question in its origin.
From these points it goes on to others, and whether the trend becomes
pro-Jewish or anti-Semitic depends on the amount of prejudice brought to the
inquiry, and whether it becomes pro-Humanity depends on the amount of insight
and intelligence.
The use of the word Humanity in connection
with the word Jew usually throws a side-meaning which may not be intended. In
this connection it is usually understood that the humanity ought to be shown
toward the Jew. There is just as great an obligation upon the Jew to show his
humanity toward the whole race. The Jew has been too long accustomed to think
of himself as exclusively the claimant on the humanitarianism of society;
society has a large claim against him that he cease his exclusiveness, that he
cease exploiting the world, that he cease making Jewish groups the end and all
of his gains, and that he begin to fulfill, in a sense his exclusiveness has
never yet enabled him to fulfill, the ancient prophecy that through him all the
nations of the earth should be blessed.
The Jew cannot go on forever filling the
role of suppliant for the world’s humanitarianism; he must himself show that
quality to a society which seriously suspects his higher and more powerful
groups of exploiting it with a pitiless rapacity which in its wide-flung and
long drawn-out distress may be described as an economic pogrom against a rather
helpless humanity. For it is true that society is as helpless before the
well-organized extortions of certain financial groups, as huddled groups of
Russian Jews were helpless against the anti-Semitic mob. And as in Russia, so
in America, it is the poor Jew who suffers for the delinquencies of the rich
exploiter of his race.
This series of articles is already being
met by an organized barrage by mail and wire and voice, every single item of
which carries the wail of persecution. One would think that a heartless and
horrible attack were being made on a most pitiable and helpless people—until
one looks at the letterheads of the magnates who write, and at the financial
ratings of those who protest, and at the membership of the organizations whose
responsible heads hysterically demand retraction. And always in the background
there is the threat of boycott, a threat which has practically sealed up the
columns of every publication in America against even the mildest discussion of
the Jewish Question.
The Jewish Question in America cannot be
concealed forever by threats against publications, nor by the propagandist
publication of matter extremely and invariably favorable to everything Jewish.
It is here and it cannot be twisted into something else by the adroit use of
propaganda, nor can it be forever silenced by threats. The Jews of the United
States can best serve themselves and their fellow-Jews all over the world by
letting drop their far too ready cry of “anti-Semitism,” by adopting a franker
tone than that which befits a helpless victim, and by seeing what the Jewish
Question is and how it behooves every Jew who loves his people to help solve
it.
There has been used in this series the
term “International Jew.” It is susceptible of two interpretations: one, the
Jew wherever he may be; the other, the Jew who exercises international control.
The real contention of the world is with the latter and his satellites, whether
Jew or Gentile.
Now, this international type of Jew, this
grasper after world-control, this actual possessor and wielder of world-control
is a very unfortunate connection for his race to have. The most unfortunate
thing about the international Jew, from the standpoint of the ordinary Jew, is
that the international type is also a Jew. And the significance of this is that
the type does not grow anywhere else than on a Jewish stem. There is no other
racial nor national type which puts forth this kind of person. It is not merely
that there are a few Jews among international financial controllers; it is that
these world controllers are exclusively Jews. That is the phenomenon which
creates an unfortunate situation for those Jews who are not and never shall be
world-controllers, who are the plain people of the Jewish race. If
world-control were mixed, like the control, say, of the biscuit business, then
the occasional Jews we might find in those higher financial altitudes would not
constitute the problem at all; the problem would then be limited to the
existence of world-control in the hands of a few men, of whatever race or
lineage they might be. But since world-control is an ambition which has only
been achieved by Jews, and not by any of the methods usually adopted by
would-be world conquerors, it becomes inevitable that the question should
center in that remarkable race.
This brings another difficulty: in
discussing this group of world-controllers under the name of Jews (and they are
Jews), it is not always possible to stop and distinguish the group of Jews that
is meant. The candid reader can usually determine that, but the Jew who is in a
state of mind to be injured is sometimes pained by reading as a charge against
himself what was intended for the upper group. “Then why not discuss the upper
group as financiers and not as Jews?” may be asked. Because they are Jews. It
is not to the point to insist that in any list of rich men there are more
Gentiles than Jews; we are not talking about merely rich men who have, many of
them, gained their riches by serving a System, we are talking about those who
Control—and it is perfectly apparent that merely to be rich is not to control.
The world-controlling Jew has riches, but he also has something much more
powerful than that.
The international Jew, as already defined,
rules not because he is rich, but because in a most marked degree he possesses
the commercial and masterful genius of his race, and avails himself of a racial
loyalty and solidarity the like of which exists in no other human group. In
other words, transfer today the world-control of the international Jew to the
hands of the highest commercially talented group of Gentiles, and the whole
fabric of world-control would eventually fall to pieces, because the Gentile
lacks a certain quality, be it human or divine, be it natural or acquired, that
the Jew possesses.
This, of course, the modern Jew denies.
There is a new position taken by the modernists among the Jews which
constitutes a denial that the Jew differs from any other man except in the
matter of religion. “Jew” they say is not a racial designation, but a religious
designation like “Episcopalian,” “Catholic,” “Presbyterian.” This is the
argument used in newspaper offices in the Jews’ protests against giving the
Jewish designation to those of their people who are implicated in crime—“You
don’t give the religious classification of other people who are arrested,” the
editor is told, “why should you do it with Jews?” The appeal to religious
tolerance always wins, and is sometimes useful in diverting attention from
other things.
Well, if the Jews are only religiously
differentiated from the rest of the world, the phenomenon grows stranger still.
For the rest of the world is interested less in the Jew’s religion than in
anything else that concerns him. There is really nothing in his religion to
differentiate the Jew from the rest of mankind, as far as the moral content of
that religion is concerned, and if there were he would have overcome that by
the fact that his Jewish religion supplies the moral structure for both of the
other great religions. Moreover, it is stated that there are among English
speaking nations 2,000,000 Jews who acknowledge their race and not their religion,
while 1,000,000 are classed as agnostic—are these any less Jews than the
others? The world does not think so. The authoritative students of human
differences do not think so. An Irishman who grows indifferent to the Church is
still an Irishman, and it would seem to be equally true that a Jew who grows
indifferent to the Synagogue is still a Jew. He at least feels that he is, and
so does the non-Jew.
A still more serious challenge would arise
if this contention of the modernists were true, for it would necessitate the
explanation of these world-controlling Jews by their religion. We should have
to say, “They excel through their religion,” and then the problem would turn on
the religion whose practice should bring such power and prosperity to its devotees.
But another fact would intervene, namely, that these world-controlling Jews are
not notably religious; and still another fact would hammer for recognition,
namely, the most devout believers and most obedient followers of the Jewish
religion are the poorest among the Jews. If you want Jewish orthodoxy, the
bracing morality of the Old Testament, you will find it, not among the
successful Jews, who have Unitarianized their religion to the same extent that
the Unitarians have Judaized their Christianity, but among the poor in the side
streets who still sacrifice the Saturday business for their Sabbath keeping.
Certainly their religion has not given them world-control; instead, they have
made their own sacrifices to keep it inviolate against modernism.
Of course, if the Jew differs from the
rest of mankind only when he is in full accord with his religion, the question
becomes very simple. Any criticism of the Jew becomes sheer religious bigotry
and nothing else! And that would be intolerable. But it would be the consensus
of thoughtful opinion that the Jew differs less in his religion than in
anything else. There is more difference between the two great branches of
Christianity, more conscious difference, than between any branch of
Christianity and Judaism.
So that, the contention of certain
modernists notwithstanding, the world will go on thinking of the Jew as a
member of a race, a race whose persistence has defeated the utmost efforts made
for its extermination, a race that has preserved itself in virility and power
by the observance of those natural laws the violation of which has mongrelized
so many nations, a race which has come up out of the past with the two great
moral values which may be reckoned on monotheism and monogamy, a race which
today is before us as the visible sign of an antiquity to which all our
spiritual wealth harks back. Nay, the Jew will go on thinking of himself as the
member of a people, a nation, a race. And all the mixture and intermixture of
thought or faith or custom cannot make it otherwise. A Jew is a Jew and as long
as he remains within his perfectly unassailable traditions, he will remain a
Jew. And he will always have the right to feel that to be a Jew is to belong to
a superior race.
These world-controlling Jews at the top of
affairs, then, are there by virtue of, among other things, certain qualities
which are inherent in their Jewish natures. Every Jew has these qualities even
if not in the supreme sense, just as every Englishman has Shakespeare’s tongue
but not in Shakespeare’s degree. And thus it is impracticable, if not
impossible, to consider the international Jew without laying the foundations
broadly upon Jewish character and psychology.
We may discount at once the too common
libel that this greater form of Jewish success is built upon dishonesty. It is
impossible to indict the Jewish people or any other people on a wholesale
charge. No one knows better than the Jew how widespread is the notion that
Jewish methods of business are all unscrupulous. There is no doubt a possibility
of a great deal of unscrupulousness existing without actual legal dishonesty,
but it is altogether possible that the reputation the Jewish people have long
borne in this respect may have had other sources than actual and persistent
dishonesty.
We may indicate one of these possible
sources. The Jew at a trade is naturally quicker than most other men. They say
there are other races which are as nimble at a trade as is the Jew, but the Jew
does not live much among them. In this connection one may remember the famous
joke about the Jew who went to Scotland.
Now, it is human nature for the slower man
to believe that the quicker man is too deft by far, and to become suspicious of
his deftness. Everybody suspects the “sharper” even though his sharpness be entirely
honest. The slower mind is likely to conceive that the man who sees so many
legitimate twists and turns to a trade, may also see and use a convenient
number of illegitimate twists and turns. Moreover, there is always the ready
suspicion that the one who gets “the best of the bargain” gets it by trickery
which is not above board. Slow, honest, plain-spoken and straight-dealing
people always have their doubts of the man who gets the better of it.
The Jews, as the records for centuries
show, were a keen people in trade. They were so keen that many regarded them as
crooked. And so the Jew became disliked for business reasons, not all of which
were creditable to the intelligence or initiative of his enemies.
Take for example, the persecution which
Jew merchants once suffered in England. In older England the merchant class had
many easy-going traditions. One tradition was that a respectable tradesman
would never seek business but wait for it to come to him. Another tradition was
that to decorate one’s store window with lights or colors, or to display one’s
stock of goods attractively in the view of the public, was a contemptible and
underhanded method of tempting a brother tradesman’s customers away from him.
Still another tradition was that it was strictly unethical and unbusinesslike
to handle more than one line of goods. If one sold tea, it was the best reason
in the world why he should not sell teaspoons. As for advertising, the thing
would have been so brazen and bold that public opinion would have put the
advertiser out of business. The proper demeanor for a merchant was to seem
reluctant to part with his goods.
One may readily imagine what happened when
the Jewish merchant bustled into the midst of this jungle of traditions. He
simply broke them all. In those days tradition had all the force of a divinely
promulgated moral law and in consequence of his initiative the Jew was regarded
as a great offender. A man who would break those trade traditions would stop at
nothing! The Jew was anxious to sell. If he could not sell one article to a
customer, he had another on hand to offer him. The Jews’ stores became bazaars,
forerunners of our modern department stores, and the old English custom of one
store for one line of goods was broken up. The Jew went after trade, pursued
it, persuaded it. He was the originator of “a quick turnover and small
profits.” He originated the installment plan. The one state of affairs he could
not endure was business at a standstill, and to start it moving he would do
anything. He was the first advertiser—in a day when even to announce in the
public prints the location of your store was to intimate to the public that you
were in financial difficulties, were about to go to the wall and were trying
the last desperate expedient to which no self-respecting merchant would stoop.
It was as easy as child’s play to connect
this energy with dishonesty. The Jew was not playing the game, at least so the
staid English merchant thought. As a matter of fact he was playing the game to
get it all in his own hands—which he has practically done.
The Jew has shown that same ability ever
since. His power of analyzing the money currents amounts to an instinct. His
establishment in one country represented another base from which the members of
his race could operate. Whether by the natural outworking of innate gifts, or
the deliberate plan of race unity and loyalty, all Jewish trading communities
had relations, and as those trading communities increased in wealth, prestige
and power, as they formed relations with governments and great interests in the
countries where they operated, they simply put more power into the central
community wherever it might be located, now in Spain, now in Holland, now in
England. Whether by intention or not, they became more closely allied than the
branches of one business could be, because the cement of racial unity, the bond
of racial brotherhood cannot in the very nature of things exist among the
Gentiles as it exists among the Jews. Gentiles never think of themselves as
Gentiles, and never feel that they owe anything to another Gentile as such.
Thus they have been convenient agents of Jewish schemes at times and in places
when it was not expedient that the Jewish controllers should be publicly known;
but they have never been successful competitors of the Jew in the field of
world-control.
From these separated Jewish communities
went power to the central community where the master bankers and the master
analysts of conditions lived. And back from the central community flowed information
of an invaluable character and assistance wherever needed. It is not difficult
to understand how, under such a condition, the nation that did not deal kindly
with the Jews was made to suffer, and the nation that yielded to them their
fullest desire was favored by them. And it is credibly stated that they have
made certain nations feel the power of their displeasure.
This system, if it ever existed, exists in
greater power today. It is today, however, threatened as it has never been.
Fifty years ago, international banking, which was mostly in control of the Jews
as the money brokers of the world, was on top of business. It exercised the
supercontrol of governments and finance everywhere. Then came that new thing,
Industry, which expanded to a degree unguessed by the shrewdest prophets and
analysts. As Industry gathered strength and power it became a powerful money
magnet, drawing the wealth of the world in its train, not, however, merely for
the sake of possessing the money, but of making it work. Production and profit
on production, instead of loans and interest on loans, became the master method
for a time. The war came, in which the former broker-masters of the world had
undoubtedly their large part. And now the two forces, Industry and Finance, are
in a struggle to see whether Finance is again to become the master, or creative
Industry. This is one of the elements which is bringing the Jewish Question to
the bar of public opinion.
