A Real Case Against the Jews - THE CENTURY MAGAZINE - 1928
Marcus Eli Ravage
The highlight is this piece is "no conquest in history can even remotely compare with this clean sweep of our conquest over you." (Christianity usurping native paganism).
Of course, you do resent us.
It is no good telling me you
don't. So let us not waste
any time on denials and alibis. You
know you do, and I know it, and we
understand each other. To be sure,
some of your best friends are Jews,
and all that. I have heard that before
once or twice, I think. And I know,
too, that you do not include me
personally — "me" being any particular individual Jew — when you
fling out at us in your wholesale
fashion, because I am, well, so
different, don't you know, almost as
good as one of yourselves. That
little exemption does not, somehow,
move me to gratitude; but never
mind that now. It is the aggressive,
climbing, pushing, materialistic sort
you dislike — those, in a word, who
remind you so much of your own
up-and-coming brethren. We under-
stand each other perfectly. I don't
hold it against you.
Bless my soul, I do not blame
anybody for disliking anybody. The
thing that intrigues me about this
anti-Jewish business, as you play
at it, is your total lack of grit. You
are so indirect and roundabout with
it, you make such fantastic and
transparent excuses, you seem to be
suffering from self-consciousness so
horribly, that if the performance
were not grotesque it would be irritating.
It is not as if you were amateurs :
you have been at it for over fifteen
centuries. Yet watching you and
hearing your childish pretexts, one
might get the impression that you
did not know yourselves what it is
all about. You resent us, but you
cannot clearly say why. You think
up a new excuse — a "reason" is what
you call it — every other day. You
have been piling up justifications for
yourselves these many hundreds of
years and each new invention is more
laughable than the last and each new
excuse contradicts and annihilates
the last.
Not so many years ago I used to
hear that we were money-grubbers
and commercial materialists; now the
complaint is being whispered around
that no art and no profession is safe
against Jewish invasion.
We are, if you are to be believed,
at once clannish and exclusive and
unassimilable because we won't intermarry with you, and we are also
climbers and pushers and a menace
to your racial integrity.
Our standard of living is so low
that we create your slums and
sweated industries, and so high that
we crowd you out of your best
residential sections.
We shirk our patriotic duty in
wartime because we are pacifists by
nature and tradition, and we are the
arch-plotters of universal wars and
the chief beneficiaries of those wars
(see the late "Dearborn Independent," passim, and "The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion").
We are at once the founders and
leading adherents of capitalism and
the chief perpetrators of the rebellion
against capitalism.
Surely, history has nothing like us
for versatility!
And, oh! I almost forgot the
reason of reasons. We are the stiff-
necked people who never accepted
Christianity, and we are the criminal
people who crucified its founder.
But I tell you, you are self-
deceivers. You lack either the self-
knowledge or the mettle to face the
facts squarely and own up to the
truth. You resent the Jew not
because, as some of you seem to
think, he crucified Jesus but because
he gave him birth. Your real quarrel
with us is not that we have rejected
Christianity but that we have im-
posed it upon you !
Your loose, contradictory charges
against us are not a patch on the
blackness of our proved historic offense. You accuse us of stirring up
revolution in Moscow. Suppose we
admit the charge. What of it? Com-
pared with what Paul the Jew of
Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the
Russian upheaval is a mere street
brawl.
You make much noise and fury
about the undue Jewish influence in
your theaters and movie palaces.
Very good; granted your complaint
is well-founded. But what is that
compared to our staggering influence in your churches, your schools, your
laws and your governments, and the
very thoughts you think every day?
A clumsy Russian forges a set of
papers and publishes them in a book
called "The Protocols of the Elders
of Zion," which shows that we plot-
ted to bring on the late World War.
You believe that book. All right.
For the sake of argument we will
underwrite every word of it. It is
genuine and authentic. But what is
that beside the unquestionable historical conspiracy which we have
carried out, which we have never
denied because you never had the
courage to charge us with it, and of
which the full record is extant for
anybody to read?
