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A SHORT HISTORY OF THE JEWS
Forward
The Jewish question is the most important question in the world to-day. Every man should understand its nature, for it is the root of many other problems.
All economic literature, for example, which ignores the Jewishness of international finance and the Jewishness of Socialism and Communism, is a mere beating of the air.
Throughout all history the presence of any large number of Jews in a European country has let to strife and friction. Britain has escaped having any very acute Jewish question as the number of Jews in the country has been small.
There is now danger that the repressive measures against Jews in Germany and Austria may lead to a great flood of Jewish immigration into Britain and the British Dominions.
In many quarters it is held that the only way to solve this difficult question is to provide the Jewish nation with a home of its own big enough t accommodate it (which Palestine is not); and that merely to shift Jews from one European country to another gets nowhere. Madagascar has been suggested as most suited for a Jewish national home.
An endeavour is made in the following pages to set out certain material facts as succinctly as possible, and give a bird’s-eye view of this great problem. The object is to help the reader to form an opinion whether Jewish immigration into British countries is desirable.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE JEWS
By A.N. Field
Author of “The Truth About the Slump” “All These Things” &c.
Some Ancient History
Nothing is more erroneous than the common idea that Jewish dispersion was the result of Roman brutality; that friction between Jew and non-Jew had its origin in Christian bigotry; and that the Jews were driven to their trade of usury by being banned from other occupations.
The word ‘sojourner’ always applied with peculiar force to the people of Israel,” write the Rev. Drs. Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake in “The Beginnings of Christianity” (Macmillan, 1920). The patriarchs were wanders: their descendants endured not one but many captivities. In the sixth century B.C. there was a voluntary migration of Jews into Egypt: Jews were numerous in the Persian Empire. The Jews followed in the trail of the conquest of Alexander the Great, which brought them into contact with the West, and spread them far and wide. The Sybilline Oracles (second century, B.C.), declare “every land and every sea is full of them.” Josephus says, “There is no people on earth that has not portion of us.”
Professor S. Angus in “The Environment of Early Christianity”(Duckworth, 1914), estimates their number in the Roman Empire as about eight millions and adds: “The hostility of the Jew was the greatest menace to the peace of the Empire…The Jew never amalgamated with other races so as to lose his religion or racial consciousness. He met the scorn and hate of the world with the pride of a superior people. Wherever the Jew emigrated he sought out his brethren and formed a community…The terrible uprisings under Vespasian, Trajan, and Hadrian bear ample testimony to their power to shake the Empire.”
The same writer point out that Jewish wealth was at this time considerable. Sometimes it took a thousand Jews to carry the annual contributions of the Jews of Rome to the treasure in the temple at Jerusalem. Jewish bank-books of the time of Xerxes (about 470 B.C.) show them as bankers to their Persian conquerors. The corn export f Egypt was largely in their hands, as was the trade of Mesopotamia.
Outbursts against the Jews occurred in almost all the countries in which they settled before the Christian era. “Many Roman writers,” states Angus. : speak disparagingly of the Jews. Horace writes in mockery of their circumcision and the Sabbaths; Seneca calls them ‘a most accursed race’; Tacitus accuses them of hatred to all men, of immorality, of worshipping an ass…Cicero , Quintilian, Juvenal and Martial pour scorn upon them. The fact that Roman writers are so much more anti-Semitic than Greek bears testimony to the increased prominence of the Jew.”
The fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 merely completed a dispersion that had begun centuries before. At the time of the decline of the Roman Empire, from the latter half of the fourth century and through the fifth century of the present era, Dean Milman’s “History of the Jews” (4th edition, 1866) tells us the Jew were then settled in Belgium, along the course of the Rhine an in such parts of Germany as were civilized, and in Gaul. Italy and Spain. Council after Council denounced their traffic in slaves in those disturbed times, and Milman says the slave traffic in Europe after the fall of Rome was almost entirely conducted by Jews.
Jewish popularity soon evaporated in Western Europe. They were expelled from country after country. But no sooner did an expulsion take place than the Jews in many cases were back negotiating for permission to return to the scene of their persecutions, and the monarchs were willing to readmit them. Hilaire Belloc in his book “The Jews” says of these happenings:
“It has been a series of cycles invariably following the same steps. The Jew comes to an alien society at first in small numbers. He thrives. His presence is not resented. He is rather treated as a friend. Whether from mere contrasts in type—what I have called ‘friction’—or from some apparent divergence between his objects and those of his hosts, or through his increasing numbers, he creates (or discovers) a growing animosity. He resents it. He opposes his hosts. They call themselves masters in their own house. The Jew resists their claim. It comes to violence. It is always the same miserable sequence.”
II
In Modern Times
The only European country from which the Jews were banished for any long period was England. There is no positive record of Jews in Britain prior to the Norman Conquest. The Norman Kings brought them over to aid in finance. They were hated by the people: their presence resulted in perpetual out breaks against them. Finally, Edward I banished them from the realm in 1290. That banishment continued until the year 1655. It is a historically interesting fact that in the three and a half centuries in which Jewish influences were absent from Britain nearly all our characteristically British institutions were developed, the foundations of British sea-power and commerce were laid, and English literature reached a very high point.
Cromwell desired to re-admit the Jews, but no Council he called would pronounce in favour of any such step. Cromwell thereupon allowed the Jews to return to Britain surreptitiously. The edict of banishment ahs never been repealed to this day. In an article in the “Quarterly Review” of October 1934, Mr. William Harbutt Dawson records that at the Councils called by Cromwell the merchants were against admitting the Jews, “insisting vehemently “ that to do so would “enrich foreigners and impoverish the natives of the land.” The clergy were equally opposed: “The most did fear that if they should come many would be seduced and cheated by them, and little good would be unto them,: and that they would not hesitate “to blaspheme Christ and the Christian religion, to the pain and distress of all Godly people.”