To state this and to prove it may be
nothing more than to establish the superiority of Jewish ability. Certainly it
is not a tenable position to say that the Jew is extraordinarily successful and
therefore must be curbed. It would be equally aside from the truth to say that
the co-ordination of Jewish activity has been, on the whole, a harmful thing
for the world. It may be possible to show that up to this point it has been
useful. Success cannot be attacked nor condemned. If any moral question arises
at all, it must concern the use made of the success which has been attained. The
whole matter centers there, after the previous fact is established. May the Jew
go on as he has gone, or does his duty to the world require another use of his
success?
This inquiry obviously leads to further
discussion, as well as a gathering up of the remaining threads of the present
discussion, which future articles will attempt to do.
Chapter 5 •
Anti-Semitism — Will It Appear in the U.S.?
THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT, issue of 19 June
1920
Anyone who essays to discuss the Jewish
Question in the United States or anywhere else must be fully prepared to be
regarded as an Anti-Semite, in high-brow language, or in low-brow language, a
Jew-baiter. Nor need encouragement be looked for from people or from press. The
people who are awake to the subject at all prefer to wait and see how it all
turns out; while there is probably not a newspaper in America, and certainly
none of the advertising mediums which are called magazines, which would have
the temerity even to breathe seriously the fact that such a Question exists.
The press in general is open at this time to fulsome editorials in favor of
everything Jewish (specimens of the same being obtainable almost anywhere),
while the Jewish press, which is fairly numerous in the United States, takes
care of the vituperative end.
Of course, the only acceptable explanation
of any public discussion at present of the Jewish Question is that some
one—writer, or publisher, or a related interest—is a Jew-hater. That idea seems
to be fixed; it is fixed in the Jew by inheritance; it is sought to be fixed in
the Gentile by propaganda, that any writing which does not simply cloy and drip
in syrupy sweetness toward things Jewish is born of prejudice and hatred. It
is, therefore, full of lies, insult, insinuation, and constitutes an instigation
to massacre. These terms are culled at random from Jewish editorial utterances
at hand.
It would seem to be necessary for our
Jewish citizens to enlarge their classification of Gentiles to include the
class which recognizes the existence of a Jewish Question and still is not
anti-Semitic.
There are four distinct parties traceable
among the Jews themselves. First, those whose passionate purpose is to keep
Jewish faith and life alive at the cost of any sacrifice of popularity or
success; second, those who are willing to make whatever sacrifice may be needed
to preserve Jewish religion, but are not so particular about the traditional
customs of Jewish life; third, those who have no very strong convictions either
way, but are opportunists, and will always swerve in the direction of success;
and, fourth, those who believe and preach that the only solution of the
differences between the Jew and other men is the complete absorption of the
Jewish race by the other races. The fourth is the weakest, most unpopular and
least to be considered of all the parties.
With the Gentiles there are only two
classes, as far as this special question is concerned: those who dislike Jews,
they cannot tell why; and those who are disposed to fairness, in spite of the
accident of congeniality or uncongeniality, and who recognize the Jewish
Question as, at least, a problem. Both these attitudes, whenever they become
apparent, are subject to the charge of “anti-Semitism.”
Anti-Semitism is a term which is bandied
about too loosely. It ought to be reserved to denote the real anti-Jewish
temper of violent prejudice. If used indiscriminately about all who attempt to
discuss Jewish characteristics and Jewish world-power, it may in time arrive at
the estate of respectability and honor.
Anti-Semitism in almost every form is
bound to come to the United States; indeed, it may be said that it is here now,
and has been here for a long time. If it be mislabeled now, the United States
will not be able to work within it the transformation which has been effected
upon so many other ideas that have arrived here in their journey round the
globe. I.
It may be a serviceable clearing of the
ground to define what anti-Semitism is not:
1. It is not recognition of the Jewish
Question. If it were, then it could be set down that the bulk of the American
people are destined to become anti-Semites, for they are beginning to recognize
the existence of a Jewish Question and will steadily do so in increasing
numbers as the Question is forced upon them from the various practical angles
of their lives. The Question is here. We may be honestly blind to it. We may be
timidly silent about it. We may even make dishonest denial of it. But it is
here. In time all will have to recognize it. In time the polite “hush, hush” of
over-sensitive or intimidated circles will not be powerful enough to suppress
it. But to recognize it will not mean that we have gone over to a campaign of
hatred and enmity against the Jews. It will only mean that a stream of tendency
which has been flowing through our civilization has at last accumulated bulk
and power enough to challenge attention, to call for some decision with regard
to it, to call for the adoption of a policy which will not repeat the mistakes
of the past and yet will forestall any possible social menace of the future.
2. Again, the public discussion of the
Jewish Question is not anti-Semitism. Publicity is sanitary. The publicity
given the Jewish Question, or certain aspects of it, in this country has been
very misleading. It has been discussed more fully in the Jewish press than
elsewhere, but not with candor or breadth of vision. The two dominant
notes—they are sounded over and over again with monotonous regularity in the
Jewish press—are Gentile unfairness and Christian prejudice. These apparently
are the two chief aspects of life which impress Jewish publicists when they
look over the line of their own race. It is said in all soberness that it is
fortunate for Jews generally that the Jewish press does not circulate very
widely among Gentiles, for it is probably the one established agency in the
United States which, without altering its program in the least, could stir up
anti-Jewish sentiment by the simple expedient of a general reading among
non-Jews. Jewish writers writing for Jewish readers present unusual material
for the study of race consciousness and its accompaniment of contempt for other
races. It is true that in the publications referred to, America is constantly
praised, but not America as the land of the American people; America, rather,
as the land of the Jews’ opportunity.
On the side of the daily press, there has
been no serious discussion at all. This is neither surprising nor
reprehensible. The daily press deals with matters that have reached the
overheated stage. When it mentions the Jews at all, it has stock phrases for
the purpose; the effort includes a list of the famous Jews of history, and
usually closes with complimentary references to certain local Jews of
commendable qualities, whose advertisements are not infrequently found in
another part of the paper. Summing up, it may be said that the publicity given
the question in this country consists in misrepresentative criticism of the
Gentiles by the Jewish press and misrepresentative praise of the Jews by the
non-Jewish press. An independent effort to give a constructive publicity
cannot, therefore, be laid to anti-Semitism, even when some of the statements
which are made in the course of it arouse the resentment of Jewish readers.
3. Nor is it anti-Semitism to say that the
suspicion is abroad in every capital of civilization and the certainty is held
by a number of important men that there is active in the world a plan to
control the world, not by territorial acquisition, not by military aggression,
nor by governmental subjection, not even by economic control in the scientific
sense, but by control of the machinery of commerce and exchange. It is not
anti-Semitism to say that, nor to present the evidence which supports that, nor
to bring the proof of that. Those who could best disprove it if it were not
true are the international Jews themselves, but they have not disproved it.
Those who could best prove it would be those Jews whose ideals include the good
of the whole of humanity on an equality and not the good of one race only, but
they have not proved it. Some day a prophetic Jew may arise who will see that
the promises bestowed upon the Ancient People are not to be fulfilled by
Rothschild methods, and that the promise that all the nations were to be
blessed through Israel is not to be fulfilled by making the nations the
economic vassals of Israel; and when that time comes we may hope for a
redirection of Jewish energy into channels that will drain the present sources
of the Jewish Question. In the meantime, it is not anti-Semitism, it may even
be found to be a world service to the Jew, to throw light on what purpose
motivates certain higher circles.
If the above propositions are true, then
the term “anti-Semitic,” so freely bestowed on this series of articles, betrays
a worse spirit in the critics than in the author. But enough of that. There is
much yet to do, and what is done must stand on what merit remains after friend
and foe alike are through with praise and blame. II.
Anti-Semitism has unquestionably swayed
large sections of humanity at various times, warping the vision, twisting the
characters and staining the hands of its victims, but the most amazing
statement that can be made of it is that it has never accomplished anything in
behalf of those who used it, and it has never taught anything to the Jews
against whom it was used.
The grades of anti-Semitism are fairly
numerous, and a few of them may be cited here:
1. There is first that degree of
anti-Semitism, if it may be so described, which consists in plain dislike of
the Jew as a person, no matter whom he may be. This is often found in people of
all grades. It is found mostly, however, in those whose contact with Jews has
been very limited. It begins sometimes in childhood with an instinctive dislike
for the word “Jew.” It is encouraged by the misuse of the word “Jew” as an
epithet, or as an adjective generally descriptive of unpopular practices. The
feeling is not different from that which exists toward Gentiles, concerning
whom the same notions are held, but it differs in that it is extended to the
race of unknown individual Jews instead of being restricted to known
individuals who may justify such a feeling.
Congeniality is not within our choice, but
control of the sentiment of uncongeniality is. Every fair-minded person is
compelled at times to reflect that it is not impossible that the person for
whom he feels a dislike may be as good and possibly a better person than he.
Our dislike merely registers the result of attraction and repulsion as they
operate between another person and oneself; it does not indicate that the
disliked person is unworthy. Of course, wherever intelligence is joined with
this instinctive withdrawal from social contact with members of the Jewish
race, prejudice is forestalled, except, of course, in those persons who hold
that there are no individuals among the Jews worthy of respect. This is an
extreme attitude and is composed of other elements beside natural dislike. It
is possible for people to dislike Jews and not be anti-Semitic. Indeed, it is
not at all uncommon, it grows more and more common, that intelligent and
refined Jews themselves do not relish the society of their own people except in
cases of exceptional refinement.
This reality calls for some comment on the
manners and characteristics of the ordinary member of the Jewish race, the
accidents of behavior which stand out most obnoxiously and of which Jews
themselves are often the most unsparing critics, but these comments must fall
into place later.
2. A second stage of the spirit of
anti-Semitism may be designated as hatred and enmity. It should be noted that
the antipathy referred to immediately above was not hatred. Dislike is not
hatred, nor is it necessarily enmity. One may dislike sugar in his tea without
troubling to hate sugar. But undoubtedly there are people who because they have
let their dislikes deepen into prejudice, and perhaps also because of
unpleasant experiences with members of the Jewish race (probably a million
Americans have been brought to the verge of becoming Jew-haters this winter
because of contact with Jewish merchants and landlords) may be classified as,
at least, incipient anti-Semites. This is most of all unfortunate for the
persons who harbor these emotions. It is unfortunate in that it unfits the mind
to consider intelligently the facts which constitute the Jewish Question, and
also unfits it to deal with them in a fair and constructive way. For one’s own
sake, whatever the provocation otherwise, it is better not to let passion
deflect the needle of one’s mind. Hatred at the wheel means hazard on the course.
Enmity lives in the vicinity of the Jews more than of any other race, and the
reason for this is one of the puzzles of the ages. The Jewish nature itself, as
shown in ancient and modern history, is not without its own share of enmity,
and it either evokes or provokes enmity where it comes in contact with those
Aryan races which follow their natural impulses unchecked by cultural and
ethical influences. This age-long conflict of the Jew has puzzled the minds of
students for generations. Some explain it Biblically as the curse of Jehovah
upon His Chosen People for their disobedience to the discipline by which He
would have made them the Prophet Nation of the world. If this offense must
come, if it is part of the Jew’s heritage, an old saying—Christian and
Scriptural, by the way—would still remain true: “It must needs be that offenses
come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.”
3. 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. There is, of
course, no excuse for these outbreaks, but there is sufficient explanation of
them. The Jews usually explain them as expressions of religious prejudice, and
the Gentiles as rebellion against an economic yoke which the Jews have woven
for the people. It is an astonishing fact that, to take one country, the parts
of Russia where anti-Semitic violence has been most marked are the most
prosperous parts, so prosperous indeed and with a prosperity so unquestionably
due to Jewish enterprise that the Jews have openly declared that they have the
power to throw those parts of Russia back into commercial lethargy again by
simply withdrawing. It is utterly idle to throw denials at this statement. It
is confirmed time and time again by men who have gone to Russia full of
resentment against the attitude of the Russians toward the Jews, as that
attitude is represented in the Anglo-Saxon press, and who have come home with a
new light on the cause of these outbreaks, though not excusing their character.
Impartial observers have also found that some of the outbreaks have been
precipitated by the Jews themselves. A correspondent, known the world over for
his trenchant defense of the Jews under Russian persecution, was always bitterly
attacked by the Jews themselves whenever he stated the truth about this,
notwithstanding his protest to them that if he did not tell the truth when they
were in the wrong the world would not be ready to believe him when he said they
were blameless. To this day, in every country, the Jews are slow to admit
blameworthiness for anything. They must be excused, whoever else may be
accused. It is a trait which will have to be disciplined before they can be
brought to assist, if ever they can, the removal of those characteristics which
arouse the antagonism of other peoples. Elsewhere in the world, it may be said
that out-and-out enmity to the Jews has an economic basis. This, of course,
leads to the question whether the Jew shall have to become a deliberate failure,
or deny his genius, and forego his just meed of prosperity before he can win
the approval of the other races—a question which will arise for discussion
later.
As to the religious prejudice which the
Jews are, as a rule, readiest to affirm, it is safe to say that it does not
exist in the United States. Yet it is charged up to Americans by Jewish writers
just as freely as it is charged up to Russians. Each non-Jew reader is
competent to settle this for himself. He can easily do so by asking himself whether
in all his life he has ever felt a moment’s resentment against the Jew on
account of his religion. In an address recently delivered in a Jewish lodge and
reported in the Jewish press, the speaker, a Jew, stated that if 100 non-Jews
on the street were approached at random and casually asked what a Jew is, the
reply of the majority would be, “He is a Christ-killer.” One of the best known
and most highly respected rabbis in the United States said recently in a sermon
that children in Christian Sunday schools were taught to regard the Jew as a
Christ-killer. He repeated it in a conversation several weeks later.
It would probably be the testimony of
Christians generally that they never heard this term until they heard it in a
Jewish complaint, and certainly themselves never used it. The charge is absurd.
