Victims, or persecutors?

THE INTERNATIONAL JEW by HENRY FORD - Chapter 3

VICTIMS, OR PERSECUTORS?

From the earliest record of the Jews' contact with other ; nations, no long period of years has ever passed without the charge arising that the Jews constitute "a people within a people, a nation within a nation." When this charge is made today it is vehemently denied by men who pose as the defenders of their people, and the denial is more or less countenanced by all the Jews of every class. Yet there is nothing more clearly stated in Jewish teaching, nor more clearly indicated in Jewish life, than that the charge is true. But whether the truth should be used against the Jews is quite another question.

If the Jews are a nation, their nationality founded upon the double ground of race and religion, it is certainly outside the bounds of reason that they should be asked or expected to de-racialize, de-nationalize and de-religionize themselves; but neither is it to be expected that they should bitterly denounce those who state the facts. It is only on a basis of facts that a solution of any problem can come. Where the blame attaches is here: that the evident facts are denied, as if no one but the Jews themselves knew that there are such facts.

If the Jews are to be continuously a nation, as they teach, and if the condition of "a nation within a nation' becomes more and more intolerable, then the solution must come through one of two things: a separation of the "nation" from the rest of the nations, or an exaltation of the "nation" above the rest of the nations. There is a mass of evidence in Jewish writings that the leaders expect both of these conditions to come-a separate nation and a super-nation; indeed the heart of Jewish teaching is that Jewry is a separate nation now, and on the way to becoming a super-nation. It is only those appointed to address the Gentiles who deny this: the real rabbinate of Judah does not deny.

JEWS OBJECT TO "AMERICANISM. "

In any investigation of the Jewish Question, the student is struck over and over again by the fact that what the Jews most complain of, they themselves began. They complain of what they call anti-Semitism; but it must be apparent to the dullest mind that there could never have been such a thing as anti-Semitism were there not first such a thing as Semitism. Then take the complaint about the Jews having to live in ghettos. The ghetto is a Jewish invention. In the beginning of the invasion of European cities, and centuries later of American cities, the Jews always lived by themselves because they wanted to; because they believed the presence of Gentiles contaminated them. Jewish writers, writing for Jews, freely admit this; but in writing for Gentiles, they refer to the ghetto as an illustration of Gentile cruelty. The idea of contamination originated with the Jews, it is an old oriental survival; it spread by suggestion to the Gentiles. So with this fact of the separate "nation"; it was the Jews who first recognized it, first insisted upon it and have always sought to realize that separateness both in thought and action.

  More, the true and normal type of Jew believes that the influence of Americanism, or of any civilized Gentile state, is harmful to Judaism. That is a serious statement and no amount of Gentile assertion will be sufficient to confirm it. Indeed, it is such a statement as the Gentile mind could not have evolved, because the trend of Gentile feeling is all in the opposite direction, namely that Americanization is a good thing for the Jew. It is from authoritative Jewish sources we learn this fact, that what we call civilizing influences are looked upon as being at enmity with Judaism. It is not the Gentile who says that Jewish ideals, as ideals, are incompatible with the life of our country; it is the Jew who says so. It is he who inveighs against Americanism, not the American who inveighs against Judaism.

  Americanism is yet unfinished, Judaism has been complete for centuries. While no American would think of pointing to any part of the country or to any group as representing the true and final type of Americanism, the Jews quite unhesitatingly point to parts of the world and to certain groups as representing the true type of Judaism.

  Where is the type to be found which Jewish writers recognize as the true one? The Jew of the ghetto is held up in Jewish treatises as the norm of Judaism. A famous rabbi of the synagogue of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, on Central Park, New York, was Dr. D. de Sola Pool. He is the author of the following words:

  "In the ghetto the observance of Judaism was natural and almost inevitable. The regimen of Jewish life was the atmosphere that was breathed."