Prominent in stating the case against the Jews was John Dury, a Presbyterian clergyman who had acted as chaplain to British trading colonies in Northern Europe. In a pamphlet he said of the Jews, “They have ways beyond all other men to undermine a State and to insinuate into those that are in office, and prejudice the trade of others” He warned his countrymen against the Jews’ “covetous practices and biting usury” and urged that if they were admitted they should be required to live by themselves, and that offences against the Christian religion and blasphemy against the person of Christ should be punished by death.
All modern revolutions have resulted in great increases of Jewish power. The execution of Charles I was followed by the admission of the Jews to Britain. The Revolution of 1688 resulted in a great influx of Jews from Amsterdam with William of Orange. Banking, a business of Jewish origin, then grew up by the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, and the finances of the State were thereafter conducted on a basis of Jewish usury by the founding of the National Debt. In the reign of Queen Anne it was discovered that a Jewish army contractor, Sir Solomon Medina, had been bribing the great Duke of Marlborough to the tune of £6000 to £7000 a year over a period of ten or eleven years A Jew named Sampson Gideon (Sampson de Rehuel Abudiente) was Walpole’s financial adviser through a period of notorious corruption.
When the American Revolution broke out the Jewish family of Salvador are stated in Hyamson’s “History of the Jews in England” (Methuen, 1928) to have been the leading financiers of London; and the same historian relates that Francis Salvador of this family emigrated to Georgia in 1773 and became a leader on the revolutionary side. The American Revolution resulted in the Jews getting full civic rights in the United States from the start, the first country on earth to give these to them. According to the diaries of Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, one of the framers of the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin protested very strongly against admitting the Jews. Franklin is reported as saying at the Constitution convention:*
“In whatever country Jews have settled in any great numbers, they have lowered its moral tone, depreciated its commercial integrity; have segregated themselves and not been assimilated; have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian religion upon which that nation is founded by objecting to its restrictions: have built up a state within a state, and when opposed, have tried to strangle that country to death financially, as in the case of Spain and Portugal… If you do not exclude them from the United States in this Constitution, in less than 200 years they will have swarmed in such great numbers that they will dominate, for which we Americans have shed our blood, given our lives and our substances, and jeopardized our liberty. If you do not exclude them, in less than 200 years our descendants will be working in the fields to furnish them substance, while they will be in the counting houses rubbing their hands. I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews for all time, your children will curse you in your graves. Jews, gentlemen, are Asiatics, let them be born where they will, or how many generations they are away from Asia, they will never be otherwise.”
The French Revolution resulted in the emancipation of the Jews in France: and the revolution of 1848 did the same for them in Germany. Finally, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 made them the masters of Russia.
III
Finance and Revolution
In Britain, France, and the United States today Jews exercise an influence in politics wholly disproportionate to their numbers in the population of these countries. Particulars showing the Jewishness of these Governments were given in the No. 3 issue of the “Examiner.”
Ownership of the Bank of England being secret it cannot be positively described as Jewish; but Jewish international finance is prominently represented on its directorate. The deflation program, which plunged British industry into difficulty after the war, and threw millions of workers into the streets, was formulated in 1918 by a committee presided over by the then Governor of the Bank, who was partner in a Jewish banking house. Furthermore, the present Governor of the Bank of England has been busy establishing Reserve Banks throughout the world modeled on the Jew-created U.S. Federal Reserve system.
The United States Federal Reserve system was created at the end of 1913 as the result of prolonged agitation by Paul Warburg Jacob H. Schiff, two German-born Jews. The people of America were told that it was designed to prevent financial crises. Actually, its operation has been accompanied by greater financial crises than were ever before known in the history of the world. Te minutes of a secret Federal Reserve conference in Washington in May 1920, ordering a curtailment of credit and forcing sown of prices, were in after years published in United States Government documents. Almost simultaneously with this conference, the Bank of England commenced deflation in Britain. Bankruptcy and unemployment followed in both countries and throughout a great part of the world. This was what smashed New Zealand’s soldier settlers. It has been alleged by competent observers that the world depression of 1929-34 was also do to deliberate action by the U.S. Federal Reserve. The world slump was precipitated by an enormous withdrawal of funds from the American short term loan market in the last week of October, 1929. Jewish international finance can create slumps at will and throw millions on the streets.
“The Federal Reserve Act is the work of Mr. Warburg more than any other man,” said Professor E.R.A. Seligman in a foreword to a book written about the Federal Reserve by Mr. Warburg, shortly before his death in 1932. The Federal Reserve followed on a campaign by President Wilson and the Democrats to put the U.S. Money Trust in its place. A Congressional Committee had reported in 1912 that a Money Trust existed, and was dominated by four firms, one of which was the Jewish international bank of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, in which Messrs. Schiff, Paul and Felix Warburg, and Otto H. Kahn were partners.
The Jewish Encyclopedia describes the Schiff family as the oldest contemporary Jewish family of which there is a record. “The much beloved leader of the Jews”. Is how Mr. Jacob H. Schiff was described in “All in a Lifetime” (1923), the memoirs of Mr. Henry Morgenthau, Senior, another eminent Jewish financier, a former U.S. Ambassador, and father of the present Secretary of the Treasury in President Roosevelt’s Administration. Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British Ambassador to the United States during the war to February, 1918, called Mr. Schiff “the arch Jew”, and said that he and Mr. Warburg dominated the Wilson Administration financially, and were toiling to compass the destruction of Britain (“The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice,” 1929).
Other members of the Warburg family conducted the banking house of M. Warburg and Company, Hamburg, controlling German shipping and the Hamburg-America line in particular. The memoirs of Prince Max of Baden, last German Imperial Chancellor, show that Herr Max Warburg, head of this bank, helped to draft the proclamation setting up the German Republic in 1918. Dr. Carl Melchoir, another partner in the bank, was later active in establishing the Bank for International Settlements, the world central bank of all the reserve banks.
Connected with the Warburgs was another Jew, Albert Ballin, head of the Hamburg-America line and closest adviser of the Kaiser. The “Dictionary of National Biography” records that Sir Ernest Cassel, Jewish financier, close friend of King Edward VII and founder of the Vickers armament combine, was a lifelong friend of Mr. Schiff, and former partner with him in forming a railway combine in the United States. This group of international financiers thus had close contact and great influence with the Governments of Britain, France and Germany.