Let the 20,000,000 now in the Christian Sunday schools of Canada and the United
States testify as to the instruction given. There is no hesitation in stating
that there is no prejudice whatever in the Christian churches against the Jew
on account of his religion. On the contrary, there is not only a deep sense of
indebtedness, but a feeling of sharing with the Jew in his religion. The Sunday
schools of the Christian churches of the world are spending six months of this
year studying the International Lessons which are appointed for the Books of
the Judges, Ruth, First and Second Samuel and the Books of the Kings, and every
year is devoted in part to the Old Testament.
Here, however, is something for Jewish
religious leaders to consider: there is more downright bitterness of religious
prejudice on the part of the Jews against Christianity than could ever be
possible in the Christian churches of America. Simply take the church press of
America and compare it with the Jewish press in this regard, and there is no
answer. No Christian editor would think it either Christian or intelligent to
attack the Jewish religion, yet any six months’ survey of the Jewish press
would yield a mass of attack and prejudice on the other side. Moreover, no
religious bitterness in America attains within infinite distances to that
bitterness visited upon the Jew who becomes a Christian in his faith. It
amounts almost to a holy vendetta. A Christian may become a Jewish proselyte
and his motives be respected; it is never so when a Jew becomes a Christian.
These statements are true of both the orthodox and liberal wings of Judaism. It
is not his religion that gives prominence to the Jew today; it is something
else. And yet, with undeviating monotony, it is repeated wherever the Jew takes
cognizance of the feeling toward him that it is on account of three things,
first and most prominent of which is his religion. It may be comforting to him
to think that he is suffering for his faith, but it is not true. Every
intelligent Jew must know it.
Every Jew ought to know also that in every
Christian church where the ancient prophecies are received and studied, there
is a great revival of interest in the future of the Ancient People. It is not
forgotten that certain Promises were made to them regarding their position in
the world, and it is held that these prophecies will be fulfilled. The future
of the Jew, as prophetically outlined, is intimately bound up with the future
of this planet, and the Christian church in large part—at least by the
evangelical wing, which the Jews most condemn—sees a Restoration of the Chosen
People yet to come. If the mass of the Jews knew how understandingly and
sympathetically all the prophecies concerning them are being studied in the
Church, and the faith that exists that these prophecies will find fulfillment
and that they will result in great Jewish service to society at large, they
would probably regard the Church with another mind. They would at least know
that the Church does not believe that it will be the instrument in the
conversion of the Jews—a point on which Jewish leaders are tragically misled
and which evokes more bitterness than anything else—but that it depends on
quite other instruments and conditions, which it is not the function of this
article to point out except to say that it will be the Jews’ very own Messiah
which will accomplish it and not the “wild olive,” or the Gentile.
Curiously enough, there is a phase of
anti-Semitism having to do with religion, but not in the way here discussed.
There are those, very few in number and of atheistical tendencies, who assert
that all religion is a sham, being the invention of Jews for the purpose of
enslaving the minds of the people of the world to an enervating superstition.
This position, however, has had no effect on the main issue. It is a far
extreme. III.
Now, which of these exhibitions of
anti-Semitism will show itself in America? If certain tendencies continue, as
they are certain to do, what form will the feeling toward the Jew take? Not
that of mass violence, we may be sure. The only mass action visible now is that
of the Jewish agencies themselves against any person or institution that dares
bring the Jewish Question to public attention.
1. Anti-Semitism will come to America
because of the habit which emotions and ideas apparently have of making their
way westward around the world. North of Palestine, where the Jews have been
longest settled and where they are now in great numbers, anti-Semitism is acute
and well-defined. Westward, in Germany, it is clearly defined but, until the
seizure of German revolutionary agencies, was devoid of violence. Still farther
westward, in Great Britain, it is defined, but because of the comparatively
small number of Jews in the British Isles and their coalition with the ruling
class, it is more a feeling than a movement. In the United States it is not so
definite, but shows itself in a restlessness, a questioning, a sensible
friction between the traditional tendency of the American to fair-mindedness
and his respect for the cold facts.
Because the Question will assume more and
more pressure in America it behooves everyone of foresight to disregard the
shortsighted protests of the Jews themselves and see to it that the Question
shall not present itself among us as it has done among other people, in its
most distressing and confusing forms. It is a public duty to seize this problem
at its beginning and train it up, so to speak; that is, so prepare for it that
it may be handled here in a manner which will form a model for all other
countries, which will indeed supply all other countries with the essential
materials for a permanent solution. And this can be done only by exposing and
recognizing and treating with the serum of publicity the conditions before
which, heretofore, the nations have helplessly floundered because they lacked
either the desire or the means to get at the great root of the difficulty.
2. Another cause of the Question appearing
here will be the great influx of Jews which is planned for America. There will
probably be a million Jews enter the country this year, increasing our Jewish
population to nearly 4,500,000. This does not mean merely an immigration of
persons, but an immigration of ideas. No Jewish writer has ever told us, in
systematic fashion, just what is the Jews’ idea of non-Jews, how they regard
the Gentiles in their private minds. But there are indications of it, although
one would not attempt to reconstruct the Jewish attitude toward Gentiles. A Jew
ought to do this for us, but he would probably be cast out by his own people if
he discharged his task with rigorous jealousy for the exact fact.
These people are coming here regarding the
Gentile as an hereditary enemy, as perhaps they have good ground for doing, and
so believing they are going to model their behavior in a manner that will show
it. Nor will these Jews be so helpless as they appear. In stricken Poland,
where the Jews are represented as having been stripped of everything during the
war, there are hundreds daily appearing before the consulate to arrange their
passage here. The fact is significant. In spite of their reputed suffering and
poverty, they are able to travel a great distance and to insist on coming. No
other people are financially able to travel in such numbers. But the Jews are.
It will readily be seen that they are not objects of charity. They have been
able to keep afloat in a storm that has wrecked the other people. They know it
and they joy in it, as is natural. And they will bring here the same thoughts
toward the majority which they have harbored in their present lands of
domicile. They may hail America; they will have their own thoughts about the
majority of the American people. They may be in the lists as Russians or Poles
or what not, but they will be Jews with the full Jewish consciousness, and they
will make themselves felt.
All this is bound to have its effect. And
it is not race prejudice to prepare for it, and to invite American Jews
themselves to consider the fact and contribute to the solution of the problem
which it presents.
3. Every idea which has ruled Europe has
met with transformation when it was transplanted in America. It was so with the
idea of Liberty, the idea of Government, the idea of War. It will be so with
the idea of anti-Semitism. The whole problem will center here and if we are
wise and do not shirk it, it will find its solution here. A recent Jewish
writer has said: “Jewry today largely means American Jewry . . . . . . . . . .
all former Jewish centers were demolished during the war and were shifted to
America.” The problem will be ours, whether we choose it or not.
And what course will it take? Much depends
on what can be accomplished before it becomes very strong. It may be said,
however, that the first element to appear will be a show of resentment against
certain Jewish commercial successes, more particularly against the united
action by which they are attained. Our people see the spectacle of a people in
the midst of a people, in a sense which the Mormons never were, and they will
not like it. The Mormons made an Exodus; Israel is going back into Egypt to
subjugate it.
The second element which will undoubtedly
appear is prejudice and its incitement. The majority may always be right, but
they are not always initially reasonable. That prejudice which exists now, and
which is freely admitted by both Jew and Gentile, may become more marked, to
the distress of both parties, for neither the subject nor the object of
prejudice can attain that freedom of mind which is happiness.
Then we may most confidently look for a
reaction of Justice. It is here that the whole matter will begin to bend to the
genius of Americanism. The innate justice of the American mind has come to the
aid of every object that ever roused American resentment. The natural reaction
with us is of very brief duration; the intellectual and ethical reaction
swiftly follows. The American mind will never rest with merely resenting
certain individuals. It will probe deeper. Already this deeper probe has been
begun in Great Britain and America. We characteristically do not stop with
persons when principles are in sight.
And upon this there will be an
investigation of materials, part of which may yet be presented in this series
and which may possibly be disregarded for a time, but which at a future date
will be found to be the clue to the maze. Upon this, the root of all the
trouble will be bared to the light, to die as all roots do when deprived of
their concealment of darkness, and then the Jewish people themselves may be
expected to begin an adjustment to the new order of things, not to lose their
identity or to curtail their energy or to dim their brilliance, but to turn all
into more worthy channels for the benefit of all races, which alone can justify
their claim to superiority. A race that can achieve in the material realm what
the Jews have achieved while asserting themselves to be spiritually superior,
can achieve in a less sordid, a less society-defying realm also.
The Jews will not be destroyed; neither
will they be permitted to maintain the yoke which they have been so skillful in
fastening upon society. They are the beneficiaries of a system which itself
will change and force them to other and higher devices to justify their proper place
in the world.
Chapter 6 •
Jewish Question Breaks Into the Magazines
THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT, issue of 26 June
1920
Once upon a time an American faculty
member of an American university went to Russia on business. He was expert in a
very important department of applied science and a keen observer. He entered
Russia with the average American’s feeling about the treatment which the
government of that people accorded the Jew. He lived there three years, came
home for a year, and went back again for a similar period, and upon his second
return to America he thought it was time to give the American public accurate
information about the Jewish Question in Russia. He prepared a most careful
article and sent it to the editor of a magazine of the first class in the
Eastern United States. The editor sent for him, spent most of two days with
him, and was deeply impressed with all he learned—but he said he could not
print the article. The same interest and examination occurred with several
other magazine editors of the first rank.
It was not because the professor could not
write—these editors gladly bought anything he would write on other subjects.
But it was impossible for him to get his article on the Jews accepted or
printed in New York.
The Jewish Question, however, has at last
broken into a New York magazine. Rather it is a fragment of a shell hurled from
the Jewish camp at the Jewish Question to demolish, if possible, the Question
and thus make good the assertion that there is no such thing.
Incidentally it is the only kind of
article on the Jewish Question that the big magazines, whose mazes of financial
controllers make most interesting rummaging, would care to print.
Yet, the general public may learn much
about the Question even from the type of article whose purpose is to prove that
the Question doesn’t exist.
Mr. William Hard, in the Metropolitan for
June, has done as well as could be expected, considering the use he was
supposed to make of such material as he had at hand. And doubtless the
telegraph and letter brigades, which keep watch over all printed references to
the Jews, have duly congratulated the good editors of the Metropolitan for
their assistance in soothing the public to further sleep.
It is to be hoped, for the sake of the
Question, that Mr. Hard’s effort will have a wide reading, for there is very
much to be learned from it—much more than it was anybody’s intention should be
learned from it.
It may be learned, first, that the Jewish
Question exists. Mr. Hard says it is discussed in the drawing-rooms of London
and Paris. Whether the mention of drawing-rooms was a writer’s device to
intimate that the matter was unimportant and frivolous, or merely represented
the extent of Mr. Hard’s contact with the Question is not clear. He adds,
however, that a document relating to the Question has “travelled a good bit in
certain official circles in Washington.” He also mentions a cable dispatch to
the New York World, concerning the same Question, which that paper published.
His article was probably published too early to note the review which the
London Times made of the first document referred to. But he has told the reader
who is looking for the objective facts in the article that there is a Jewish
Question, and that it does not exist among the riff-raff either but principally
in those circles where the evidence of Jewish power and control is most
abundant. Moreover, the Question is being discussed. Mr. Hard tells us that
much. If he does not go further and tell us that it is being discussed with
great seriousness in high places and among men of national and international
importance, it is probably because of one of two things, either he does not
know, or he does not consider it consonant with the purpose of the article to
tell.
However, Mr. Hard has already made it
clear that there is a Jewish Question, that it is being discussed, that it is
being discussed by people who are best situated to observe the matter they are
talking about.
The reading of Mr. Hard’s article makes it
clear also that the Question always comes to the fore on the note of
conspiracy. Of course, Mr. Hard says he does not believe in conspiracies which
involve a large number of people, and it is with the utmost ease that his
avowal of unbelief is accepted, for there is nothing more ridiculous to the
Gentile mind than a mass conspiracy, because there is nothing more impossible
to the Gentile himself. Mr. Hard, we take it, is of non-Jewish extraction, and
he knows how impossible it would be to band Gentiles together in any
considerable number for any length of time in even the noblest conspiracy.
Gentiles are not built for it. Their conspiracy, whatever it might be, would
fall like a rope of sand. Gentiles have not the basis either in blood or
interest that the Jews have to stand together. The Gentile does not naturally
suspect conspiracy; he will indeed hardly bring himself to the verge of
believing it without the fullest proof.
It is therefore quite easy to understand
Mr. Hard’s difficulty with conspiracy; the point is that to write his article
at all, he is forced to recognize at almost every step that whenever the Jewish
Question is discussed, the idea of conspiracy occupies a large part in it. As a
matter of fact, it is the central idea in Mr. Hard’s article, and it completely
monopolizes the heading—“Great Jewish Conspiracy.”
The search for basic facts in Mr. Hard’s
article will disclose the additional information that there are certain
documents in existence which purport to contain the details of the conspiracy,
or—to drop a word that is unpleasant and may be misleading and which has not
been used in this series—the tendency of Jewish power to achieve complete
control. That is about all that the reader learns from Mr. Hard about the
documents, except that he describes one as “strange and horrible.” Here is
indeed a regrettable gap in the story, for it is to discredit a certain
document that Mr. Hard writes, and yet he tells next to nothing about it.
Discreditable documents usually discredit themselves. But this document is not
permitted to do that. The reader of the article is left to take Mr. Hard’s word
for it. The serious student or critic will feel, of course, that the documents
themselves would have formed a better basis for an intelligent judgement. But
laying that matter aside, Mr. Hard has made public the fact that there are
documents.
And then Mr. Hard does another thing, as
well as he can with the materials at hand, the purpose of the article being
what it was, and that is to show how little the Jews have to do with the
control of affairs by showing who are the Jews that do control certain selected
groups of affairs. The names are all brought forward by Mr. Hard and he alone
is responsible for them, our purpose in referring to them being merely to show
what can be learned from him.
Mr. Hard leans heavily on Russian affairs.