  Another famous Jewish rabbi, Dr. M. H. Segal, expresses the view that Jewry in the more modern portions of Europe and America was really kept alive by the infusions of immigrants from Poland and Lithuania. Asserting, in agreement with other Jewish leaders, that the Jewish center of the world had been in Russia and Poland until just before the 1914 war, Dr. Segal says:

  "The war (1914-1918) has destroyed the last traces of the declining Jewish society which had dragged out its feeble existence in the semi-medieval ghettos of Poland and Lithuania. With all their growing feebleness, these communities were yet the last refuge of Judaism in the Dispersion. In them there still survived something of the old Jewish life, some of the old Jewish institutions, practices and traditions. These communities also supplied such vitality as they could afford to the attenuated and atrophied Judaism in the communities of the more modern states of Europe and America."

  The idea is not at all uncommon-that large infusions of "real Jews" from the Old World ghettos are desirable and necessary in order to keep Judaism alive in countries like the United States. Israel Friedlaender whose name is held in honor by the Jews, also recognized the service of the ghetto stream to Judaism. In his lecture, "The Problem of Judaism in America," he speaks about the de-Judaizing tendencies of absolute freedom, such as the Jew has always enjoyed in the United States. This tendency, he says, is corrected in two ways-by anti-Semitic influences and "by the large stream of Jewish emigration, on the other hand, which, proceeding from the lands of oppression to the lands of freedom, carries with it, on or under the surface, the preserving and reviving influences of the ghetto." This same authority, in an article entitled "The Americanization of the Jewish Immigrant," frankly prefers the Jew fresh from the ghetto to the Jew who has been influenced t by American life.

  To "Americanize" means, in our ordinary speech, to bring into sympathy with the traditions and institutions of the United States, but the Jews do not mean only the United States when they say "America." They mean also South and Central America-where so many revolutions have occurred. There are large numbers of Jews in Argentina, and many are found in other countries. It would probably give a wrong slant to the fact to say that the Jewish leaders are wholly anti-America, but it is true to say that they are against the "Americanization" of the Jewish immigrant stream. That is, that the trend of "Americanism" is so different from the trend of "Judaism" that the two are in conflict. This does not indicate treason toward American nationalisms perhaps, so much as it indicates loyalty toward Jewish nationalism. But the reader must himself be the judge, on the facts given in this book, as to how far the difference really goes and the effect of the struggle between the two ideas. The fact of the antagonism which exists between the two is clear and complete. The Gentiles do not notice that antagonism, but the Jews are always and everywhere keenly aware of it. This throws a very strong light on all the revolutionary programs to break up the present control of society, by sowing dissensions between so-called capital and labor, by cheapening the dignity of government through corrupt politics, by trivializing the mind of the people through theaters and movies, but it is in the study of Jewish money-making out of war that the clues are found to most of the great abuses of which the Jews have been guilty. "Wars are the Jews' harvests," is an ancient saying. Their predilection for the quartermaster's department has been observed anciently and modernly. Their interest being mostly in profits and not in national issues; their traditional loyalty being to the Jewish nation, rather than to any other nation; it is natural that they should be found to be the merchants of goods and information in times of war-that is, the war profiteers and spies. As the unbroken program is traced through the Revolutionary War, through the Civil War, and through the Great War*, the only change observable is the increasing power and profit of the Jews. Although the number of Jews resident in the American colonies was small, there were enough to make a mark on the Revolutionary War; and while there was no wholesale legislation against Jews as there was in the Civil War, there were the same actions against individuals for the same causes which in 1861-5 obtained more extensively.

JEWS AND THE "RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION" CRY

No intelligent Jew in the United States ever was asinine enough to declare that the Jewish Question is a religious question and that investigation of that question in these articles constituted "religious persecution." But it is apparently all that remains for the "Gentile fronts" to shout about. From what can be learned of them they are for the most part men of no religion themselves and they use the term "religious persecution" as a red rag which they think will stir people into action. It is curious how the cry of "religious persecution" is used to evoke the spirit of persecution against the alleged persecutors.

