Israel Among the Nations A Study of the Jews and Antisemitism - 1895

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Israel Among the Nations A Study of the Jews and Antisemitism
By Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Frances Hellman (Published 1895)

Everywhere in the East as well as the West it was from the outside and thanks only to the lamps of the goim that the new ideas the light penetrated into the alleys of the Ghetto and pierced the gloom of the Judengasse Could it indeed have been otherwise after centuries of sequestration and debasement. However great may be Israel's elasticity her mainspring seemed to have been broken. She was weighed down by the double load of her heavy talmudic traditions and the hatred of a hostile society. As in the time subsequent to the fall of the Temple, the Jew thrown back on himself, withdrew behind the walls of his ritual and his traditional observances, the Jews had become perhaps more strictly Jewish than they were on the eve of the Crusades. We can easily imagine what the European Jew was some thirty or forty years before the Revolution We need but to turn our glance toward the East where the Jews still live in compact masses separated from the Christians by spiritual and material barriers On such a subject nothing can be so convincing as an immediate view of men and things He who traverses the poverty stricken Zions of the East and beholds their inhabitants clad in their long shiny gaberdines can realise the inherited aversion to change and novelty which the isolated Jew must feel. In this respect he is still an Oriental like his forefathers the BenihrdeL. What is most wonderful and we shall return to it later is the rapidity with which he is being metamorphosed under the magic wand of our Occidental civilization. Whoever is not acquainted with the great Jewish communities of our age where the sons of Israel live together in groups of thousands more, judaico does not know the Jew. Only in such communities in Bohemia, Galicia, Lithuania, Little Russia, and Moldavia can we still find the Jew as Jew. Take those Jews of Central or Eastern Europe, those judaising Jews of the great Jewries. Does the Polish Russian or Roumanian Jew strike you as an innovator? Take a good look at him. Could he or his like have pushed the modern world forward into untrodden paths? Is it he whom you could possibly suspect of imperiling Christian civilization? Unhappy creature, he is much too degraded for that, too poor, too ignorant, too heedless of our religious and political strifes. Question him he will not understand you. He is besides too much of a Jew too religious, too devout, too completely hedged in by tradition, in a word too conservative. This is a point on which we must lay especial stress. We shall be obliged to revert to it more than once There is in all the world perhaps nothing more stubbornly conservative than the talmudic Jew. In the matter of adherence to the habits of his ancestors and to custom he might have descended from the Chinese mandarin or from the Russian moujik. This man, who is pictured to us as the natural enemy of tradition, is sedulously occupied in conforming to tradition Wherever the Jew has remained Jew neither the government nor Christian society has had anything to fear from Israel. Note well the countries that complain most bitterly of the judaising of contemporaneous society are precisely those in which the Jews have least remained Jews.

In order to become a religious or a political solvent the Jew must, if I may use the expression, become de judaised. It is easy to verify this in Germany, in Austro Hungary, even in France as well as in Russia and the Orient, if in those countries there are Jews who may be accused of being zealous promoters of the spirit of negation and destruction they are generally such as have freed themselves from Judaism and who in their contact with Christians have stripped off the beliefs and traditions of Israel. This modern Israelite depicted to us as the corrupting agency in our Christian civilisation is himself a product of our civilization. The virus with which he charges the veins of society was not secreted by him, it is only because he has been infected with it that he spreads its contagion. Let us take the countries in which modern ideas have as yet touched but the surface, for instance Russia. Can it really be the Jews of Vilna in their long gaberdines and their high boots who have endangered autocratic government and Orthodox civilization? Who can be made to believe, yet I know men in St Petersburgh and Moscow who are anxious to convince us of it. Such an attempt was made first by the defunct Rons of the late Aksakof and then by the Grajdanine of Prince Mechtchersky. There have even been statesmen in the immediate vicinity of the Czar who expressed on this score the apprehensions inspired by their monarchical loyalty or their Christian conscience. Foremost among them was the High Procurator of the Very Holy Synod M Pobe donostsef, former preceptor of the Emperor Alexander III, and to this day the chief adviser of his imperial pupil in matters of religion.