The Jewish Encyclopedia states that Mr. Schiff financed Japan in her war against Russia in 1904-5, and in Congress on June 10, 1932, the late Mr. Louis T. McFadden, long Republican chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee, asserted that the same financial interests had financed the Russian revolutionary outbreak in 1905. At a meeting reported in the “New York Times” of March 24, 1917, Mr. George Kennan related that Mr. Schiff had heavily financed revolutionary propaganda amongst the 50,000 Russian prisoners of war in Japan at this time, many of them being turned into ardent revolutionaries.
This New York meeting was held in celebration of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, and at it a message was read from Mr. Schiff expressing his pleasure at the achievement of “what we had hoped and strived for these long years.” In his memoirs “Through Thirty Years” (1924), Mr. H. Wickham Steed, editor of the London “Times” through the war, described Messrs, Schiff and Warburg, as “akin to, if not identical with” the men who shipped Trotsky and a cargo of fellow desperadoes to Russia in 1917.
A report made by the French High Commissioner in the United States early in 1919 from material supplied the U.S. Secret Service, stated that Kuhn Loeb and Coy, and other Jewish bankers had fomented and financed the Bolshevik revolution, and that “the Bolshevik movement is a certain measure the expression of a general Jewish movement.” The full text of this document has been published in many quarters.
Just before the Revolution it was alleged in a stormy debate in the Russian Duma that M. Protopopoff, head of the last Tsarist Government had been bribed by one of the Warburgs at Stockholm. The memoirs of Sir George Buchanan, British Ambassador to Russia to 1918, state that Rasputin, the Charlatan monk called in to attend the sickly Tsarevitch, and whose ascendancy over the Empress brought the Russian Royal Family into disrepute, was “largely financed by certain Jewish bankers.”
The “War Memoirs” of Mr. Lloyd George contain a report from the British observer with the Russian army, made in the summer of 1915, and stating that the total failure of the Vickers firm to supply munitions as contracted was mainly responsible for the 3,800,000 casualties out of the 7,000,000 men put into the line; had resulted in large units being sent under fire unequipped with rifles; and was creating a revolutionary situation. As stated, Vickers was founded and financed by Sir Ernest Cassel, friend and associate of Mr. Schiff, and another Jew, Sir Basil Zaharoff, was prominent in it through the war. Documents seized from the Bolsheviks by the Kerensky Government and later published in the Sisson Report in the United States named the Warburg’s Bank as providing large funds for munitions for Trotsky.
After the war numerous statements were made by Mr. McFadden, Mr. James W. Gerard (former U.S. Ambassador to Germany), and others, that Bolshevism was being financed by Britain and America lending money to Germany, which money was immediately re-lent to Russia. International finance found the money for the Five Year Plan. The London “Daily Express” of January 16, 1932, for instance, said that international financiers in the City of London had borrowed £ 50,000,000 in France and at 2 percent, let it to Germany at 8 percent, and Germany had lent it to Russia at 15 percent. More recent Britain gave Russia a great Government-guaranteed trade credit, which Russia did not need for trade purposes as she was selling more in Britain than she bought there. International finance and international revolution tie up from start to finish.
IV
The Gospel of Slaughter
The Jewishness of Bolshevism was widely noted at the start. The Netherlands Minister in Petrograd in a dispatch of September 6, 1918, warned the British Government, for whom he was acting, that Bolshevism “is organized and worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends, the existing order of things.” Americans in Petrograd at the time of the revolution testified before a Senate Committee in 1919 as to its Jewishness. One witness said that of 388 Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd all but 17 were Jews, and 265 of these Jews came from New York, Mr., Victor E. Marsden later published a list of the early Bolshevik Commissars, showing 454 out of 545 as Jews.
Pages of testimony to the continuance of this state of things could be assembled. As recently noted, M. Theodor Butenko, the Soviet diplomat who fled from Bucharest to Italy was saying in the “Giornale d’ Italia” of February 17 last that: "In place of the former capitalists a new ‘bourgeoisie’ has been formed, composed of 100% Jews,” and that these Jews controlled all the big industries, railways and trading, while the Russian people themselves existed “in the most awful servitude which human history has ever seen and registered.”
Once the Jewishness of the Bolshevism is understood its otherwise puzzling features become understandable. Hatred of Christianity, for instance, is not a Russian characteristic: it is a Jewish characteristic. Russians have nothing to gain by pulling in their belts and living in poverty while huge sums are being expended by their government in propagating Communism throughout the world and urging workers everywhere to rise and slaughter their racial leaders and destroy their racial institutions. This is purely a Jewish interest. Russians rose in this way, and the rising enabled Jews to rule their country. If other workers will do it, Jews can then rule the world.
This slaughter was part and parcel of Socialism from the start. Socialism and Communism are just variations on the same tune: though many Socialists quite fail to realize this. “That which is generally termed Socialism,” said Lenin in his book “The State and Revolution”, “is termed by Marx the firs or lower phase of Communist society.” Constitutional Socialism’s task is to bankrupt the existing order and so to pave the way for later violent overthrow. Such is the view of the high priests of the whole movement.
According to the London “Times” of September 1, 1922, Bolshevik official gave 1,766,118 persons as the total executed by the Cheka up to February of that year. This was only a portion of the slaughter. The late Lord Sydenham in the House of Lords in 1923 put the sum total, including those who died of starvation and disease, as about 30 million up to that early date. “This is the most horrible crime in all history,” he said.
Fifteen more years of murder and terrorism have gone by since then. Estimates of the loss of life in the famine in the Ukraine in 1932-33 range from three to seven million. The Soviet officials took away the foodstuff the peasants required to live o during the winter. Mr. W. H. Chamberlin, “Christian Science Monitor” correspondent in Russia, called it “organized famine” in his book “Russia’s Iron Age” (1935), as did Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge former British Communist in his “Winter in Moscow” (1934). Mr. Eugene Lyons, American United Press correspondent, in his “Assignment in Utopia” (1938), similarly described the famine as easily preventable, and like Mr. Chamberlin tells how the most rigid censorship concealed its existence from the outside world until all was over.