Sometimes it would almost seem as if the Jewish Question were conceived as the
Soviet Question, which it is not, as Mr. Hard very well knows, and although the
two have their plain connections, it is nothing less than well-defined
propaganda to set up Bolshevist fiction and knock it down by Jewish fact for
the purpose of the latter. However, what Mr. Hard offers as fact is very
instructive, quite apart from the conclusion which he draws from it.
Now, take his Russian line-up first. He
says that in the cabinet of Soviet Russia there is only one Jew. But he is
Trotsky. There are others in the government, of course, but Mr. Hard is
speaking about the cabinet now. He is not speaking about the commissars, who
are the real rulers of Russia, nor about the executive troops, who are the real
strength of the Trotsky-Lenin régime. No, just the cabinet. Of course, there
was only one Jew prominent in Hungary, too, but he was Bela Kun. Mr. Hard does
not ask us to believe, however, that it is simply because of Trotsky and Kun
that all Europe believes that Bolshevism has a strong Jewish element. Else the
stupid credibility of the Gentiles would be more impossible of conception than
the idea of a Jewish conspiracy is to Mr. Hard’s mind. Why should it be easier
to believe that Gentiles are dunces than that Jews are clever?
However, it is not too much to say that
Trotsky is way up at the top, sharing the utmost summit of Bolshevism with
Lenin, and Trotsky is a Jew—nobody ever denied that, not even Mr. Braunstein
himself (the latter being Trotsky’s St. Louis, U.S.A., name).
But then, says Mr. Hard, the Mensheviks
are led by Jews, too! That is a fact worth putting down beside the others.
Trotsky at the head of the Bolsheviks; at the head of the Mensheviks during
their opposition of the Bolsheviks were Leiber, Martov and Dan—“all Jews,” says
Mr. Hard.
There is, however, a middle party between
these extremes, the Cadets, which, Mr. Hard says, are or were the strongest
bourgeois political party in Russia. “They now have their headquarters in
Paris. Their chairman is Vinaver—a Jew.”
There are the facts as stated by Mr. Hard.
He says that Jews, whose names he gives, head the three great divisions of
political opinion in Russia.
And then he cries, look how the Jews are
divided! How can there be conspiracy among people who thus fight themselves?
But another, looking at the same situation
may say, look how the Jews control every phase of political opinion in Russia!
Doesn’t there seem to be some ground for the feeling that they are desirous of
ruling everywhere?
The facts are there. What significance
does it bring to the average mind that the three great parties of Russia are
led by Jews?
But that does not exhaust the information
which the matter-of-fact reader may find in Mr. Hard’s article. He turns to the
United States and makes several interesting statements.
“There is Otto Kahn,” he says. Well,
sometimes Otto Kahn is there, and sometimes he is in Paris on important
international matters, and sometimes he is in London advocating certain
alliances between British and American capital which have to do in a large way
with European political conditions. Mr. Kahn is rated as a conservative, and
that may mean anything. A man is conservative or not according to the angle
from which he is viewed. The most conservative men in America are really the
most radical; their motives and methods go to the very roots of certain
matters; they are radicals in their own field. The men who controlled the last
Republican Convention—if not the last, the most recent—are styled conservatives
by those whose vision is circumscribed by certain limited economic interests;
but they are the most radical of radicals, they have passed the red stage and
are white with it. If it were known what is in the back of Mr. Kahn’s mind, if
he should display a chart of what he is doing and aiming to do, the term which
would then most aptly describe him might be quite different. Anyway, we have it
from Mr. Hard, “There is Mr. Kahn.”
“On the other hand,” says Mr. Hard, “there
is Rose Pastor Stokes.” He adds the name of Morris Hillquit. They are, in Mr.
Hard’s classification, radicals. And to offset these names he adds the names of
two Gentiles, Eugene V. Debs and Bill Haywood and intimates that they are much more
powerful leaders than the first two. Students of modern influences, of which
Mr. Hard has long appeared as one, do not think so. Neither Debs nor Haywood
ever generated in all their lives a fraction of the intellectual power which
Mrs. Stokes and Mr. Hillquit have generated. Both Debs and Haywood live by the
others. To every informed person, as to Mr. Hard in this article, come the
Jewish names to mind when the social tendencies of the United States are passed
under reflection.
This is most instructive indeed, that in
naming the leaders of so-called conservatism and radicalism, Mr. Hard is driven
to use Jewish names. On his showing the reader is entitled to say that Jews
lead both divisions here in the United States.
But Mr. Hard is not through. “The man who
does more than any other man—the man who does more than any regiment of other
men—to keep American labor anti-radical is a Jew—Samuel Gompers.” That is a
fact which the reader will place in his list—American labor is led by a Jew.
Well, then, “the strongest anti-Gompers
trade union in the country—The Amalgamated Clothing Workers—and very strong
indeed, and very large—is led by a Jew—Sidney Hillman.”
It is the Russian situation over again.
Both ends of the movements, and the movement which operate within the movement,
are under the leadership of Jews. This, whatever the construction put upon it,
is a fact which Mr. Hard is compelled by the very nature of his task to
acknowledge.
And the middle movement, “the Liberal
Middle” as Mr. Hard calls it, which catches all between, produces in this
article the names of Mr. Justice Brandeis, Judge Mack and Felix Frankfurter,
gentlemen whose activities since Armistice Day would make a very interesting
story.
For good measure, Mr. Hard produces two
other names, “Baron Gunzberg—a Jew” who is “a faithful official” of the Russian
Embassy of Ambassador Bakhmetev, a repesentative of the modified old regime,
while the Russian Information Bureau, whose literary output appears in many of
our newspapers is conducted by another Jew, so Mr. Hard calls him, whose name
is familiar to newspaper readers, Mr. A. J. Sack.
It is not a complete list by any means,
but it is quite impressive. It seems to reflect importance on the documents
which Mr. Hard endeavors to minimize to a position of ridiculous unimportance.
And it leads to the thought that perhaps the documents are scrutinized as
carefully as they are because the readers of them have observed not only the
facts which Mr. Hard admits but other and more astonishing ones, and have discovered
that the documents confirm and explain the observations. Other readers who have
not had the privilege of learning all that the documents contain are entitled
to have satisfaction given to the interest thus aroused.
The documents did not create the Jewish
Question. If there were nothing but the documents, Mr. Hard would not have
written nor would the Metropolitan Magazine have printed the article here
discussed.
What Mr. Hard has done is to bring
confirmation in a most unexpected place that the Question exists and is
pressing for discussion. Someone felt the pressure when “The Great Jewish
Conspiracy” was ordered and written.
Chapter 7 •
Arthur Brisbane Leaps to the Help of Jewry
THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT, issue of 3 July
1920
Once more the current of this series on
the Modern Jewish Question is interrupted to give notice of the appearance of
the Question in another quarter, the appearance this time consisting of a more
than two-column “Today” editorial in the Hearst papers of Sunday, June 20, from
the pen of Arthur Brisbane. It would be too much to say that Mr. Brisbane is
the most influential writer in the country, but perhaps he is among the dozen
most widely read. It is, therefore, a confirmation of the statement that the
Question is assuming importance in this country, that a writer of Mr.
Brisbane’s prominence should openly discuss it.
Of course, Mr. Brisbane has not studied
the Question. He would probably admit in private conversation—though such an
admission would hardly be in harmony with the tone of certainty he publicly
adopts—that he really knows nothing about it. He knows, however, as a good
newspaper man, how to handle it when the exigencies of the newspaper day throw
it up to him for offhand treatment. Every editorial writer knows how to do
that. There is something good in every race, or there have been some notable
individuals in it, or it has played a picturesque part in history—that is
enough for a very readable editorial upon any class of people who may happen to
be represented in the community. The Question, whatever it may be, need not be
studied at all; a certain group of people may be salved for a few paragraphs,
and the job need never be tackled again. Every newspaper man knows that.
And yet, having lived in New York for a
long time, having had financial dealings of a large and obligating nature with
certain interests in this country, having seen no doubt more or less of the
inner workings of the great trust and banking groups, and being constantly
surrounded by assistants and advisors who are members of the Jewish race, Mr.
Brisbane must have had his thoughts. It is, however, no part of a newspaper
man’s business to expose his thoughts about the racial groups of his community,
any more than it is a showman’s business to express his opinion of the patrons
of his show. The kinds of offense a newspaper will give, and the occasions on
which it will feel justified in giving it, are very limited.
So, assuming that Mr. Brisbane had to
write at all, it could have been told beforehand what he would write. The only
wonder is that he felt he had to write. Did he really feel that the Jews are
being “persecuted” when an attempt is made to uncover the extent and causes of
their control in the United States and elsewhere? Did he feel, with good editorial
shrewdness, that here was an opportunity to win the attention and regard of the
most influential group in New York and the nation? Or—and this seems within the
probabilities—was he inclined simply to pass it over, until secretarial
suggestions reached him for a Sunday editorial, or until some of the
bondholders made their wishes known? This is not at all to impugn Mr.
Brisbane’s motives, but merely to indicate on what slender strings such an
editorial may depend.
But what is more important—does Mr. Brisbane
consider that, having disposed of the Sunday editorial, he is through with the
Question, or that the Question itself is solved? That is the worst of daily
editorializing; having come safely and inoffensively through with one
editorial, the matter is at an end as far as that particular writer is
concerned—that is, as a usual thing.
It is to be hoped that Mr. Brisbane is not
through. He ought not to leave a big question without contributing something to
it, and in his Sunday editorial he did not contribute anything. He even made
mistakes which he ought to correct by further study. “What about the
Phoenicians?” he asks. He should have looked that up while his mind was opened
receptively toward the subject, and he would not have made so miserable a
blunder as to connect them so closely with the Jews. He would never find a Jew
doing that. It is permissible, however, in Jewish propaganda intended for
Gentile consumption. The Phoenicians themselves certainly never thought they
were connected in any way with the Jews, and the Jews were equally without
light on the subject. If in nothing else, they differed in their attitude
toward the sea. The Phoenicians not only built boats but manned them; the Jew
would rather risk his investment in a boat than himself. In everything else the
differences between the two peoples were deep and distinct. Mr. Brisbane should
have turned up the Jewish Encyclopedia at that point in his dictation. It is to
be hoped he will resume his study and when he has found something that is not printed
in “simply written” Jewish books will give the world the benefit of it. It is
hardly like the question of the rotundity of the earth; this Question is not
settled and it will be discussed.
Mr. Brisbane is in a position to pursue
some investigations of his own on this subject. He has a large staff, and it is
presumed that some of its members are Gentiles of unbiased minds; he has a
world-wide organization; since his own modification of speech and views
following upon his adventure in the money-making world, he has a “look-in” upon
certain groups of men and certain tendencies of power—why does he not take the
Question as a world problem and go after the facts and the solution?
It is a task worthy of any newspaper
organization. It will assist America to make the contribution which she must
make if this Question is ever to be turned from the bugbear it has been through
all the centuries. All the talk on earth about “loving our fellow men” will not
serve in lieu of an investigation, because it is asking men to love those who
are rapidly and insidiously gaining the mastery of them. “What’s wrong with the
Jew?” is the first question, and then, “What’s wrong with the Gentile to make
it possible?”
As in the case of every Gentile writer who
appears as the Jew’s good-natured defender, Mr. Brisbane is compelled to state
a number of facts which comprise a part of the very Question whose existence is
denied.
“Every other successful name you see in a
great city is a Jewish name,” says Mr. Brisbane. In his own city the ratio is
even higher than that.
“Jews numbering less than one per cent of
the earth’s population possess by conquest, enterprise, industry and
intelligence 50 per cent of the world’s commercial success,” says Mr. Brisbane.
Does it mean anything to Mr. Brisbane? Has
he ever thought how it will all turn out? Is he willing to absolve that
“success” from every quality which humanity has a right to challenge? Is he
entirely satisfied with the way that “success” is used where it is supreme?
Would he be willing to undertake to prove that it is due to those commendable
qualities he has named and nothing less commendable? Speaking of the
Jew-financed Harriman railroad campaign, is Mr. Brisbane ready to write his
endorsement upon that? Did he ever hear of Jewish money backing railroads that
were built for railroad purposes and nothing else?
It would be very easy to suggest to Mr.
Brisbane, as editor, a series of articles which would be most enlightening,
both to himself and his readers, if he would only put unbiased men at work
gathering the facts for them.
One of the articles might be entitled “The
Jews at the Peace Conference.” His men should be instructed to learn who were
the most prominent figures at the Peace Conference; who came and went most
constantly and most busily; who were given freest access to the most important
persons and chambers; which race provided the bulk of the private secretaries
to the important personages there; which race provided most of the sentinels
through whom engagements had to be made with men of note; which race went
furthest in the endeavor to turn the whole proceeding into a festival rout by
dances and lavish entertainment; which civilians of prominence oftenest dined
the leading conferees in private session.
If Mr. Brisbane, with the genius for
reporting which his organization deservedly has, will turn his men loose on
that assignment, and then print what they bring him, he will have a story that
will make a mark even in his remarkable career as an editor.
He might even run a second story on the
Peace Conference, entitled, “Which Program Won at the Peace Conference?” He
might instruct his men to inquire as to the business which brought the Jews in
such quality and quantity to Paris, and how it was put through. Particularly
should they inquire whether any jot or tittle of the Jews’ world program was
refused or modified by the Peace Conference. It should also be carefully
inquired whether, after getting what they went after, they did not ask for
still more and get that, too, even though it constituted a discrimination
against the rest of the world. Mr. Brisbane would doubtless be surprised to
learn that of all the programs submitted to that Conference, not excepting the
great program on which humanity hung so many pathetic hopes, the only program
to go through was the Jews’ program. And yet he could learn just that if he
inquired. The question is, having obtained that information, what would Mr.
Brisbane do with it?
There are any number of lines of
investigation Mr. Brisbane might enter, and in any one of them his knowledge of
his country and of its relation to this particular Question would be greatly
enlarged.
Does Mr. Brisbane know who owns Alaska? He
may have been under the impression, in common with the rest of us until we
learned better, that it was owned by the United States. No, it is owned by the
same people who are coming rapidly to own the United States.