It was in 1881 at the time of the Antisemitic troubles in Southern Russia when Jewish shops and houses had been looted that hordes of rioters sweeping down from the North proclaimed to the people that an imperial ukase had decreed the pillage of those rascally Hebrews. A deputation of Israelites repaired to the Very Holy Synod to invoke the intervention of the High Procurator in behalf of the victims. While condescending to listen to their complaints he thought it his duty to deplore in their presence the fact that educated Jews should use their knowledge to undermine the foundations of society and to disseminate baleful doctrines among the people. Such a reproach directed at such a time against the Russian Jew missed its mark. If the imperial customhouses backed by a double and triple censorship were not able to prevent the spirit of Western negation from being smuggled into the empire, it was assuredly not the Jewish contrabandists who imported that forbidden commodity into holy Russia.

If the Jew has been a broker of ideas he has not been so in modern Russia. Had a feeling of respect not restrained the bankers and rabbis who interviewed the High Procurator M Pobedonostsef they might have answered his complaint by flinging back upon Orthodox Russia the charge brought against the sons of Judah. The old Jews of the Western Jewries with their long beards and their long curls might have asked him what the imperial schools and the intercourse with Christians had done with the souls of their sons and daughters. A Russian novelist Ivan Turgenief, if I mistake not, brings the procurator of a province face to face with a Jew of the West whose son is implicated in a conspiracy. It is not the Russian Jews alone who would have a right to give to their accusers the same answer as that which the old Abraham gave to this magistrate. What the Russian writer with a rare gift of divination has placed on the lips of the Lithuanian Jew might have been repeated by many co religionists of Samuel Abraham in the West as well as in the East? The Jewish communities of Russia are not the only ones in which fathers and grandfathers are frequently at a loss to recognise their children. Here we must cease to think of ourselves for a moment. We are in the habit of considering only the influence of the Jews on our Christian society we do not trouble ourselves at all about the influence of our modern civilisation on the Jews or on Judaism. Otherwise we should perceive that if the Jew appears at times to be a disintegrating force in Christian society, the Christian or the Aryan is so to a much greater degree with respect to Judaism. Israel that has withstood twenty centuries of oppression is now imperilled by the civilisation that has emancipated her. Of all the enemies which she has outlived from Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar to Titus and from Hadrian to Torquemada none has been so formidable to her as this modern society, the first to smile on her. Our modern ideas, our critical spirit, our Aryan sciences, are about to destroy Jewish customs and traditions. Will Judaism long survive their destruction? Possibly yet for the Synagogue this is no less serious a problem than for Christianity. At this moment through contact with us an internal process of disintegration is taking place in the bosom of Judaism. What will be its outcome? We do not know. Thus between the Jew and the non Jew between the goi and the son of Jacob, mutual forces are at work apparently equally disintegrating but on the whole more dangerous to the Jew than to the goi. What has preserved the Jew for so many centuries and prevented him from disappearing among the nations. It was his religion it was as we have said the ritual the ceremonial the minute practices with which the Talmud has wrapped him round. Now these protecting rites this shell of observances which have been his safeguard for two thousand years and which nothing could penetrate have been pierced by our Western spirit that is about to make them fall to the ground piece by piece.