If you really are serious when you
talk of Jewish plots, may I not direct
your attention to one worth talking
about ? What use is it wasting words
on the alleged control of your public
opinion by Jewish financiers, news-
paper owners and movie magnates,
when you might as well justly accuse
us of the proved control of your whole
civilization by the Jewish Gospels ?
You have not begun to appreciate
the real depth of our guilt. We are
intruders. We are disturbers. We
are subverters. We have taken your
natural world, your ideals, your
destiny, and played havoc with
them. We have been at the bottom
not merely of the latest great war but
of nearly all your wars, not only of
the Russian but of every other major
revolution in your history. We have
brought discord and confusion and
frustration into your personal and
public life. We are still doing it.
No one can tell how long we shall go
on doing it.
Look back a little and see what
has happened. Nineteen hundred
years ago you were an innocent,
care-free, pagan race. You worshipped countless gods and goddesses, the spirits of the air, of the
running streams and of the wood-
land. You took unblushing pride in
the glory of your naked bodies. You
carved images of your gods and of
the tantalizing human figure. You
delighted in the combats of the field,
the arena and the battle-ground.
War and slavery were fixed institutions in your systems. Disporting
yourselves on the hillsides and in the
valleys of the great outdoors, you
took to speculating on the wonder
and mystery of life and laid the
foundations of natural science and
philosophy. Yours was a noble,
sensual culture, unirked by the
prickings of a social conscience or by
any sentimental questionings about
human equality. Who knows what
great and glorious destiny might
have been yours if we had left you
alone.
But we did not leave you alone.
We took you in hand and pulled
down the beautiful and generous
structure you had reared, and
changed the whole course of your
history. We conquered you as no
empire of yours ever subjugated
Africa or Asia. And we did it all
without armies, without bullets,
without blood or turmoil, without
force of any kind. We did it solely
by the irresistible might of our spirit,
with ideas, with propaganda.
We made you the willing and
unconscious bearers of our mission to
the whole world, to the barbarous
races of the earth, to the countless
unborn generations. Without fully understanding
what we were doing to
you, you became the agents at large
of our racial tradition, carrying
our gospel to the unexplored ends of
the earth.
Our tribal customs have become
the core of your moral code. Our
tribal laws have furnished the basic
groundwork of all your august constitutions and legal systems. Our
legends and our folk-tales are the
sacred lore which you croon to your
infants. Our poets have filled your
hymnals and your prayer-books.
Our national history has become an
indispensable part of the learning of
your pastors and priests and scholars.
Our kings, our statesmen, our prophets, our warriors are your heroes.
Our ancient little country is your
Holy Land. Our national literature
is your Holy Bible. What our people
thought and taught has become
inextricably woven into your very
speech and tradition, until no one
among you can be called educated
who is not familiar with our racial
heritage.
Jewish artisans and Jewish fisher-
men are your teachers and your
saints, with countless statues carved
in their image and innumerable
cathedrals raised to their memories.
A Jewish maiden is your ideal of
motherhood and womanhood. A
Jewish rebel-prophet is the central
figure in your religious worship.
We have pulled down your idols, cast
aside your racial inheritance, and
substituted for them our God and
our traditions. No conquest in
history can even remotely compare
with this clean sweep of our conquest
over you.
How did we do it? Almost by
accident. Two thousand years ago nearly, in far-off Palestine, our
religion had fallen into decay and
materialism. Money-changers were
in possession of the temple. Degenerate, selfish priests mulcted our
people and grew fat. Then a young
patriot-idealist arose and went about
the land calling for a revival of faith.
He had no thought of setting up a
new church. Like all the prophets
before him, his only aim was to
purify and revitalize the old creed.
He attacked the priests and drove
the money-changers from the temple.
This brought him into conflict with
the established order and its supporting pillars. The Roman authorities,
who were in occupation of the country, fearing his revolutionary agitation as a political effort to oust them,
arrested him, tried him and condemned him to death by crucifixion,
a common form of execution at that
time.
The followers of Jesus of Nazareth,
mainly slaves and poor workmen,
in their bereavement and disappointment, turned away from the world
and formed themselves into a
brotherhood of pacifist non-resisters,
sharing the memory of their crucified
leader and living together communistically. They were merely a new sect in Judea, without power or
consequence, neither the first nor the
last.