  Neither directly nor by implication is it held in these articles that the Jewish Question is a religious question. On the contrary, supported by the highest Jewish authorities, it is firmly stated that the Jewish Question is one of race and nationality.

  There is no religious persecution of the Jews in the United States, unless the agitation of the various humane societies for the abolition of "kosher killing" may be considered as such-the method of slaughtering animals for food which is needlessly cruel. But even this objection can only with difficulty be stretched into interference with "the religion of the Jews." The Jewish method of slaughter as now practiced is not commanded in the Old Testament but in the Talmud, and is, therefore, not religious in the authoritative sense, but traditional. Moreover, there is positive evidence that modern methods achieve the Jewish purpose (the disposal of the blood of the carcass) much better than does the Jewish method. This is the only instance where even remotely the religion of the Jews has been touched.

  The fact is that while there is no "religious persecution". Of the Jews, there is very much real religious persecution by the Jews. That is one of the outstanding characteristics of organized Jewish life in the United States, its active, unceasing, powerful and virulent attacks upon any and all forms of Christianity which may chance to come to public notice. Now and again we hear of outbreaks of sectarian bigotry between Catholics and Protestants, but these are not to be compared with the steady, relentless, alert, anti-Christian activity of the Jewish organizations. There are doctrinal disputes within the Christian Churches, but none that challenge the basis of Christianity itself; organized Judaism, however, is not content with doctrinal disputation, but enlists its vast commercial and political power against everything that it regards as, in its own words, "Christological manifestations."

  No President of the United States has yet dared to take his inaugural oath on the open pages of the New Testament -the Jews would denounce him. Various governors of American states, having used the word "Christian" in their Thanksgiving proclamations, have been obliged to teach Americanism in our cities because it held that Christianity and good citizenship were synonymous!

No public man in America has ever given public evidence of his Christian faith without rebuke from the Jews. Not only do the Jews disagree with Christian teaching- which is their right and no one questions it-but they excise it on demand of the Jews. Everything that would remind the child in school that he is living in the midst of a Christian civilization, in a nation declared by its Supreme Court to be founded on the Christian principles, has been ordered out of the public schools on Jewish demand. In a nation and at a time when a minority of Jews can print every year a record of the apologies they have extorted from public officials for "having inadvertently used the term 'Christian'," it is desirable that this charge of "religious persecution" should be placed where it belongs.

  The Jew glories in religious persecution as the American glories in patriotism. Religious prejudice is the Jews' chief expression of their own patriotism. It is the only well-organized, active and successful form of religious prejudice in the country because they have succeeded in pulling off the gigantic trick of making not their own attitude~ but any opposition to it, bear the stigma of "prejudice" and "persecution." That is why the Jew uses these terms so frequently. He wants to label the other fellow first. That is why any investigation of the Jewish Question is so wickedly advertised as anti-Semitism-the Jew knows the advantage of labeling the other man.

  This theme "religious persecution," will not be found anywhere within the whole range of the Jewish Question, except on the Jewish side. There is, in the United States, a religious prejudice, but it is strictly Yiddish. If the Christian population bothered one-hundredth-thousandth part as much about Jewish religion as the Jews bother about Christian observances, the whole fabric of Talmudic teaching would be consumed in the bright light to which general attention would bring it, the bright light from which it has always been concealed. Sheer analysis in the interest of mental health would compel the Jewish people to abandon the darkness which holds them now. Jewish Talmudism owes its existence today to the indifference with which it is regarded. This is the far Opposite extreme of ' religious persecution."

  Religious prejudice is just as unpleasant to write about as it is to experience in any other way. It is totally contrary to the genius of the American and the Anglo-Saxon. We have always regarded religion as a matter of conscience. To believe as he will is part of every man's fundamental liberty. Holding these hereditary principles, one chooses to study that active stream of influence in America which is known as the Jewish stream, and immediately upon doing so, one finds himself classed with the bigots and torturers of other times.