Is Mr. Brisbane, from the vantage point
afforded by his position in national journalism, even dimly aware that there
are elements in our industrial unrest which neither “capital” nor “labor”
accurately define? Has he ever caught a glimpse of another power which is
neither “labor” nor “capital” in the productive sense, whose purpose and
interest it is to keep labor and capital as far apart as possible, now by
provoking labor, now by provoking capital? In his study of the industrial
situation and its perfectly baffling mystery, Mr. Brisbane must have caught a
flash of something behind the backmost scene. It would be good journalistic enterprise
to find out what it is.
Has Mr. Brisbane ever printed the name of
the men who control the sugar supply of the United States—does he know
them—would he like to know them?
Has he ever looked into the woolen
situation in this country, from the change of ownership in cotton lands, and
the deliberate sabotage of cotton production by banking threats, right on
through to the change in the price of cloth and clothing? And has he ever noted
the names of the men he found on that piece of investigation? Would he like to
know how it is done, and who does it? Mr. Brisbane could find all these things
and give them to the public by using his efficient staff of investigators and
writers on this Question.
Whether Mr. Brisbane would feel free to do
this, he himself best knows. There may be reasons why he would not, private
reasons, prudential reasons.
However that may be, there are no reasons
why he should not make a complete study of the Question—a real study, not a
superficial glance at it with an eye to its “news value”—and arrive at his own
considered conclusion. There would be no intolerance about that. As it is now,
Mr. Brisbane is not qualified to take a stand on either side of the Question;
he simply brushes it aside as troublesome, as the old planters used brush aside
the anti-slavery moralists; and for that reason the recent defense of the Jew
is not a defense at all. It is more like a bid for favor.
Mr. Brisbane’s chief aversion, apparently,
is toward what he calls race prejudice and race hatred. Of course, if any man
should fear that the study of an economic situation would plunge him into these
serious aberrations of mind, he should be advised to avoid that line of study.
There is something wrong either with the investigation or with the investigator
when prejudice and hatred are the result. It is a mighty poor excuse, however,
for an intelligent man to put forward either on his own behalf or on behalf of
those whose minds he has had the privilege of molding over a course of years.
Prejudice and hatred are the very
conditions which a scientific study of the Jewish Question will forestall and
prevent. We prejudge what we do not know, and we hate what we do not
understand; the study of the Jewish Question will bring knowledge and insight,
and not to the Gentile only, but also to the Jew. The Jew needs this as much,
even more than the Gentile. For if the Jew can be made to see, understand, and
deal with certain matters, then a large part of the Question vanishes in the
solution of ideal common sense. Awaking the Gentile to the facts about the Jew
is only part of the work; awaking the Jew to the facts about the Question is an
indispensable part. The big initial victory to be achieved is to transform
Gentiles from being mere attackers and to transform Jews from being mere
defenders, both of them special pleaders for partisan views, and to turn them
both into investigators. The investigation will show both Gentile and Jew at
fault, and the road will then be clear for wisdom to work out a result, if
there should perchance be that much wisdom left in the race.
There is a serious snare in all this plea
for tolerance. Tolerance is first a tolerance of the truth. Tolerance is urged
today for the sake of suppression. There can be no tolerance until there is
first a full understanding of what is tolerated. Ignorance, suppression,
silence, collusion—these are not tolerance. The Jew never has been really
tolerated in the higher sense because he has never been understood. Mr.
Brisbane does not assist the understanding of this people by reading a “simply
written” book and flinging a few Jewish names about in a sea of type. He owes
it to his own mind to get into the Question, whether he makes newspaper use of
his discoveries or not.
As to the newspaper angle, it is
impossible to report the world even superficially without coming everywhere
against the fact of the Jews, and the Press gets around that fact by referring
to them as Russians, Letts, Germans, and Englishmen. This mask of names is one
of the most confusing elements in the whole problem. Names that actually name,
statements that actually define are needed for the clarification of the world’s
mind.
Mr. Brisbane should study this question
for the light such a study would throw on other matters with which he is
concerned. It would be a help to that study if from time to time he would
publish some of his findings, because such publication would put him in touch
with a phase of Judaism which mere complimentary editorials could not. No doubt
Mr. Brisbane has been deluged by communications which praise him for what he
has written; the real eye-opener would come if he could get several bushels of
the other kind. Nothing that has ever come to him could compare with what would
come to him if he should publish even one of the facts he could discover by an
independent investigation.
Having written about the Jews, Mr.
Brisbane will probably have a readier eye henceforth for other men’s
pronouncements on the same subject. In his casual reading he will find more
references to the Jew than he has ever noticed before. Some of them will
probably appear in isolated sentences and paragraphs of his own papers. Sooner
or later, every competent investigator and every honest writer strikes a trail
that leads toward Jewish power in the world. THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT is only
doing with system and detail what other publications have done or are doing
piecemeal.
There is a real fear of the Jew upon the
publicity sources of the United States—a fear which is felt and which ought to
be analyzed. Unless it is a very great mistake, Mr. Brisbane himself has felt
this fear, though it is quite possible he has not scrutinized it. It is not the
fear of doing injustice to a race of people—all of us ought to have that
honorable fear—it is the fear of doing anything at all with reference to them
except unstintedly praising them. An independent investigation would convince
Mr. Brisbane that a considerable modification of praise in favor of
discriminate criticism is a course that is pressing upon American journalism.
Chapter 8 •
Does a Definite Jewish World Program Exist?
THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT, issue of 10 July
1920
In all the explanations of anti-Jewish
feeling which modern Jewish spokesmen make, these three alleged causes are
commonly given—these three and no more: religious prejudice, economic jealousy,
social antipathy. Whether the Jew knows it or not, every Gentile knows that on
his side of the Jewish Question no religious prejudice exists. Economic
jealousy may exist, at least to this extent, that his uniform success has
exposed the Jew to much scrutiny. A few Jewish spokesmen seek to turn this
scrutiny by denying that the Jew is pre-eminent in finance, but this is loyalty
in extremity. The finances of the world are in control of Jews; their decisions
and their devices are themselves our economic law. But because a people excels
us in finance is no sufficient reason for calling them to the bar of public
judgement. If they are more intellectually able, more persistently industrious
than we are, if they are endowed with faculties which have been denied us as an
inferior or slower race, that is no reason for our requiring them to give an
account of themselves. Economic jealousy may explain some of the anti-Jewish
feeling; it cannot account for the presence of the Jewish Question except as
the hidden causes of Jewish financial success may become a minor element of the
larger problem. And as for social antipathy—there are many more undesirable
Gentiles in the world than there are undesirable Jews, for the simple reason
that there are more Gentiles.
None of the Jewish spokesmen today mention
the political cause, or if they come within suggestive distance of it, they
limit and localize it. It is not a question of the patriotism of the Jew,
though this too is very widely questioned in all the countries. You hear it in
England, in France, in Germany, in Poland, in Russia, in Rumania—and, with a
shock, you hear it in the United States. Books have been written, reports
published and scattered abroad, statistics skillfully set forth for the purpose
of showing that the Jew does his part for the country in which he resides; and
yet the fact remains that in spite of these most zealous and highly sponsored
campaigns, the opposite assertion is stronger and lives longer. The Jews who
did their duty in the armies of Liberty, and did it doubtless from true-hearted
love and allegiance, have not been able to overcome the impression made upon
officers and men and civilians by those who did not.
But that is not what is here meant as the
political element in the Jewish Question. To understand why the Jew should
think less of the nationalities of the world than do those who comprise them is
not difficult. The Jew’s history is one of wandering among them all.
Considering living individuals only, there is no race of people now upon the
planet who have lived in so many places, among so many peoples as have the
Jewish masses. They have a clearer world-sense than any other people, because
the world has been their path. And they think in world terms more than any
nationally cloistered people could. The Jew can be absolved if he does not
enter into national loyalties and prejudices with the same intensity as the
natives; the Jew has been for centuries a cosmopolitan. While under a flag he
may be correct in the conduct required of him as a citizen or resident,
inevitably he has a view of flags which can hardly be shared by the man who has
known but one flag.
The political element inheres in the fact
that the Jews form a nation in the midst of the nations. Some of their
spokesmen, particularly in America, deny that, but the genius of the Jew
himself has always put these spokesmen’s zeal to shame. And why this fact of
nationhood should be so strenuously denied is not always clear. It may be that
when Israel is brought to see that her mission in the world is not to be
achieved by means of the Golden Calf, her very cosmopolitanism with regard to
the world and her inescapable nationalistic integrity with regard to herself
will together prove a great and serviceable factor in bringing about human
unity, which the total Jewish tendency at the present time is doing much to
prevent. It is not the fact that the Jews remain a nation in the midst of the
nations; it is the use made of that inescapable status, which the world has
found reprehensible. The nations have tried to reduce the Jew to unity with
themselves; attempts toward the same end have been made by the Jews themselves;
but destiny seems to have marked them out to continuous nationhood. Both the
Jews and the World will have to accept that fact, find the good prophecy in it,
and seek the channels for its fulfillment.
Theodor Herzl, one of the greatest of the
Jews, was perhaps the farthest-seeing public exponent of the philosophy of
Jewish existence that modern generations have known. And he was never in doubt
of the existence of the Jewish nation. Indeed, he proclaimed its existence on
every occasion. He said, “We are a people—One people.”
He clearly saw that what he called the
Jewish Question was political. In his introduction to “The Jewish State” he
says, “I believe that I understand anti-Semitism, which is really a highly
complex movement. I consider it from a Jewish standpoint, yet without fear or
hatred. I believe that I can see what elements there are in it of vulgar sport,
of common trade jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance and
also of pretended self-defense. I think the Jewish Question is no more a social
than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms.
It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political
world-question to be discussed and controlled by the civilized nations of the
world in council.”
Not only did Herzl declare that the Jews
formed a nation, but when questioned by Major Evans Gordon before the British
Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in August, 1902, Dr. Herzl said: “I will
give you my definition of a nation, and you can add the adjective ‘Jewish.’ A
nation is, in my mind, an historical group of men of a recognizable cohesion
held together by a common enemy. That is in my view a nation. Then if you add
to that the word ‘Jewish’ you have what I understand to be the Jewish nation.”
Also, in relating the action of this
Jewish nation to the world, Dr. Herzl wrote—“When we sink, we become a
revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of the revolutionary party;
when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse.”
This view, which appears to be the true
view in that it is the view which has been longest sustained in Jewish thought,
is brought out also by Lord Eustace Percy, and re-published, apparently with
approval, by the Canadian Jewish Chronicle. It will repay a careful reading:
“Liberalism and Nationalism, with a
flourish of trumpets, threw open the doors of the ghetto and offered equal
citizenship to the Jew. The Jew passed out into the Western World, saw the
power and the glory of it, used it and enjoyed it, laid his hand indeed upon
the nerve centers of its civilization, guided, directed and exploited it, and
then—refused the offer * * * Moreover—and this is a remarkable thing—the Europe
of nationalism and liberalism, of scientific government and democratic equality
is more intolerable to him than the old oppressions and persecutions of despotism
* * * In the increasing consolidation of the western nations, it is no longer
possible to reckon on complete toleration * * *
“In a world of completely organized
territorial sovereignties he (the Jew) has only two possible cities of refuge:
he must either pull down the pillars of the whole national state system or he
must create a territorial sovereignty of his own. In this perhaps lies the
explanation both of Jewish Bolshevism and of Zionism, for at this moment
Eastern Jewry seems to hover uncertainly between the two.
“In Eastern Europe Bolshevism and Zionism often seem
to grow side by side, just as Jewish influence molded Republican and Socialist
thought throughout the nineteenth century, down to the Young Turk revolution in
Constantinople hardly more than a decade ago—not because the Jew cares for the
positive side of radical philosophy, not because he desires to be a partaker in
Gentile nationalism or Gentile democracy, but because no existing Gentile
system of government is ever anything but distasteful to him.”
All that is true, and Jewish thinkers of
the more fearless type always recognize it as true. The Jew is against the
Gentile scheme of things. He is, when he gives his tendencies full sway, a
Republican as against the monarchy, a Socialist as against the republic, and a
Bolshevist as against Socialism.
What are the causes of this disruptive
activity? First, his essential lack of democracy. Jewish nature is autocratic.
Democracy is all right for the rest of the world, but the Jew wherever he is
found forms an aristocracy of one sort or another. Democracy is merely a tool
of a word which Jewish agitators use to raise themselves to the ordinary level
in places where they are oppressed below it; but having reached the common
level they immediately make efforts for special privileges, as being entitled
to them—a process of which the late Peace Conference will remain the most
startling example. The Jews today are the only people whose special and
extraordinary privileges are written into the world’s Treaty of Peace. But more
of that at another time.
No one now pretends to deny, except a few
spokesmen who really do not rule the thought of the Jews but are set forth for
the sole benefit of influencing Gentile thought, that the socially and
economically disruptive elements abroad in the world today are not only manned
but also moneyed by Jewish interests. For a long time this fact was held in
suspense owing to the vigorous denial of the Jews and the lack of information
on the part of those agencies of publicity to which the public had looked for
its information. But now the facts are coming forth. Herzl’s words are being
proved to be true—“when we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the
subordinate officers of the revolutionary party”—and these words were first
published in English in 1896, or 24 years ago.
Just now these tendencies are working in
two directions, one for the tearing down of the Gentile states all over the
world, and the other for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The
latter project has the best wishes of the whole world, but it is far from
having the best wishes of the whole, or even the larger part, of Jewry. The
Zionist party makes a great deal of noise, but it is really an unrepresentative
minority. It can scarcely be designated as more than an unusually ambitious
colonization scheme. [NOTE 1] It is doubtless serving, however, as a very
useful public screen for the carrying on of secret activities. International
Jews, the controllers of the world’s governmental and financial power, may meet
anywhere, at any time, in war time or peace time, and by giving out that they
are only considering the ways and means of opening up Palestine to the Jews,
they easily escape the suspicion of being together on any other business. The
Allies and enemies of the Gentile nations at war thus met and were not
molested. It was at a Zionist conference—the sixth, held in 1903—that the
recent war was exactly predicted, its progress and outcome indicated, and the
relation of the Jews to the Peace Treaty outlined.