Bloodshed has been an integral part of Marxian Socialism from the beginning. A recent American writer* prints extracts from early writing on this point by Karl Marx—real name Mordecai, a descendant of a line o Jewish rabbis. In the last issue of his paper, “Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung” of May 19, 1849, Marx said: “We are ruthless and want no consideration from you (the bourgeoisie). When our turn comes revolutionary terrorism will not be sugar-coated…There is but one way of….concentration the death agony of the old society as well as the bloody labour of the new world’s birth—revolutionary Terror.” The same writer notes Marx at it the next year, laying id down that “so far from stopping so-called excesses…one must not only tolerate these examples, but lead and conduct them.”
As noted on a previous occasion, former Detective Inspector Herbert T. Finch of Scotland Yard testifies in his book “Traitors Within” (1933) to having heard Lenin declaim at a secret meeting in London thirty years before: “It must be bloodshed on a colossal scale. We must revolt, and when we revolt there shall be no mercy…In Russia first, and then from one side of Europe to the other…They must perish, down to the man who keeps a stall in the street!”
Although the Jewishness of Lenin is not definitely established, his appearance was Jewish; he took part in debates in a Jewish students’ club in his youth; his wife was a Jewess; and he spoke Yiddish in the family circle.
Detailed accounts of the Bolshevik massacres in Russia show them as conducted in many cases with sadistic cruelty. Prominent in directing them were many Jews, including Bela Kun, who also ran the short-lived and bloody Communist revolution in Hungary in 1919. Bela Kun and other Jews from Moscow have also taken part in directing the Spanish revolution. This Moscow-promoted revolution has been run on similar lines, with wholesale massacres of priests and nuns, many being first mutilated and then burned alive after being soaked in petrol. Estimates of the numbers massacred by the Reds in Spain range from 150,000 to 300,000. Innumerable witnesses of all kinds have testified to the fiendish brutality of many of the killings.
Fear is the basis of Communistic rule. Even disgusted Jewish Commissars testify to this. A former Soviet Commissar for Justice named Steinberg thus described Bolshevik methods in Russia in the “New York Times” of February 23, 1930:
“All the psycho logic elements of a regime of force and inequality manifest themselves in the atmosphere engendered by terror. On the one side we have intoxication with power and a realization that anything done by him who wields power will go unpunished, and on the other, fear, depression, silent hatred, and sycophancy; the rise of two classes, masters and slaves. In turn, the relations among the suspects themselves become perverted. In the struggle to win the favour of the authorities, treachery assumes appalling dimensions. All become slaves with respect to the government, wolves with respect to one another,”
“Everyone underneath the Communists in Russia is so low as to be practically not human,” said Morris Gordin, son of a rabbi and former head of the Soviet Press Bureau from about 1921 to 1924, in an address in Detroit on January 16, 1931. “Sovietism,” he declared, “is dragging mankind into the darkness of the jungle, into the mouth of chaos.”
Summing up his impressions of Soviet Russia after about ten years there as an American press correspondent Mr. Eugene Lyons said in his recent book “Assignment in Utopia”: “Above all, I had the sense of leaving behind me a nation trapped.” That is what has happened. A nation of 160,000,000 has been trapped by Jews. The trapping was effected by making the Russians think that something quite different was taking place. Europe is to-day being trapped into another war by similar hidden agencies stirring Gentile nation against Gentile nation, to pave the way to domination of the world, just as the last war paved the way to domination of Russia.
V
The Religious Background
The Jewish question runs much deeper than the matter of France and Revolution. Many subsidiary movements working with disintegrating effect upon religion, patriotism, and the family are largely Jewish in their personnel and inspiration. Jewish combines and monopolies exist in many directions and the entire machinery of publicity in all its forms--the press, book publishing, the cinema, radio control, etc. are subject to pronounced Jewish influences. Without being aware of it, millions of people daily think the thoughts that Jewish propagandist wish them to think.
Jewish power has grown at a great pace since the outbreak of war in 1914, an event from which the Jews gained enormously. At the same time this growth of Jewish power has been accompanied by an increasing instability in every direction. Jewish aims and objects thus deserve the closet scrutiny.
The first thing to consider is the nature of the Jewish religion. An article in the Jewish Encyclopedia on “Liberal Judaism” tells us that Judaism is not based upon a creed like Christianity, “but is one inseparable connection with the Jewish nation as the depository and guardian of the truth held by it for mankind.”
We further learn that Judaism insists on “its pure monotheistic doctrine.” At the same time “Satan has his place among the angels of heaven…and in the end can work only for good.” Moreover, “the Midrash boldly proclaim that the world was (or is) a process of selection and evolution.” Judaism “refutes the idea of an inherent impurity in the flesh,” and rejects the doctrine of original sin. Nor does it regard the body as prison-house of the soul.
Furthermore, “Judaism’s scope lies not in the world beyond…its sole aim and purpose is to render the world that now is a divine kingdom of truth and righteousness.” The Messianic Age to which Judaism looks forward is regarded as “the one when the heathen (non-Jewish) world will join Judah.”
“Judaism,” it is laid down, “points forward to a state of human perfection and bliss to be brought about by the complete enfoldment of the divine in man—and herein lies its great distinction also from Christianity.” Its ultimate end is proclaimed to be “to unite all mankind into one bond.”
Such is one interpretation of the Jewish religion as given by Jews in a great Jewish work of reference. A Gentile who wishes to make first-hand acquaintance with the subject mater, however, will not find it an easy task. The Old Testament is only part of the Jewish religion, and orthodox Jewish teaching is that it is the less important part. To the Jews the five Books of Moses are the Torah, or written law. It is taught, however, that God also gave to Moses the oral law, and that this oral law is of greater validity than the written law. This was the view of the Pharisees, but writers on the subject state that it was rejected by the Sadducees. Finally, after the fall of Jerusalem the Pharisees became supreme and the oral law was at last set down in writing in the Talmud.