Judaism and with it the Jew bereft of its preserving envelope is so to say reduced to a condition of utter nakedness thus bared and liable to be touched to the quick, can it withstand the corroding action of our modern acids into which it has been plunged as into a bath? And if Judaism already weakened were to be entirely dissolved what would become of the Jew Fashioned and safeguarded by his religion is not the Jew in danger of vanishing together with Judaism It will thus be seen that the rabbis would be justified in flinging back at the Christians the charge so readily brought by the Lutheran clergyman and the Russian priest against the Israelites. The latter also have cause for uneasiness. Some of them realise and acknowledge this I have met in the Jewish communities of the East men who dreading the overthrow of the artificial barriers which still existed between their brethren and the Gentiles preferred the mortification and annoyance of their restrictive laws to our corrupting liberties. They said to themselves that all is not clear gain for Israel in this civilisation which the world seems to open out to her. While others hail the victory on Zion they ask themselves whether Israel's triumph is not to be looked upon as the prelude to her fall and whether the emancipation of Judah is not to end in its utter submersion its engulfment by the nations? There is always this distinction to be made between the Jew and the non Jew the Semite and the Aryan that our ideas and our Aryan Teuto Roman civilisation do indeed threaten dissolution to Judaism while there is nothing specifically Semitic in the doctrines that menace Christianity and eat into our Christian society. A glance at the Arabs will show this. The very disease which we accuse them of bringing or transmitting to us, has been caught by them from us. In this respect, the East and the West Russia and our own country, are all alike Scepticism materialism nihilism far from being Jewish products are in the Jews, infected by them, but a sign and a consequence of the closer union of races they bear witness to the contact of the Jew with ourselves. In this respect as in almost all others and in regard to modern as well as mediaeval times the Jew is only an agent of transmission, a broker. The intellectual commodities, which he offers and retails to us, are generally not of his own making, they do not originate with him, he took them from us, from our workshops and our laboratories. He gives them at best a certain shape and polish.
It is often asserted that the Jew produces nothing, that he is only a middle man. It is perhaps with respect to the subject we are discussing that this statement contains most truth. And even in this respect it seems to me that the Jew's influence has been exaggerated. Though he may sometimes control the money market he nowhere monopolises the transmission of ideas. Nothing forces us to get our stock of them from him. It is hardly fair to ascribe to Jewish irony, to Hebrew skepticism, to the Semitic spirit, the diffusion of doctrines which the Jew often dishes up to us merely because they are to our taste and because it pays him to do so. Here again by virtue of his old trader's instinct he follows the law of supply and demand. Law is in those cases where each still asserts its sway far from being as formidable as people sometimes like to imagine. To judge by the manner in which some Christians speak of the Jewish spirit and of Judaism it might be inferred that the Old and the New Testament have nothing in common. We seem to forget that both have at bottom the same God the same Decalogue, the same moral Law. Were the Jew and the Christian equally faithful the one to the Gospel the other to the Thora the points of difference between them would be fewer than those of resemblance. If the only change in our modern society had been that of substituting a Jewish or a Judo Christian civilisation for one purely Christian the idea of God, the religious and moral idea would still be the beacon light of modern society. Is it necessary to show that the transformation which our Western world is undergoing has not stopped there? That the evolution of modern thought and society means something more than Europe's return to Jerusalem? He must be blind indeed who perceives in this evolution nothing but a tardy revenge of the Synagogue on the Church and the overthrow of the Cross by the candelabra with seven branches.

Let us then no longer speak of the judaising of Christian society. Had the Christians remained better Christians the Jews would have slight hold upon them. What you call the judaising of modern society might both by Christian and Jew be equally well called, pardon the barbarism, the paganising of society. Aryans and Semites de christianised Christians and de judaised Jews are practically reverting to a sort of unconscious paganism. This is the plain truth. Shem and Japhet swept along by the same wind are slipping side by side down the same declivity. Our clumsy Western races which the Gospel had with such difficulty wrested from the worship of matter and force are about to revert to their old nature worship now stripped of the mythical adornments that once covered it with a veil of poetry. And Israel herself chosen to perpetuate the idea of a living God. Israel snatched by her prophets of old with such infinite trouble from the altars of Moloch and Baal Israel weakened by misfortune, and weary of waiting for the Messiah who is to mete out justice seems like Solomon in his old age, to forget her compact with the Eternal in order to offer incense on high places to Kamosch and Aschtoret, the idols of the stranger. If the decline of the Christian idea may be looked upon as the revenge of one faith on another of a remote past on the past, of yesterday it is assuredly the revenge of ancient paganism of immortal paganism our neo pagans would say equally ready to triumph over the Thora and the Gospel over Jehovah and Jesus. What the Christian spirit has to battle against is not so much the new science or the modern spirit with its confused aspirations as the old pagan instincts the lust of the flesh and the pride of life once more unchained by the centuries. The idolatry of nature, the idolatry of man, erected into a god such is the new worship to which our Western civilisation seems to be reverting and this false worship of the human instead of the divine is perhaps more repugnant to the Old than to the New Testament, to Sinai than to Calvary. The glorification of the creature taken individually or collectively amounts to a formal negation of Judaism- I am the Eternal thy God has said Jehovah and thou shalt have no other gods before my face. Be it so, some Antisemite will exclaim the Jew is not the sole, nor perhaps the principal agent, in the dechristianising of contemporary society. Judaism is in danger of annihilation itself, a victim of the warfare waged by its own people against Christianity and the Christian idea. But what we have in view in speaking of the judaising of society and the disintegration of European nations by the Jew, is not so much the Jewish religion as the Jewish race it is less the Jew whom we fear than the Semite Israel appears to us like an alien tribe encamped in the midst of modern nations and threatening them at once with moral subjection and material enslavement. Let us leave Christian civilisation out of the question. The Jew acts as a solvent on something else which we have no less at heart on our national culture our historic genius our French Slav and German souls.

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