  It is time to show that the cry of "bigot" is raised mostly by bigots. There is a religious prejudice in this country, there is, indeed, a religious persecution, there is a forcible shoving aside of the religious liberties of a majority of the people, and this prejudice and persecution and use of force is Jewish and nothing but Jewish.

  A study of history and of contemporary Jewish journalism shows that Jewish prejudice and persecution is a continuous phenomenon wherever the Jews have obtained power, and that in neither action nor word has any disability placed upon the Jew equalled the disabilities he has placed and still contemplates placing upon non-Jews. There is no Christian church that the Jews have not repeatedly attacked.

  If there is in the world any extra-ecclesiastical undertaking by Catholics which has won the undivided approval of the entire Christian world it is the Passion Play of Oberammergau Yet in a volume entitled "A Rabbi's Impressions of the Oberammergau Passion Play," Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf, of Philadelphia, has stigmatized that noble production as reeking with falsehoods and vicious antiSemitism. In the rabbi's eyes, of course, it is, for to him the entire Christian tradition is a poisonous lie. The whole fabric of Christian truth, especially as it concerns the person of Christ is "the hallucinations of emotional men and hysterical women." "Thus," says the rabbi, "was invented that cruel story, that has caused more misery, more innocent suffering, than any other work of fiction in the range of the whole world's literature." a

  And thus the simple peasants of Oberammergau, presenting the Catholic faith in reverent pageant, are labeled anti-Semites.

  These are not isolated instances. When the Methodist Church put on the great pageant entitled "The Wayfarer,'' Rabbi Stephen S. Wise (American Zionist leader when this original was published, and one of the most active political leaders of Zionist Jewry in the United Nations; Ed.) played critic and made the solemn and silly statement that had he been a South Sea Islander (instead of the itinerant platform performer which he is) his first impulse, after seeing "the Wayfarer," would have been to rush out into the street and kill at least three Jews. It says a great deal, perhaps, for the channel in which Rabbi Wise's impulses run, but the tens of thousands of Methodists who saw "The Wayfarer:' will not be inclined to attribute such a criticism to the spirit of tolerance which Rabbi Wise so zealously counsels the Christians to observe.

The Episcopal Church also has felt the attack of the Jews. Recently (June, 1921: Ed.) the Jewish Press raised a clamor that the Episcopal Church was not competent to seek to interfere with it. It is not religious tolerance in the midst of religious difference, but religious attack that they preach and practice. The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and other Christian festivals, and their opposition to certain patriotic songs, shows the venom and directness of that attack. One parallel between the Protocols and the real hopes of the Jews is written in the common Jewish prophecy that Christianity is doomed to perish.

It will perish, Jewish intolerance today, yesterday and in every age of history where Jews were able to exert influence or power, is indisputable except among people who do not know the record. Jewish intolerance in the past is a matter of history; for the future it is a matter of Jewish prophecy. One of the strongest causes militating against the full Americanization of several millions of Jews in this country is their belief-instilled in them by their religious authorities-that they are "chosen," that this land is theirs, that the inhabitants are idolators, that the day is coming when the Jews will be supreme.

How can they otherwise act than in agreement with such declarations? The supercilious attitude adopted by the Jews toward the stock that made America is merely a foreshadowing of what would be the complete attitude if power and influence made it possible. Bolshevism, which began with the destruction of the class that contained all the promise of a better Russia, is an exact parallel for the attitude that is adopted in this courts regarding the original stock.

THE INTERNATIONAL JEW
by HENRY FORD, SR.

CONTENTS

Index

Chapter 1. Jewish History in the United States

Chapter 2 .Angles of Jewish Influence

Chapter 3. Victims, or Persecutors?

Chapter 4. Are the Jews a Nation?

Chapter 5. The Jewish Political Program

Chapter 6. Introduction to the "Jewish Protocols"

Chapter 7. How the Jews Use Power

Chapter 8. Jewish Influence in American Politics

Chapter 9. Bolshevism and Zionism