In addition to the Talmud, the holy books of the Jews include the Kabbalah, a work which teaches that the words and letters of the Books of Moses have secret meanings. The Kabbalah also treats of necromancy. It is said to have been reduced to writing by Simeon ben Jochai (or Yachai), who lived at the time of the destruction of the second temple.
The Talmud is described as consisting of twelve folio volumes. No complete translations exist in English so far as the writer knows. Eight volumes of an English translation—stated to be one quarter of the whole—were published in 1935 at a price of nine guineas. Something however, appeared to be lacking in this translation, for the London “Jewish students desirous of understanding the spirit of the great work will have to go to the original.”
From all accounts the Talmud is a labyrinth devoid of orderly arrangement. It consists of two parts, the Mischna and the Gemara. The Mischna is a commentary on the Books of Moses (or Torah) written by different Rabbis, and the Gemara is a commentary on the Mischna written by a later lot of Rabbis. There are two Talmud’s, the Palestinian or Jerusalem Talmud, completed about A.D. 350; and the Babylonian Talmud, completed about A.D. 500. The Mischna is the same in both, but the Gemara is different. The Babylonian Talmud is the most important, and is the one usually quoted unless the other is specified.
In the latter half of the sixteenth century the Rabbi Joseph Caro wrote the Schulchan Aruch (or “prepared table”) embodying the more important passages in the Talmud.
A little book “The Talmud” (Williams and Norgate, 1932) tells how the Talmud was written. The author is Mr. Dudley Wright, editor of various Masonic publications and a staunch admirer of the Jews. Mr. H.M. J. Loewe, Reader in Rabbinic’s at Cambridge University, and he a Jew, highly commends this book, and especially the completeness of its concluding chapter dealing with “The Burnings of the Talmud.”
From this particular chapter one learns that in bygone days Popes and Kings, after investigation by commissions and tribunals, repeatedly ordered the seizing and burning of all copies of the Talmud they could lay hands on. The inquires into the contents of the Talmud appears to have been of a most searching nature in many cases. One investigation in France, occupied forty examiners from August, 1247, to May, 1248, and resulted in a report that the Talmud was “full of errors and horrible blasphemies and by no means to be tolerated.” Another begun in Spain in 1412 lasted over eighteen months with sixty-eight sessions and with evidence in defense by about twenty of the leading Jews.
Mr. Wright tells us that the condemnation of Talmudic teaching began among the Jews themselves away back in the Second century B.C. long before the Talmud has been reduced to writing. The Roman Emperors Hadrian Antoninus Pius and Justinian also endeavoured to suppress Talmudic teaching.
VI
What Converts Have Said
It is a very curious thing that in Christian days many of the burnings of the Talmud followed on appeals by Jews converted to Christianity. The Talmud, the converts urged, should be destroyed as evil. Mr. Wright in his book takes the view that these converted Jews were one and all inspired by bad motives. He writes of “the machinations of apostates from the Jewish faith, who seemed with their change of religion to have lost all sense of honesty and truthfulness”; refers to the converts as “renegades” actuated by “revenge and self-seeking”; and places the adjective “converted” in quotation marks indicating doubt of the genuiness of their Christianity. The “converts”, we are told, “repeated the old slanderous charges against the Jews and manufactured fresh accusations.” The reader however has to take the author’s word for it that the charges were “slanderous “and the accusations “manufactured”.
The first of these denunciatory converts was a Jew of France named Donin, who in 1238 felt so strongly on the matter that he journeyed to Rome, and obtained an audience of the Pope in which he denounced the Talmud in a document of thirty-five articles. Mr. Wright tells us that Donin affirmed that the Talmud “distorted the words of the Bible;… that it was filled with abuse against Jesus and the Virgin; that it taught that is was meritorious to kill the best men among the Christians; that it was lawful to deceive a Christian without any scruple; and that it was permitted to a Jew to break a promise made on oath.”
In 1264 appeared Pablo Christiani (Paul Christian of Montpelier) another converted Jew, and he again denounced the Talmud, “reviving the well-worn theme that it contained passages of hostile import directed against Jesus and Mary.”
In 1412 Joseph Halorqui, known after his conversion to Christianity as Geronimo de Santa Fe, accused the Talmud “of containing all kinds of abominations, immoralities, and heresies,” and asserted that it “countenanced the beating of parents, blasphemy, and the practice of idolatry, also the breaking of oaths, provided that on the preceding Day of Atonement the precaution had been taken to declare them invalid.”
In 1507 appeared a pamphlet by Joseph (afterwards baptized John) Pfefferkorn, “a Moravian Jewish convert to Christianity, a butcher by trade, who, it is said, embraced the Christian religion on his release from prison, whither he had been committed for burglary, a fact which has been established by documentary evidence.” Beyond telling us that Pfefferkorn urged that Jewish usury should be checked, Mr. Wright remarks: “A notorious persecutor of the Talmud in the seventeenth century was one, John Andreas Eisenmenger, who devoted almost the whole of his life to the attempt to destroy the Talmud.” Eisenmenger, however does not appear to have been a Jew. The last consignment to the flames seems to have been in Poland in 1757 when a thousand copies of the Talmud were publicly burned by the hangman.
Condemnations of the Talmud have bee made by numerous later converts from Judaism. The former Rabbi Drach, for example, is quoted by various authors as saying in a book written by him and published in France in 1844 that the Talmud contains “a great number of dreamings, ridiculous exaggerations, very revolting indecencies, and above all horrible blasphemies against everything which the Christian religion holds most sacred and most dear.”
Whatever the motive inspiring these converts to Christianity, one notes many writers on the question quoting from the London “Jewish World” of March 15, 1923, the statement, “Fundamentally, Judaism is anti-Christian”; and from the New York Yiddish daily “Morning Freheit” of January 10, 1937, editorial pronounced that, Jewish religion, be it remembered, is opposed to Christianity in general, to the Catholic Church in particular.”