Only after the destruction of
Jerusalem by the Romans did the
new creed come into prominence.
Then a patriotic Jew named Paul or
Saul conceived the idea of humbling
the Roman power by destroying the
morale of its soldiery with the doc-
trines of love and non-resistance
preached by the little sect of Jewish
Christians. He became the Apostle to the Gentiles, he who hitherto had
been one of the most active persecutors of the band. And so well did
Paul do his work that within four
centuries the great empire which had
subjugated Palestine along with half
of the world, was a heap of ruins.
And the law which went forth from
Zion became the official religion of
Rome.
This was the beginning of our
dominance in your world. But it was
only a beginning. From this time
forth your history is little more than
a struggle for mastery between your
own old pagan spirit and our Jewish
spirit. Half your wars, great and
little, are religious wars, fought over
the interpretation of one thing or
another in our teachings. You no
sooner broke free from your primitive
religious simplicity and attempted
the practice of the pagan Roman
learning than Luther armed with our
gospels arose to down you and re-
enthrone our heritage. Take the
three principal revolutions in modern
times — the French, the American
and the Russian. What are they but
the triumph of the Jewish idea of
social, political and economic justice?
And the end is still a long way off.
We still dominate you. At this very
moment your churches are torn
asunder by a civil war between
Fundamentalists and Modernists,
that is to say between those who
cling to our teachings and traditions
literally and those who are striving
by slow steps to dispossess us. In
Dayton, Tennessee, a Bible-bred
community forbids the teaching of
your science because it conflicts with
our ancient Jewish account of the
origin of life; and Mr. Bryan, the leader of the anti- Jewish Ku Klux
Klan in the Democratic National
Convention, makes the supreme fight
of his life in our behalf, without
noticing the contradiction. Again
and again the Puritan heritage of
Judea breaks out in waves of stage
censorship, Sunday blue laws and
national prohibition acts. And while
these things are happening you
twaddle about Jewish influence in
the movies!
Is it any wonder you resent us?
We have put a clog upon your
progress. We have imposed upon
you an alien book and an alien faith
which you cannot swallow or digest,
which is at cross-purposes with your
native spirit, which keeps you ever-
lastingly ill-at-ease, and which you
lack the spirit either to reject or to
accept in full.
In full, of course, you never have
accepted our Christian teachings.
In your hearts you still are pagans.
You still love war and graven images
and strife. You still take pride in the
glory of the nude human figure.
Your social conscience, in spite of all
democracy and all your social revolutions, is still a pitifully imperfect
thing. We have merely divided your
soul, confused your impulses, paralyzed your desires. In the midst of
battle you are obliged to kneel down
to him who commanded you to turn
the other cheek, who said "Resist
not evil" and "Blessed are the peace-
makers." In your lust for gain you
are suddenly disturbed by a memory
from your Sunday-school days about taking no thought for the morrow.
In your industrial struggles, when
you would smash a strike without
compunction, you are suddenly re-
minded that the poor are blessed and
that men are brothers in the Father-
hood of the Lord. And as you are
about to yield to temptation, your
Jewish training puts a deterrent hand
on your shoulder and dashes the
brimming cup from your lips. You
Christians have never become Christianized. To that extent we have
failed with you. But we have forever
spoiled the fun of paganism for you.
So why should you not resent us?
If we were in your place we should
probably dislike you more cordially
than you do us. But we should make
no bones about telling you why.
We should not resort to subterfuges
and transparent pretexts. With mil-
lions of painfully respectable Jewish
shopkeepers all about us we should
not insult your intelligence and our
own honesty by talking about communism as a Jewish philosophy.
And with millions of hard-working
impecunious Jewish peddlers and
laborers we should not make our-
selves ridiculous by talking about
international capitalism as a Jewish
monopoly. No, we should go straight
to the point. We should contemplate
this confused, ineffectual muddle
which we call civilization, this half-
Christian half-pagan medley, and —
were our places reversed — we should
say to you point-blank: "For this
mess thanks to you, to your prophets
and to your Bible."
Plebscan