|
|
This is the history of Israel at the end of the 19th century. To sum it up in a word: The majority of the Jews are a race of accursed beggars. More industrious and more able than the average European, not to speak at all of the inert Asiatic and African, the Jew is condemned to the most extreme pauperism, because he is not allowed to use his powers freely. This poverty grinds down his character, and destroys his body. Fevered by the thirst for higher education, he sees himself repelled from the places where knowledge is attainable -- a real intellectual tantalus of our non-mythical times. He dashes his head against the thick ice crusts of hatred and contempt which are formed over his head. Like scarcely any other social being -- whom even his belief teaches that it is a meritorious and God-pleasing action for three to take meals together and for ten to pray together -- he is excluded from the society of his countrymen and is condemned to a tragic isolation. One complains of Jews intruding everywhere, but they only strive after superiority, because they are denied equality. They are accused of a feeling of solidarity with the Jews of the whole world; whereas, on the contrary, it is their misfortune that as soon as the first loving word of emancipation had been uttered, they tried to pluck from their hearts all Jewish solidarity up to the last trace. Stunned by the hailstorm of anti-Semitic accusations, they forget who they are and often imagine themselves in reality the bodily and spiritual miscreants whom their deadly enemies represent them to be. Not rarely the Jew is heard to murmur that he must learn from the enemy and try to remedy his feelings. He forgets, however, that the anti-Semitic accusations are valueless, because they are not based on criticism of real facts, but the effects of psychological law according to which children, wild men and malevolent fools make persons and things against which they have an aversion responsible for their sufferings. At times of the Black Death, they were accused of poisoning wells, today, they are being accused by farmers of cutting the cereal prices; the craftsmen accuse them of ruining small businesses; the conservatives accuse them of being opposed to the government. Wherever there is no Jewish population, other parts of the population are accused of being root of all evil – people that loathed, like strangers, sometimes native minorities, sects or societies. This anthropomorphism of aversion is no evidence ag
|