VII
Some Non-Jewish Views
Although Mr. Wright in his book attributes hostility to the Talmud entirely to “a general hatred of the Jew, which has existed through the ages on the part of certain fanatical Christians”, his Jewish commentator is not so positive on the point. In his foreword to the Wright book Mr. Loewe tacitly admits that there are passages in the Talmud that may not be palatable to non-Jews. He says:
“People do not realize that the Talmud is a Hansard and that you can cite from it contrary opinions on the subjects of which it treats. People talk about “The attitude of the Talmud towards non-Jews.’ Translate the situation as follows: for Talmud’ read ‘Parliament’ and for non-Jew read ‘alien’. What historian would dip into Hansard and produce the speech on an individual member as evidence of what ‘Parliament says’?”
Mr. Loewe goes on to say that a Rabbi who lived in a community where Jews were well treated may be found writing cordially about non-Jews; but one who lived under other conditions may write otherwise. The question must always be asked with respect to any extract, “Who said it?” “When did he say?” and “Where did he live?”
A standard work on Jewish history is Dean Milman’s “History of the Jews”, first published in 1830, and friendly in its tone towards the Jewish people. In the course of this Milman refers to the researches of John Andreas Eisenmenger, professor of Oriental languages at Heidelberg University, who in 1700 produced a collection of extracts from the Talmud. Of this we are told:
“Eisenmenger undertook the hateful task of disclosing all the mysteries of Rabbinical learning…It is, according to Eisenmenger, a profound and true statement of the frightful manner in which the obdurate Jews curse and scoff at the Holy Trinity, God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, mock at the Holy Mother of Christ, throughout insult the New Testament, the Apostles and Evangelists, the whole religion of Christ. Odious as was the spirit intention of Eisenmenger, his reading was vast, his industry indefatigable (two enormously thick quarto volumes are crowed with citations in the original, and with translations). I have never heard his accuracy seriously impeached.”
Milman goes on to say that the defect of Eisenmenger book is that “passage from the Talmud are heaped together indiscriminately with passages from the modern writings, writings of times when cruel persecution as well as contempt, had for centuries goaded the miserable Jews to the only vengeance in which, besides overreaching in trade, they could indulge, writings in their own secret unintelligible language…”
A more recent writer, Professor Werner Sombart, of Breslau University, in his great book “The Jews and Modern Capitalism” (English translation, Fisher Unwin, 1913) discusses the same point. This book is generally eulogistic of the Jews, and prominent Jewish writer, Mr. Israel Cohen, in his “Jewish Life in Modern Times: (1929) refers to it as “a very notable work.” Sombart says of the Talmud:
“It is a harder task to determine to what extent this or that doctrine still finds acceptance. Does, for example, the Talmudic adage, ‘Kill even the best of the Gentiles,’ still hold good? Do the other terrible aphorisms ferreted out in Jewish religious literature by Pfefferkorn, Eisenmenger, Roehling, Dr. Justus, and they rest of that fraternity, still fond credence, or are they as the Rabbis of to-day indignantly protest, entirely obsolete? It is obvious, of course, that the single doctrines were differently expressed in different ages, and if the whole literature, but more especially the Talmud…There is nothing surprising in this when it is remembered that to a great extent the Talmud in nothing but a collection of controversies of the different Rabbinical scholars”.
In another passage Sombart Says: “All nations were struck by their hatred of others…even in the earliest collection of laws interest was allowed to be taken from ‘strangers’…Apart from this particular question, the stranger was accorded no special consideration in the Jewish legal code. Duties towards him were never as binding as towards your ‘neighbour’ towards your fellow Jew. Only ignorance or a desire to distort the facts will assert the contrary…With Jews he will scrupulously see to it that he has just weights and just measure; but as for his dealings with non-Jews his conscience will be at ease even though he had an unfair advantage. It is not to be denied that in some cases honesty towards non-Jews was inculcated. But to think that this should have been necessary!”
A much more critical view of the Talmud is taken in “The Riddle of the Jews’ Success” (Hammer Verlag, Leipzig, 1927), a book written under the pen-name of F.Roderich-Stoltheim by the late Theodor Fritsch. Herr Fritsch, who died in September 1933, aged eighty, spent a great part of his long life writing in criticism of the Jews. The book in question is a running commentary on Professor Werner Sombart’s book, which the author regards as taking an unwarrantably rosy view of Jewish activities. He says of the Talmud:
“All that is correct is, that in the Talmud with its commentaries, the most divergent opinions of the Rabbis find utterance, and that the doctrines and expositions contained therein, frequently contradict one another; that, however, is only equivalent to saying that it is open to every faithful Jew to accept as authentic whatever doctrine and exposition may best suit his purpose for the time being. Thus, when a passage reads: “You must not lie to, deceive, or rob the Goy (non-Jew),” and another Rabbi says” “Under circumstances you may do so,” more latitude is allowed to the conscience of the Jew who believes in his Talmud. He can act in ether this way, or in that, and will still fond himself in agreement with the law, will still remain a pious and orthodox Jew…
“The morality of the Talmud is like a conjurer’s box with a false bottom, from which the moral and the immoral can be produced according to wish…And one is bound to admit this is a very empty kind of morality. Sombart adds: ‘Since everything, in this case is divine revelation, one passage is just as valuable as another.’ Quite correct! Here we have the morality with a double bottom…”
VII
The Disputed Passages
The reader has now heard a considerable amount about the Talmud, and will naturally desire knowledge of the passages over which so much controversy has raged. In considering them it is necessary to bear in mind that they stand torn from their context, that the Talmud is an immense work of twelve great volumes, and that it is impossible for the ordinary Englishman to form an independent opinion of its contents until and exact and impartial translation of the work is available.
On the other hand, there remains the highly significant fact that in passages such as are cited below Jewish international finance can find full approval for its proceedings in stripping Gentiles of their property; and Jewish revolutionaries can find in them similar commendation of their programs of slaughter and rapine.
It has been frequently alleged on the Jewish side that translations of the disputed passages made by Gentiles are inaccurate and misleading. However, there are numbers of cases in which the matter has been tested in the law courts and the translations upheld as exactly conveying the meaning of the original text.