That is to say, though Jewish nationalism
exists, its enshrinement in a state to be set up in Palestine is not the
project that is engaging the whole Jewish nation now. The Jews will not move to
Palestine just yet; it may be said that they will not move at all merely
because of the Zionist movement. Quite another motive will be the cause of the
exodus out of the Gentile nations, when the time for that exodus fully comes.
As Donald A. Cameron, late British
Consul-General at Alexandria, a man fully in sympathy with Zionism and much
quoted in the Jewish press, says: “The Jewish immigrants (into Palestine) will
tire of taking in one another’s washing at three per cent, of winning one
another’s money in the family, and their sons will hasten by train and steamer
to win 10 per cent in Egypt * * * The Jew by himself in Palestine will eat his
head off; he will kick his stable to pieces.” Undoubtedly the time for the
exodus—at least the motive for the exodus—is not yet here.
The political aspect of the Jewish
Question which is now engaging at least three of the great nations—France,
Great Britain and the United States—has to do with matters of the present
organization of the Jewish nation. Must it wait until it reaches Palestine to
have a State, or is it an organized State now? Does Jewry know what it is
doing? Has it a “foreign policy” with regard to the Gentiles? Has it a
department which is executing that foreign policy? Has this Jewish State,
visible or invisible, if it exists, a head? Has it a Council of State? And if
any of these things is so, who is aware of it?
The first impulsive answer of the Gentile
mind would be “No” to all these questions—it is a Gentile habit to answer
impulsively. Never having been trained in secrets or invisible unity, the
Gentile immediately concludes that such things cannot be, if for no other
reason than that they have not crossed his path and advertised themselves.
The questions, however, answered thus,
require some explanation of the circumstances which are visible to all men. If
there is no deliberate combination of Jews in the world, then the control which
they have achieved and the uniformity of the policies which they follow must be
the simple result, not of deliberate decisions, but of a similar nature in all
of them working out the same way. Thus, we might say that as a love for
adventure on the water drove the Britisher forth, so it made him the world’s
greatest colonist. Not that he deliberately sat down with himself and in formal
manner resolved that he would become a colonizer, but the natural outworking of
his genius resulted that way. But would this be a sufficient account of the
British Empire?
Doubtless the Jews have the genius to do,
wherever they go, the things in which we see them excel. But does this account
for the relations which exist between the Jews of every country, for their
world councils, for their amazing foreknowledge of stupendous events which
break with shattering surprise on the rest of the world, for the smoothness and
preparedness with which they appear, at a given time in Paris, with a world
program on which they all agree?
The world has long suspected—at first only
a few, then the secret departments of the governments, next the intellectuals
among the people, now more and more the common people themselves—that not only
are the Jews a nation distinct from all the other nations and mysteriously
unable to sink their nationality by any means they or the world may adopt to
this end, but that they also constitute a state; that they are nationally
conscious, not only, but consciously united for a common defense and for a
common purpose. Revert to Theodor Herzl’s definition of the Jewish nation, as
held together by a common enemy, and then reflect that this common enemy is the
Gentile world. Does this people which knows itself to be a nation remain
loosely unorganized in the face of that fact? It would hardly be like Jewish
astuteness in other fields. When you see how closely the Jews are united by
various organizations in the United States, and when you see how with practiced
hand they bring those organizations to bear as if with tried confidence in
their pressure, it is at least not inconceivable that what can be done within a
country can be done, or has been done, between all the countries where the Jews
live.
At any rate, in the American Hebrew of
June 25, 1920, Herman Bernstein writes thus: “About a year ago a representative
of the Department of Justice submitted to me a copy of the manuscript of ‘The
Jewish Peril’ by Professor Nilus, and asked for my opinion of the work. He said
that the manuscript was a translation of a Russian book published in 1905 which
was later suppressed. The manuscript was supposed to contain ‘protocols’ of the
Wise Men of Zion and was supposed to have been read by Dr. Herzl at a secret
conference of the Zionist Congress at Basle. He expressed the opinion that the
work was probably that of Dr. Theodor Herzl. . . . . He said that some American
Senators who had seen the manuscript were amazed to find that so many years ago
a scheme had been elaborated by the Jews which is now being carried out, and
that Bolshevism had been planned years ago by Jews who sought to destroy the
world.”
This quotation is made merely to put on
record the fact that it was a representative of the Department of Justice of
the United States Government, who introduced this document to Mr. Bernstein,
and expressed a certain opinion upon it, namely, “that the work was probably
that of Theodor Herzl.“ Also that “some American Senators“ were amazed to note
the comparison between what a publication of the year 1905 proposed and what
the year 1920 revealed.
The incident is all the more preoccupying
because it occurred by action of the representative of a government who today
is very largely in the hands of, or under the influence of, Jewish interests.
It is more than probable that as soon as the activity became known, the
investigator was stopped. But it is equally probable that whatever orders may
have been given and apparently obeyed, the investigation may not have stopped.
The United States Government was a little
late in the matter, however. At least four other world powers had preceded it,
some by many years. A copy of the Protocols was deposited in the British Museum
and bears on it the stamp of that institution, “August 10, 1906.” The notes
themselves probably date from 1896, or the year of the utterances previously
quoted from Dr. Herzl. The first Zionist Congress convened in 1897.
The document was published in England
recently under auspices that challenged attention for it, in spite of the
unfortunate title under which it appeared. Eyre and Spottiswoode are the
appointed printers to the British Government, and it was they who brought out
the pamphlet. It was as if the Government Printing Office at Washington should
issue them in this country. While there was the usual outcry by the Jewish
press, the London Times in a review pronounced all the Jewish counter-attacks
as “unsatisfactory.“
The Times noticed what will probably be
the case in this country also that the Jewish defenders leave the text of the
protocols alone, while they lay heavy emphasis on the fact of their anonymity.
When they refer to the substance of the document at all there is one form of
words which recurs very often—“it is the work of a criminal or a madman.“
The protocols, without name attached,
appearing for the most part in manuscripts here and there, laboriously copied
out from hand to hand, being sponsored by no authority that was willing to
stand behind it, assiduously studied in the secret departments of the
governments and passed from one to another among higher officials, have lived
on and on, increasing in power and prestige by the sheer force of their
contents. A marvelous achievement for either a criminal or a madman! The only
evidence it has is that which it carries within it, and that internal evidence
is, as the London Times points out, the point on which attention is to be
focused. and the very point from which Jewish effort has been expended to draw
us away.
The interest of the Protocols at this time
is their bearing on the questions: Have the Jews an organized world system?
What is its policy? How is it being worked?
These questions all receive full attention
in the Protocols. Whosoever was the mind that conceived them possessed a
knowledge of human nature, of history and of statecraft which is dazzling in
its brilliant completeness, and terrible in the objects to which it turns its
powers. Neither a madman nor an intentional criminal, but more likely a
super-mind mastered by devotion to a people and a faith could be the author, if
indeed one mind alone conceived them. It is too terribly real for fiction, too
well-sustained for speculation, too deep in its knowledge of the secret springs
of life for forgery.
Jewish attacks upon it thus far make much
of the fact that it came out of Russia. That is hardly true. It came by way of
Russia. It was incorporated in a Russian book published about 1905 by a
Professor Nilus, who attempted to interpret the Protocols by events then going
forward in Russia. This publication and interpretation gave it a Russian tinge
which has been useful to Jewish propagandists in this country and England,
because these same propagandists have been very successful in establishing in
Anglo-Saxon mentalities a certain atmosphere of thought surrounding the idea of
Russia and Russians. One of the biggest humbugs ever foisted on the world has
been that foisted by Jewish propagandists, principally on the American public,
with regard to the temper and genius of the truly Russian people. So, to
intimate that the Protocols are Russian, is partially to discredit them.
The internal evidence makes it clear that
the Protocols were not written by a Russian, nor originally in the Russian
language, nor under the influence of Russian conditions. But they found their
way to Russia and were first published there. They have been found by
diplomatic officers in manuscript in all parts of the world. Wherever Jewish
power is able to do so, it has suppressed them, sometimes under the supreme
penalty.
Their persistence is a fact which
challenges the mind. Jewish apologists may explain that persistence on the
ground that the Protocols feed the anti-Semitic temper, and therefore are
preserved for that service. Certainly there was no wide nor deep anti-Semitic
temper in the United States to be fed or that felt the greed for agreeable lies
to keep itself alive. The progress of the Protocols in the United States can
only be explained on the ground that they supply light and give meaning to
certain previously observed facts, and that this light and meaning is so
startling as to give a certain standing and importance to these otherwise
unaccredited documents. Sheer lies do not live long, their power soon dies.
These Protocols are more alive than ever. They have penetrated higher places
than ever before. They have compelled a more serious attitude to them than ever
before.
The Protocols would not be more worthy of
study if they bore, say, the name of Theodor Herzl. Their anonymity does not decrease
their power any more than the omission of a painter’s signature detracts from
the art value of a painting. Indeed, the Protocols are better without a known
source. For if it were definitely known that in France or Switzerland in the
year 1896, or thereabouts, a group of International Jews, assembled in
conference, drew up a program of world conquest it would still have to be shown
that such a program was more than a mere vagary, that it was confirmed at large
by efforts to fulfill it. The Protocols are a World Program—there is no doubt
anywhere of that. Whose program, is stated within the articles themselves. But
as for outer confirmation, which would be the more valuable—a signature, or six
signatures, or twenty signatures, or a 25-year unbroken line of effort
fulfilling that program?
The point of interest for this and other
countries is not that a “criminal or a madman” conceived such a program, but
that, when conceived, this program found means of getting itself fulfilled in
its most important particulars. The document is comparatively unimportant; the
conditions to which it calls attention are of a very high degree of importance.
NOTE 1: The statements indicated are those
of non-Zionist Jews. The real Jewish program is that program which is executed.
It was the Zionist program that was followed by the Peace Conference. It must
therefore be regarded as the official program.
Chapter 9 • The
Historic Basis of Jewish Imperialism
THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT, issue of 17 July
1920
A great unloosening of speech with
reference to the Jewish Question and the Jewish program for world power has
occurred in this country since the beginning of this series of articles. It is
now possible to pronounce the word “Jew” in a perfectly serious discussion,
without timidity, or without intimidation. Heretofore that has been regarded as
the special prerogative of the Jewish publicists themselves and they have used
the name exclusively in well-organized and favorable propaganda. They can oust
portions of Shakespeare from the public schools on the ground that the Jews are
offended; they can demand the removal of one of Sargent’s paintings from the
Boston Library because it represents the Synagogue in a decline. But when
anything emanates from the Gentile side which indicates that the Gentile is
also conscious of the Jew, then the charge of prejudice is instantly and
strongly made. The effect of that in this country has been a ban on speech
which has had few parallels in our history. Recently at a banquet a speaker
used the term “Jews” in reference to the actions of a group of Jewish bankers.
A Jewish guest leaped to his feet demanding to know if the speaker considered
it “American” to single out a race that way. The speaker replied, “I do, sir,”
and received the approval of the audience. In that particular part of the
country, business men’s tongues had been tied for years by the unwritten law
that Jews must never by singled out as Jews.
No one would have predicted a year ago
that a newspaper like the Chicago Tribune could have convinced itself that it
was good newspaper policy to print in the first column of its first page a
copyrighted article on the Jewish program for world rule, printing the word
“Jew” in large letters in its headline, and abstaining from editorial retouching
of the word “Jew” in the body of the article. The usual plan is to do what an
eastern newspaper did when dealing with the same subject: wherever the term
“international Jew” occurred in the article which it printed, it was retouched
to “financiers.”
The Chicago Tribune, however, on Saturday,
June 19, 1920, printed in the first column of the first page a cable dispatch
from John Clayton, its special correspondent, under the heading: “Trotsky Leads
Jew-Radicals to World Rule. Bolshevism Only a Tool for His Scheme.”
The first paragraph reads as follows:
“For the last two years army intelligence officers,
members of the various secret service organizations of the Entente, have been
bringing in reports of a world revolutionary movement other than Bolshevism. At
first these reports confused the two, but latterly the lines they have taken
have begun to be more and more clear.”
As previously stated in THE DEARBORN
INDEPENDENT, our own secret service is one of these, though there is reason to
believe that because of the influence of Jews upon the government these
investigations were not pursued with the persistency that might otherwise have
been given them. However, we know from Jewish sources, not to mention any
other, that the Department of Justice of the United States was at one time
interested enough to make inquiries.
What the Tribune writer does in the above
paragraph is to show that this interest has been sustained for two years by
officials of the Entente, a fact which ought to be borne in mind by those who
declare that the whole matter is of German instigation. The emergence of the
Jewish Question into American thought was immediately met by a statement from
Jewish sources that it was a German importation, and that the anti-Semitism
which flowed over Germany and resulted in cleaning out the overwhelming Jewish
revolutionary influences from the new German Government, was only a trick to
throw the blame for the defeat of Germany on the Jews. American rabbis are even
now unitedly preaching that history shows that every great war is followed by a
new “attack” on the Jews. It is undoubtedly a fact that every war newly opens
the people’s eyes to the power which international Jewish financiers exert with
reference to war—and it would seem that such a fact is worthy of a better
explanation than that of “prejudice.” However, as the Tribune article shows,
and as all the facts confirm, the interest is not confined to the German side;
indeed, it is not even strongest there. It is “the various secret service
organizations of the Entente” that have been most active in the matter.
The second paragraph further distinguishes
between Bolshevism and Jewish imperialism:
“Bolshevism aims at the overthrow of existing society
and the establishment of an international brotherhood of men who work with
their hands as rulers of the world. The second movement aims for the
establishment of a new racial domination of the world. So far as the British,
French and our own department’s inquiry have been able to trace, the moving
spirits in the second scheme are Jewish radicals.”
Other statements in the article are:
“Within the ranks of communism is a group of this
party, but it does not stop there. To its leaders, communism is only an
incident.”