One of the most notable of these cases in recent years was heard in Hungary. Dr. Alfred Luzsensky in 1910 translated about 400 passages from the Talmud into Hungarian; In 1923 Luzsensky was charged in a Government prosecution with ‘pornography” and “corruption of public morals” by circulation of his work, which was ordered to be confiscated. Luzensky, however, was acquitted by the Courts and the confiscation suspended. According to Warren Weston’s book “Father of Lies” (Militant Christian Patriots, London, 1938), the Hungarian Court in the course of its judgment said:
“The horrors contained in the translation of Alfred Luzensky are without exception found in the Talmud. His translation is accurate, for it renders these passages which are really in the text of the Talmud, in their exact meaning.”
The testimony of the court expert, Dr. Kmosko, is also of interest. According to Erfurt “World Service” of June 1, 1937, he said: “To the first question asked by the court as to whether Luzensky’s translation corresponds to the original Talmud, I must answer with definite ‘Yes’. The underlying principle of the Gemara is that the non-Jews are not human beings, but beasts.’
In 1932 Dr. Luzsensky published a German translation of his book, and in Warren Weston’s book referred to above appear a number of passages from the Talmud which he states are taken from this German translation of Luzsensky. The texts are in agreement with what has appeared in many other publications. The following are typical specimens:
“Whosoever is uncircumcised belongs to the sons of Belial, to the children of doom and eternal perdition.” (The book of Jubiee,xv, 26-27).
“The Jew is to say on Purium Day: Cursed be Haman, blessed be Mardochai; cursed be Seresh. Blessed be Esther: cursed be all non-Jews, blessed be all Jews.” (Orach Chaim, 660, 16).
“Theft, robbery and rape of a beautiful woman and similar deeds are forbidden to every Gentile toward another Gentile and also toward a Jew. But they are allowed to a Jew against a non-Jew.” (Sanhedrin, 57 a; also Abodah Zara, 13b).
“A heretic Gentile you may kill outright with your own hands.” (Aboda Zara 4b).
“Those who do not own the Torah must all be killed. Whoever has power to kill them openly with the sword, if not let him use artifices until they are all done away with.” (Choschen ha-Mischpat, 425, 5).
“If a Jew has a suit with anon-Jew, you (Jewish judge) will take the Jew’s side as far as possible, and you will say to the non-Jew: Thus it is according to your law. If neither of these alternatives is possible, then you must cheat.” (Bab Kama, 113a.
“It is allowed to cheat a Gentile and take usury from him”. (Baba Mezia, 61 a.)
“God has commanded us to take usury from the Gentile and lend him only when he consents to repay with usury, in order that we do not create profit for him, even if there accrued no profit to us.” (Sepher Mizwoth, 73 a)
“A thing lost by a Gentile may not only be kept by the man who found it, but it is even forbidden to give it back to him.” (Choschen ha-Mischpat, 159, 1.)
“A Jew may rob a Gentile, that is, he may cheat him over a bill if unlikely to be detected.” (Choschen ha-Mischpat, 348, 1.)
The following quotations from the Talmud appear in other reputable publications:
“You are human beings but the nations of the world are not human beings, but beasts.” (Baba Mecia, 114, 6.)
“On the house of the Goy (non-Jew) one looks as on a fold of cattle.” (Tosefta, Erubin, viii.)
“The estates of the Goy are like wilderness, who first settles in them has a right to them. (Baba Batra, 54 b.)
“The property of the Goys is like a thing without a master.” (Schulchan Aruch: Choschen ha-Mischpat, 156, 5.)
“Who took an oath in the presence of the Goys, the robbers, and the custom-house officer, is not responsible.” (Tosefta Szebnot, 11.)
“A human form is only given to those who are not Jews in order that the Jews may not be waited upon by beasts.” (Schene-tuchoth-habberith.)
“If a Jew can deceive idolaters by making them think he is a follower of their cult, it is permitted to do.” (Yore de’ah, 157, 2.),
“One should and must make false oath, when the Goys (non-Jews) ask if our books contain anything against them. Then we are bound to state on oath that there is nothing like that.” (Szaalot-Utszabot. The Book of Jore d’a., 17.)
“Every Goy who studies Talmud, and every Jew who helps him in it, ought to die: (Sanhedrin, 59 a, Aboda Zara, 8-6, Szagiga, 13.)
“To communicate anything to a Goy about our religious relations would be equal to the killing of all the Jews…” (Book of Libbre David, 37.)
That the Talmud inculcates hatred both of Christianity and Christians, was the view of the late Monsignor Jouin, founder in 1912 of the “Revue International des Spcoetoes Secretes” and editor of it up to his death in 1932. Translations of article by Monsignor Jonin appeared in the London “Free Press” of September and October, 1937, and February, 1938, and in these the whole matter was fully discussed with many citations.
As has been already stated, there is much controversy as to how such passages as have been cited above are regarded by Jews to-day. The London “Free Press” of February, 1938, for instance, printed an extract from the “Jewish Chronicle” of January 3 last reporting the newly-installed president of the Council of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations in London as saying “his guide would always be the Schulcan Aruch.” In Warren Weston’s book, “Father of Lies”, it stated that Professor Cohen, as sworn expert before the Court at Marburg in April. 1888, testified that, “The religious Jew considers himself bound by the whole contents of the Talmud.”
IX
An Amazing Prayer
A further point in the Jewish religion around which much controversy has centered is the “Kol Nidre” Prayer. This is stated to be recited on the Day of Atonement each year with great solemnity in all synagogues. The “Free Press” of February, 1938, published what it stated was a Photostat reproduction of the prayer in English and Hebrew from the Jewish prayer book for the Day of Atonement, published in London under the authority of the late Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, The prayer reads as follows:
“All vows, bonds, devotions, promises, obligations, penalties and oaths: Wherewith we have vowed, sworn, devoted and bound ourselves: from this Day of Atonement unto the next Day of Atonement, may it come unto us for good: lo, all these we repent us in them. They shall be absolved, released, annulled, made void, and of none effect: they shall not be binding nor shall they have any power. Our vows shall not be vows: our bonds shall not be bonds: and our oaths shall not be vows: our bonds shall not be bonds: and our oaths shall not be oaths.”
According to an article in the Ford “Dearborn Independent” of November 5, 1921 (as reprinted in “The Jewish Question”, 1931) and English rendering of the prayer in similar words appeared in the revised “Festival prayers” issued in 1919 by the Hebrew Publishing Company, New York.
This amazing prayer, in the ordinary meaning of words, is an advance notice by the Jews, secretly made in their synagogues, that no promise to be made by them during the ensuing year shall be binding. “Indefensibly immoral as the Kol Nidre’ is,” wrote the Ford journal in 1920, “utterly destructible of all social confidence, yet the most earnest efforts of a few really spiritual Jews have utterly failed to remove it from the prayer-books, save I a few isolated instances.
A State Within The State
Enough has been now said to indicate that a considerable immigration of Jews from Germany and Austria into British communities is not a matter to be lightly regarded. Although a fringe of Jews intermarries with Gentiles and becomes absorbed in the general population, the Jews are a definitely non-assimilable race. They remain Jews at all time, and in all places. Their presence in large numbers in European communities had always created problems of the most difficult nature. As one writer tersely put it, the Jews represent a wedge of Asia driven into the heart of Europe.
Any racial or other minority in a community naturally tends to become clannish. It is impossible to regard the Jews merely as a clannish religious minority. Zionism is and open declaration of the racial unity of Jews as Jews. The Jews are not only a race, but a highly political race with an enormous international solidarity. Every Jew necessarily had a divided allegiance, on the one side to the community in which he lives, and on the other to international Jewry. Nothing can ever wipe away that fact. Jewish ascendancy in a non-Jewish community necessarily carries with it the danger of subtle sacrifice of national interest to Jewish interest. For example, the recent drift in Britain towards alliance with Bolshevik Russia may be a Jewish interest, but is most distinctly not a British interest.
A Jewish invasion from Europe in the last fifty years has monopolized a great part of the East End of London. Of the amount of work these Jews provide for the police courts ample evidence will be found in Lieut. Col. A.H. Lane’s “Alien Menace” (4th Editon, 1933). As far back as 1919 Sir Ernest Wild, now Recorder of London, said in Parliament: “You cannot be in the criminal courts without realizing what an enormous amount of the work of our courts is caused by aliens and their crimes… Vice! Why they are at the bottom of one-half, at least of the vice of the metropolis and this country!” The “Jewish chronicle” of April 1, 1910, has been quoted as saying: “All who know anything of the white slave traffic are agreed that if the Jew could be eliminated, it would shrink and shrivel to comparatively small dimensions.”
On the economic side Jewish clannishness presents a perpetual danger to national interest and under cover of anonymous ownership under our present vicious company laws on Jewish monopoly after another has been built up.
A great mass of evidence as to the extent to which the Jews will sometimes combine for business purposes was collected and published by a former Jewish rabbi, Jacom Brafmann, of Minsk in Russia.
At the age of thirty-four Brafmann was converted to Christianity. In 1858 he presented a memorial to the Tsar urging that some steps should be taken to overcome the tremendous obstacles which he alleged Jews interposed on any of their number who declared there intention of becoming Christians Brafmann was directed to report on the whole Jewish question. He wrote two books, “The Jewish Brotherhoods” (1868), and “The Book of the Kahal” (1869)
In the latter book he asserted that it was the custom in Russia in the Jewish Kahals, or community councils, secretly to sell at auction documents called Khazakas and meropies. A khazaka gave the purchaser the right to acquire a house or other specified property belonging to a certain Gentile “by any means whatsoever”, and no other Jew must interfere with the proceedings in any way. A meopie gave the purchaser the exclusive right to lend money and do business with the Gentile named therein, and to gain possession of his property. In the second volume of his book Brafmann printed 290 of these documents with names and full particulars, and relating to transactions in the Minsk district (in which he lived and wrote) during the years 1794 to 1803.
The Jewish Encyclopedia says Brafmann was a convert “seeking notoriety”, and that “his falsehoods were repeatedly exposed.” If Brafmann was a forger he was a most bold and audacious one.
Transactions such as Brafmann sets out simply amount, in essence, to traders parceling out territory among them. Their significance is their open recognition that gaining possession of the debtor’s property is the end and culmination of money lending transactions. Gentiles in the mass are still pathetically unable to recognize this as inseparable from the basis of interest-bearing debt on which the unstable fabric of modern civilization has been reared. “Usury,” said Lord Bacon “bringeth the treasure of a realm into a few hands.”
That something very similar to what Brafmann described in Russia existed in the Levant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is clear from a recent work. In his “History of the Levant Company” (Oxford University Press, 1935), Dr.A.C. Wood relates how the British factors of the company in different ports in the Eastern Mediterranean found themselves obliged, willy-nilly, to put all their business through certain Jewish brokers, and quite unable to do direct business with the producers with whom they wished to deal. He quotes old reports as relating that:”
“Wherever a new factor appeared in any of the ports he was immediately laid hold of by the first Jew that could secure him, and henceforth he was obliged to do business through that Jew, for by compact among themselves no other Jew would interpose or accept his commissions; so that, as North put it: “The merchant can no more shake off his Jew than his skin: he sticks like a burr, and whether well used or ill-used will be at every turn in with him and no remedy.’”
Whatever its precise form, this solidarity persists among the Jews, and wherever and large numbers exist in a country this economic cohesion among a non-assimilable element in the population creates a situation of ever-increasing difficulty. As Mr. Hilaire Belloc noted in his book “The Jews”, in almost every field they touch the Jews are rarely satisfied until they have built up a monopoly. “This tendency to monopoly,” he wrote, “is spreading like a disease.”
The difficult Jewish problem will not be solved by transporting masses of unwanted Jews from one European community into another. The only hope of any lasting and durable solution is for the nations by international agreement to provide the Jews with a suitable national home of their own, sufficient in area and resources to accommodate them, and to which their emigration can be encouraged from those countries where their presence is the cause of strife and friction.
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