(This will recall the statement of Lord
Eustace Percy, quoted last week from the Canadian Jewish Chronicle—“Not because
the Jew cares for the positive side of radical philosophy, not because he
desires to be a partaker in Gentile nationalism or Gentile democracy, but
because no existing Gentile system of government is anything but distasteful to
him.”)
“They are ready to use the Islamic revolt,
hatred by the central empires for England, Japan’s designs on India, and
commercial rivalry between America and Japan.”
“As any movement of world revolution must
be, this is primarily anti-Anglo-Saxon.”
“The organization of the world
Jewish-radical movement has been perfected in almost every land.”
“The aims of the Jewish-radical party have nothing of
altruism behind them beyond liberation of their own race.”
It will be conceded that these are rather
startling statements. If they were found in a propagandist publication of no
responsibility, the average reader might pass them by as preposterous, so
little does the average reader know of the secret influences which shape his
life and frame his problems. But appearing in a great newspaper, they must
receive a different evaluation.
Nor did the Tribune stop at the news
article. On June 21, 1920, an editorial appeared entitled “World Mischief.” The
editorial is evidently an effort to prevent possible misunderstanding of what
the news article was driving at.
“The Jewish phase of the movement, he
asserts, aims at a new racial domination of the world . . .”
The Tribune also says that while it is
perhaps natural for the Jews of other countries to be engaged in this “world
mischief,” the Jews of England and the United States “are loyal nationalists
and conservative upholders of the national traditions.” It were well if this
were true. Perhaps it is true of tens of thousands of Jews as individuals; it
certainly is not true of those internationalists who pull the strings of all
the governments and who during the last six tragic years have been meddling
with world affairs in a way which must soon be plainly told. The unfortunate
circumstance is that all the American and English Jews must for a time feel a
distress which no one desires them to feel, which everyone would do much to
save them from, but which seems inevitable until the whole story is told and
until the mass of the Jews themselves cut off from their name and support some
who now receive their deepest homage.
It is worth while observing the contrasts
and similarities between the Gentile and Jewish reaction to this alleged
movement to establish a Jewish imperialism over the world. Jewish publicists
first deny it without qualification. It is all false, all a lie, all hatched up
by enemies of the Jews in order to stir up hatred and murder. As the evidence
accumulates, the Jewish tone changes: “Well, suppose it is true,” the publicists
say; “is it any wonder that the poor oppressed Jews, driven to madness through
their sufferings, should dream dreams of overthrowing their enemies and placing
themselves in the seat of authority?”
The Gentile mind, confronted with the
statement, says: “Yes, but they are Russian Jews. Don’t mind them. American
Jews are all right. They would never be taken in by anything like that.” Going
a little deeper into the subject, the Gentile mind is forced to admit the
existence of some kind of a subversive world movement, the power of which has
shaken even this country, and that the moving spirits in it are revolutionary
Jews. And then the tendency from that point forward is either to fall in with
the theory that the movement is really Jewish in its origin, agitation,
execution and purpose, or to set up the theory that it is a “world movement”
undoubtedly, but only incidentally Jewish. The end of both Jewish and Gentile
reaction is an admission that something answering to the movement charged
actually exists.
For example, the Christian Science
Monitor, whose standard as a newspaper no one will question, has this to say in
a lengthy editorial on the subject:
“In spite of this, it would be a tremendous mistake to
conclude that the Jewish peril, given another name and atmosphere, does not
exist. It might, indeed, be renamed, out of one of the grandest of the books of
the Old Testament, ‘the terror by night,’ for it is, essentially, the
Psalmist’s concept of the forces of mental evil at which, consciously or
unconsciously, Professor Nilus is aiming. In other words, that a secret
international political organization exists, working unremittingly by means of
its Bureau of Psychology, though the world which should be awake to it is
entirely asleep to it, is, to the man who can read the signs of the times, a
thing unquestionable.”
The Monitor gives warning against
prejudice and disregard of the laws of evidence which is exceedingly timely and
is, indeed, the desire of anyone who has ever undertaken to deal with this
subject, but too often it is a disregard of facts and not of evidence that
makes the difficulty. It is safe to say that most of the prejudice today is against
the facts, it has not been caused by them.
There are two preconceptions to be guarded
against in making an approach to this question. One is that the Jewish
imperialistic program, if such a thing exists, is of recent origin. Upon the
mere mention of such a program, Gentiles are likely to think that it was
formulated last week, or last year, or within recent time. That need not be the
case at all, and in Jewish matters it is very likely not to be the case. It is
very easy to see how, if the program were to be formulated today, it would be
wholly different from the one which is to be considered. The kind of program
that would be made today indeed exists too, but it is not to be compared in
extent and profundity with that which has existed for a very long time. Perfect
constitutions of invisible governments are not the creations of secret
conventions; they are the accumulated thought and experience of centuries.
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. A large part of the Christian world accepts
that, too, and it may well be true, but in a moral universe it cannot come to
pass by the methods which have been and are being used.
But to mention the ancient lineage of the
idea of the Chosen People is merely to suggest that of all the programs that
may have gathered round it to assist its full historical realization, it is not
strange that there should be one very old one to which the wisest minds of
Israel have contributed their best of mind and heart to insure its success.
That there is such a plan has been the belief of many deep delvers in the
hidden things of the world, and that such a plan has at times had its dress
rehearsals, so to speak, on a limited stage, as if in preparation for its grand
finale on the universal stage, is another belief held by men at whose knowledge
it is impossible to cavil.
So, then, it may be that we are dealing
with something for which present-day Jews, even the more important
internationalists, are not originally responsible. It may have come to them as
part of their ancient Jewish inheritance. Certainly, if it were a mere modern
thing, hastily conceived and thrown together after the modern fashion, it could
be expected to disappear in the same era which saw it born.
Another preconception to be guarded
against is that every Jew one meets has secret knowledge of this program. That
is not the case. With the general idea of the ultimate triumph of Israel every
Jew who has retained contact with his people is familiar, but with the special
plans which for centuries have existed in formulated form for the attainment of
that triumph, the average Jew is no more familiar than anyone else—no more so
than was the average German with the secret plans of the Pan-Germanic party
whose ideas started and guided the recent war. The average Jew enters into the
plans of the secret group just to this extent, except in specially selected
cases: It is perfectly understood that the consummation of the Jewish triumph
will not be distasteful to any Jew, and if the methods to be used toward the
end are a bit violent, every Jew can be depended upon to see in that violence a
very insufficient retribution visited upon the Gentile world for the sufferings
which it has caused the sons of Judah throughout the centuries.
Still, with even these preconceptions
guarded against, there is no escape from the conclusion that if such a program
of Jewish world imperialism exists today, it must exist with the cognizance and
active support of certain individuals, and that these groups of individuals
must have somewhere an official head.
This is, perhaps, the one point at which
more investigators stop than at any other. The idea of a Jewish autocrat is too
strange for the mind which has not been much in contact with the main question.
And yet there is no race which more instinctively supports autocracy than does
the Jewish race, no race which more craves and respects position. It is their
sense of the value of position that explains the main course their activities
take. The Jew is primarily a money-maker for the reason that up to this time
money is the only means he knows by which to gain position. The Jews who have
gained position for any other reason are comparatively few. This is not a
Gentile gibe; it is the position of a famous Anglo-Jewish physician, Dr.
Barnard Von Oven, who wrote: “All other means of distinction are denied him; he
must rise by wealth, or not at all. And if, as he well knows, to insure wealth
will be to insure rank, respect and attention in society, does the blame rest
with him who endeavors to acquire wealth for the distinction which it will
purchase, or with that society which so readily bows down to the shrine of
Mammon?”
The Jew is not averse to kings, only to
the state of things which prevents a Jewish king. The future autocrat of the
world is to be a Jewish king, sitting upon the throne of David, so ancient
prophecies and the documents of the imperialistic program agree.
Is such a king in the world now? If not,
the men who could choose a king are in the world. There has been no king of the
Jews since before the Christian Era, but until about the eleventh century there
were Princes of the Exile, those who represented the headship of the Jews who
were dispersed through the nations. They were and still are called “exilarchs,”
or Princes of the Exile. They were attended by the wise men of Israel, they
held court, they gave the law to their people. They lived abroad wherever their
circumstances or convenience dictated, in Christian or Mohammedan countries.
Whether the office was discontinued with the last publicly known exilarch or
merely disappeared from the surface of history, whether today it is entirely
abandoned or exists in another form, are questions which must wait. That there
are offices of world jurisdiction held by Jews is well known. That there are
world organizations of Jews—organizations, that is, within the very strong
solidarity of the Jewish nation itself—is well known. That there is world unity
on certain Jewish activities, defensive and offensive, is well known. There is
nothing in the condition or thought of the Jews which would render the
existence today of an exilarch distasteful to them; indeed, the thought would
be very comfortable.
The Jewish Encyclopedia remarks:
“Curiously enough, the exilarchs are still mentioned in the Sabbath services of
the Ashkenazim ritual * * * The Jews of the Sephardic ritual have not preserved
this anachronism, nor was it retained in most of the Reform synagogues of the
nineteenth century.”
Is there, then, a Jewish Sanhedrin?—a
governing or counseling body of Jews who take oversight of the affairs of their
people throughout the world?
The Jewish Sanhedrin was a most
interesting institution. Its origin and method of constitution are obscure. It
consisted of 71 members, with the president, and performed the functions of a
political senate. There is nothing to show whence the Sanhedrin derived its
authority. It was not an elective body. It was not democratic. It was not
representative. It was not responsible to the people. In these qualities, it
was typically Jewish. The Sanhedrin was chosen by the prince or priest, not
with the purpose of safeguarding the people’s interest, but to assist the ruler
in the work of administration. It was thus assembled by call, or it was
self-perpetuating, calling its own members. The arrangement seems to have been
that well-known device by which an aristocracy can maintain itself in power
whatever the political construction of the nation may be. The Jewish
Encyclopedia says: “The Sanhedrin, which was entirely aristocratic in
character, probably assumed its own authority, since it was composed of members
of the most influential families of the nobility and priesthood.”
This body was flanked by a similar body,
which governed the religious interests of the nation, the members being drawn
apparently from classes nearer the common people.
The Sanhedrin exercised authority not only
over the Jews of Palestine, but wherever they were scattered throughout the
world. As a senate exercising direct political authority, it ceased with the
downfall of the Jewish State in the year 70, but there are indications of its
continuance as an advisory body down to the fourth century.
In 1806, in order to satisfy the mind of
Napoleon upon some questions which had arisen concerning the Jews, an Assembly
of Notables was called, whose membership consisted of prominent Jews of France.
They, in turn, to bring the sanction of all Jewry to the answers which they
should give Napoleon, convoked the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin assembled in Paris
on February 9, 1807. It followed the prescribed ancient forms; it was comprised
of Jews from all parts of Europe; it was assembled to put the whole authority
of Jewry behind any compact the French Jews may have been able to make with
Napoleon.
In putting forth its decisions, this
Sanhedrin of 1807 declared that it was in all respects like the ancient
Sanhedrin, “a legal assembly vested with power of passing ordinances in order to
promote the welfare of Israel.”
The significance of these facts is this:
Whatever the leaders of the Jews may do today in the way of maintaining the
policy and constitution of Israel, would not constitute a new departure. It
would not signify a new attitude. It would not be evidence of a new plan.
It would be entirely natural, Jewish
solidarity being what it is, that the Sanhedrin should still be continued. The
ancient Sanhedrin appears to have had a group of ten who were somewhat exalted
in importance above the rest; it would be perfectly natural if the leaders of
the Jews were today divided into committees, by countries or by objects.
There are always being held, year by year,
world meetings of the principal Jews of all lands. They come together whenever
called, to the disregard of everything else. Great judges from the high courts
of the various countries, international financiers, Jewish orators of the
“liberal type” who have the ear of the Gentiles, political maneuverers from all
the parties represented in the world, they assemble wherever they will, and the
subjects of their deliberations are made known only to the extent they will. It
is not to be supposed that all of the attendants on these conventions are
members of the inner circle. The list of delegates will show scores of persons
with whom no one would associate Lord Reading and Judge Brandeis. If the modern
Sanhedrin meets, and it would be the most natural thing in the world if it
should, we may be sure it meets within the closed circle of those persons which
the Jewish aristocracy of money, intellect and power approves.
The machinery of a Jewish world government
exists ready-made. The Jew is convinced that he has the best religion, the best
morality, the best method of education, the best social standards, the best
ideal of government. He would not have to go outside the circle of that which
he considers best to get anything which he may need to advance the welfare of
his people, or to execute any program which may have to do with the outside world.
It is the ancient machinery that the
international Jew uses in all those activities which he permits the world to
see in part. There are gatherings of the financial, political and intellectual
chief rulers of the Jews. These gatherings are announced for one or another
thing—sometimes. Sometimes there is a gathering of Jews in a world capital,
with no announced purpose. They all appear in one city, confer and depart.
Whether there is a recognized head to all
of this is yet to be disclosed. There can be little doubt, however, as to the
existence of what may be called a “foreign policy,” that is, a definite point
of view and plan of action with reference to the Gentile world. The Jew feels
that he is in the midst of enemies, but he also feels that he is a member of a
people—“one people.” He must have some policy with regard to the outer world.
He cannot help but consider present conditions, he cannot consider them without
being stirred to speculate upon what the outcome must be, and he cannot
speculate on the outcome without in some manner endeavoring to make it as he
would like it to be.
The invisible government of the Jews, its
attitude toward the Gentile world, its policy with regard to the future, are
not, then, the abnormal things that some would make them appear. Given the
Jewish position, they are of all things most natural. Jewish existence in this
world is not such as woos the Jew into sleepy contentment; it is such as stirs
him into organization against future contingencies and into programs which may
shape those contingencies to the benefit of his race. That there should be a
Sanhedrin of the Jews, a world body of the leading men of all countries; that
there should even be an exilarch, a visible and recognized head of the
Sanhedrin, mystically foreshadowing the autocrat to come; that there should
even be a world program, just as every government has its foreign policy, are
not strange, uncanny suppositions. They grow normally out of the situation
itself.
And it is also natural that not every Jew
should know this. The Sanhedrin always was the aristocracy, and would be today.
When rabbis cry from their pulpits that they know nothing about this thing,
they are doubtless telling the truth. What the international Jew depends upon
is the likelihood of every Jew approving that which brings power and prestige
to his people. At any rate, it is well enough known that however little the
ordinary Jewish leader may have been told about world programs, he regards with
the greatest respect and confidence the very men who must put these programs
through, if these exist at all.
The twenty-fourth Protocol of the Learned
Elders of Zion has this to say:
“Now I will discuss the manner in which the roots of
the house of King David will penetrate to the deepest strata of the earth. This
dynasty, even to this day, has given the power of controlling world affairs to
our wise men, the educational directors of all human thought.”
This would indicate, if reliable, that, as
the Protocol goes on to recite, the Autocrat himself has not appeared, but the
dynasty, or the Davidic line in which he must appear, have entrusted the work
of preparing for him to the Wise Men of Zion. These wise men are represented
not only as preparing those who exercise rulership over Judaism’s affairs, but also
as framing and influencing the world’s thought toward ends which shall be
propitious to these plans. Whatever may be hidden in the program, it is certain
that its execution or the effects of its execution cannot be hidden. Therefore,
it may be possible to find in the outer world the clues which, traced back to
their source, reveal the existence of a program, whose promise for the world,
good or bad, ought to be widely known.
Chapter 10 • An
Introduction to the “Jewish Protocols”
THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT, issue of 24 July
1920
The documents most frequently mentioned by
those who are interested in the theory of Jewish World Power rather than in the
actual operation of that power in the world today, are those 24 documents known
as “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.”
The Protocols have attracted much
attention in Europe, having become the center of an important storm of opinion
in England only recently, but discussion of them in the United States has been
limited. These are the documents concerning which the Department of Justice was
making inquiries more than a year ago, and which were given publication in
London by Eyre and Spottiswoode, the official printers to the British
Government.
Who it was that first entitled these
documents with the name of the “Elders of Zion” is not known. It would be
possible without serious mutilation of the documents to remove all hint of
Jewish authorship, and yet retain all the main points of the most comprehensive
program for world subjugation that has ever come to public knowledge.
Yet it must be said that thus to eliminate
all hint of Jewish authorship would be to bring out a number of contradictions
which do not exist in the Protocols in their present form. The purpose of the
plan revealed in the Protocols is to undermine all authority in order that a
new authority in the form of autocracy may be set up. Such a plan could not
emanate from a ruling class which already possessed authority, although it
might emanate from anarchists. But anarchists do not avow autocracy as the
ultimate condition they seek. The authors might be conceived as a company of
French Subversives such as existed at the time of the French Revolution and had
the infamous Duc d’Orleans as their leader, but this would involve a
contradiction between the fact that those Subversives have passed away, and the
fact that the program announced in these Protocols is being steadily carried
out, not only in France, but throughout Europe and very noticeably in the
United States.
In their present form which bears evidence
of being their original form, there is no contradiction. The allegation of
Jewish authorship seems essential to the consistency of the plan.
If these documents were the forgeries
which Jewish apologists claim them to be, the forgers would probably have taken
pains to make Jewish authorship so clear that their anti-Semitic purpose could
easily have been detected. But only twice is the term “Jew” used in them. After
one has read much further than the average reader usually cares to go into such
matters, one comes upon the plans for the establishment of the World Autocrat,
and only then it is made clear of what lineage he is to be.
But all through the documents there is
left no doubt as to the people against whom the plan is aimed. It is not aimed
against aristocracy as such. It is not aimed against capital as such. It is not
aimed against government as such. Very definite provisions are made for the
enlistment of aristocracy, capital and government for the execution of the
plan. It is aimed against the people of the world who are called “Gentiles.” It
is the frequent mention of “Gentiles” that really decides the purpose of the
documents. Most of the destructive type of “liberal” plans aim at the
enlistment of the people as helpers; this plan aims at the degeneration of the
people in order that they may be reduced to confusion of mind and thus
manipulated. Popular movements of a “liberal” kind are to be encouraged, all
the disruptive philosophies in religion, economics, politics and domestic life
are to be sown and watered, for the purpose of so disintegrating social
solidarity that a definite plan, herein set forth, may be put through without
notice, and the people then molded to it when the fallacy of these philosophies
is shown.
The formula of speech is not, “We Jews
will do this,” but “The Gentiles will be made to think and do these things.”
With the exception of a few instances in the closing Protocols, the only
distinctive racial term used is “Gentiles.”
To illustrate: the first indication of this
kind comes in the first Protocol in this way:
“The great qualities of the people—honesty and
frankness—are essentially vices in politics, because they dethrone more surely
and more certainly than does the strongest enemy. These qualities are
attributes of Gentile rule; we certainly must not be guided by them.”
And again:
“On the ruins of the hereditary aristocracy of the
Gentiles we have set up the aristocracy of our educated class, and over all the
aristocracy of money. We have established the basis of this new aristocracy on
the basis of riches, which we control, and on the science guided by our wise
men.”
Again:
“We will force up wages, which however will be of no
benefit to workers, for we at the same time will cause a rise in the prices of
prime necessities, pretending that this is due to the decline of agriculture
and of cattle raising. We will also artfully and deeply undermine the sources
of production by instilling in the workmen ideas of anarchy and encourage them
in the use of alcohol, at the same time taking measures to drive all the
intellectual forces of the Gentiles from the land.”
(A forger with anti-Semitic malice might
have written this any time within the last five years, but these words were in
print at least 14 years ago according to British evidence, a copy having been
in the British Museum since 1906, and they were circulated in Russia a number
of years prior.)
The above point continues: “That the true situation
shall not be noticed by the Gentiles prematurely we will mask it by a pretended
effort to serve the working classes and promote great economic principles, for
which an active propaganda will be carried on through our economic theories.”
These quotations will illustrate the style
of the Protocols in making reference to the parties involved. It is “we” for
the writers, and “Gentiles” for those who are being written about. This is
brought out very clearly in the Fourteenth Protocol:
“In this divergence between Gentiles and ourselves in
ability to think and reason is to be seen clearly the seal of our election as
the chosen people, as higher human beings, in contrast with the Gentiles who
have merely instinctive and animal minds. They observe, but they do not
foresee, and they invent nothing (except perhaps material things). It is clear
from this that nature herself predestined us to rule and guide the world.”
This, of course, has been the Jewish
method of dividing humanity from the earliest times. The world was only Jew and
Gentile; all that was not Jew was Gentile.
The use of the word Jew in the Protocol
may be illustrated by this passage in the eighth section:
“For the time being, until it will be safe to give
responsible government positions to our brother Jews, we shall entrust them to
people whose past and whose characters are such that there is an abyss between
them and the people.”
This is the practice known as using
“Gentile fronts” which is extensively practiced in the financial world today in
order to cover up the evidences of Jewish control. How much progress has been
made since these words were written is indicated by the occurrence at the San
Francisco convention when the name of Judge Brandeis was proposed for
President. It is reasonably to be expected that the public mind will be made
more and more familiar with the idea of Jewish occupancy—which will be really a
short step from the present degree of influence which the Jews exercise—of the
highest office in the government. There is no function of the American
Presidency in which the Jews have not already secretly assisted in a very
important degree. Actual occupancy of the office is not necessary to enhance
their power, but to promote certain things which parallel very closely the
plans outlined in the Protocols now before us.
Another point which the reader of the Protocols
will notice is that the tone of exhortation is entirely absent from these
documents. They are not propaganda. They are not efforts to stimulate the
ambitions or activity of those to whom they are addressed. They are as cool as
a legal paper and as matter-of-fact as a table of statistics. There is none of
the “Let us rise, my brothers” stuff about them. There is no “Down with the
Gentiles” hysteria. These Protocols, if indeed they were made by Jews and
confided to Jews, or if they do contain certain principles of a Jewish World
Program, were certainly not intended for the firebrands but for the carefully
prepared and tested initiates of the higher groups.
Jewish apologists have asked, “Is it
conceivable that if there were such a world program on the part of the Jews,
they would reduce it to writing and publish it?” But there is no evidence that
these Protocols were ever uttered otherwise than in spoken words by those who
put them forth. The Protocols as we have them are apparently the notes of
lectures which were made by someone who heard them. Some of them are lengthy;
some of them are brief. The assertion which has always been made in connection
with the Protocols since they have become known is that they are the notes of
lectures delivered to Jewish students presumably somewhere in France or
Switzerland. The attempt to make them appear to be of Russian origin is
absolutely forestalled by the point of view, the reference to the times and
certain grammatical indications.
The tone certainly fits the supposition
that they were originally lectures given to students, for their purpose is
clearly not to get a program accepted but to give information concerning a
program which is represented as being already in process of fulfillment. There
is no invitation to join forces or to offer opinions. Indeed it is specifically
announced that neither discussion nor opinions are desired. (“While preaching
liberalism to the Gentiles, we shall hold our own people and our own agents in
unquestioning obedience.” “The scheme of administration must emanate from a
single brain * * * Therefore, we may know the plan of action, but we must not
discuss it, lest we destroy its unique character * * * The inspired work of our
leader therefore must not be thrown before a crowd to be torn to pieces, or
even before a limited group.”)
Moreover, taking the Protocols at their
face value, it is evident that the program outlined in these lecture notes was
not a new one at the time the lectures were given. There is no evidence of its
being of recent arrangement. There is almost the tone of a tradition, or a
religion, in it all, as if it had been handed down from generation to
generation through the medium of specially trusted and initiated men. There is
no note of new discovery or fresh enthusiasm in it, but the certitude and
calmness of facts long known and policies long confirmed by experiment.
This point of the age of the program is
touched upon at least twice in the Protocols themselves. In the First Protocol
this paragraph occurs:
“Already in ancient times we were the first to shout
the words, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ among the people. These words have
been repeated many times by unconscious poll-parrots, flocking from all sides
to this bait, with which they have ruined the prosperity of the world and true
personal freedom * * * The presumably clever and intellectual Gentiles did not
understand the symbolism of the uttered words; did not observe their
contradiction in meaning; did not notice that in nature there is no equality *
* *”
The other reference to the program’s
finality is found in the Thirteenth Protocol:
“Questions of policy, however, are permitted to no one
except those who have originated the policy and have directed it for many
centuries.”
Can this be a reference to a secret Jewish
Sanhedrin, self-perpetuating within a certain Jewish caste from generation to
generation?
Again, it must be said that the
originators and directors here referred to cannot be at present any ruling
caste, for all that the program contemplates is directly opposed to the
interests of such a caste. It cannot refer to any national aristocratic group,
like the Junkers of Germany, for the methods which are proposed are the very
ones which would render powerless such a group. It cannot refer to any but a people
who have no government, who have everything to gain and nothing to lose, and
who can keep themselves intact amid a crumbling world. There is only one group
that answers that description.
Again, a reading of the Protocols makes it
clear that the speaker himself was not seeking for honor. There is a complete
absence of personal ambition throughout the document. All plans and purposes
and expectations are merged in the future of Israel, which future, it would
seem, can only be secured by the subtle breaking down of certain world ideas
held by the Gentiles. The Protocols speak of what has been done, what was being
done at the time these words were given, and what remained to be done. Nothing
like them in completeness of detail, in breadth of plan and in deep grasp of
the hidden springs of human action has ever been known. They are verily
terrible in their mastery of the secrets of life, equally terrible in their
consciousness of that mastery. Truly they would merit the opinion which Jews
have recently cast upon them, that they were the work of an inspired madman,
were it not that what is written in the Protocols in words is also written upon
the life of today in deeds and tendencies.
The criticisms which these Protocols pass
upon the Gentiles for their stupidity are just. It is impossible to disagree
with a single item in the Protocols’ description of Gentile mentality and
veniality. Even the most astute of the Gentile thinkers have been fooled into
receiving as the motions of progress what has only been insinuated into the
common human mind by the most insidious systems of propaganda.
It is true that here and there a thinker
has arisen to say that science so-called was not science at all. It is true
that here and there a thinker has arisen to say that the so-called economic
laws both of conservatives and radicals were not laws at all, but artificial
inventions. It is true that occasionally a keen observer has asserted that the
recent debauch of luxury and extravagance was not due to the natural impulses of
the people at all, but was systematically stimulated, foisted upon them by
design. It is true that a few have discerned that more than half of what passes
for “public opinion” is mere hired applause and booing and has never impressed
the public mind.
But even with these clues here and there,
for the most part disregarded, there has never been enough continuity and
collaboration between those who were awake, to follow all the clues to their
source. The chief explanation of the hold which the Protocols have had on many
of the leading statesmen of the world for several decades is that they explain
whence all these false influences come and what their purpose is. They give a
clue to the modern maze. It is now time for the people to know. And whether the
Protocols are judged as proving anything concerning the Jews or not, they
constitute an education in the way the masses are turned about like sheep by
influences which they do not understand. It is almost certain that once the
principles of the Protocols are known widely and understood by the people, the
criticism which they now rightly make of the Gentile mind will no longer hold
good.
It is the purpose of future articles in
this series to study these documents and to answer out of their contents all
the questions that may arise concerning them.
Before that work is begun, one question
should be answered—“Is there likelihood of the program of the Protocols being
carried through to success?” The program is successful already. In many of its
most important phases it is already a reality. But this need not cause alarm,
for the chief weapon to be used against such a program, both in its completed
and uncompleted parts, is clear publicity. Let the people know. Arousing the
people, alarming the people, appealing to the passions of the people is the
method of the plan outlined in the Protocols. The antidote is merely
enlightening the people.
That is the only purpose of these
articles. Enlightenment dispels prejudice. It is as desirable to dispel the
prejudice of the Jew as of the Gentile. Jewish writers too frequently assume
that the prejudice is all on one side. The Protocols themselves ought to have
the widest circulation among the Jewish people, in order that they may check
those things which are bringing suspicion upon their name.
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