Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, let's do a new reading for substack and
for the supporters here. This may be a book that
some of you have heard of by Maurice Samuel, called
You Gentiles. It's pretty infamous. Anelope Hill has their own
version of it. Let me show you how they describe
it here. They say. There has been no shortage of
writings detailing and incompatibility between Jewish and Gentile people from
a variety of sources and perspectives. Many of these fade
with the circumstances it sparked them, but a few make
lasting contributions to the understanding of millennia of conflict, preserved
by his own stature as a titan of Jewish literature.
Maurice Samuel authored You Gentiles in nineteen twenty four, which
persists as one of the most visceral and fundamental contrasts
of Jews and non Jews. Emils writes with confidence as
a recipient as a recipient of several awards for his writing,
including the Annisfield Wolf Book Award and the It'sick Manger Prize.
With reference to his own deep familiarity with the collective
Jewish experience, Samuel makes no qualification for his belief in
the spiritual, racial, and religious incompatibility at Gentiles with his
own people. His thesis culminates in the ultimate rejection of
any possible reconciliation between these peoples. So it's very easy
for people to say that, oh, that's just one person writing. Well,
I mean, this is somebody who was very celebrated in
his day. Wikipedia describes him he was actually born in Romania.
His family then they went to England. He moved to
Paris with his family at the age of five, about
a year later to England, where then they moved to
England a year after that. He studied at Victoria University. There,
his parents spoke Yetdish at home, and he developed strong
attachments to the Jewish people in Yiddish language at an
early age. This later became a motivation for the books
he wrote as an adult. Eventually, he left England and
emigrated to the United States, settling in New York City's
Lower East Side. He served in the US Army during
World War One. A Jewish intellectual and writer, Samuel was
known for his role as a polemicist and campaigner against
anti Semitism. Most of his work concerns itself with Judaism
or the Jews role in history in modern society, but
he also wrote more conventional fictions, such as The Web
of Lucifer, which takes place in the borgious role of
Renaissance Italy. He Let's See. He and his work received
acclaim within the Jewish community during his lifetime, including the
nineteen forty four Ennisfield Wolf Book Award for his nonfiction
work The World of Shalom Alecam I Like him. He
received the Itzig Manger Prize for Yiddish Literature posthumously in
nineteen seventy two. He was a radio personality, appearing on
NBC summer program Eternal Light the Worlds We Live By.
He did a Bible, a radio show discussing the literary
and cultural impact of the Bible. He died in nineteen
seventy two at the age of seventy seven. He had
six fiction works and a ton of nonfiction works. The
first one was You Gentiles. The second one was I
the Jew, Never read Ei the Jew. Some of the
other ones are Prince of the Ghetto, Jew Want Approval,
the Gentleman, and the Jew certain people of the book.
So this is someone who was celebrated and someone who
was known in the Jewish world. This just wasn't some
random guy who wrote a book and someone found it
and was like, oh look at this. No, this is
well known. And in nineteen twenty four, and this would
be after World War One, Henry Ford is writing at
this time about Jews in the United States and the
international jew Also, nineteen twenty four is also the year
of the first real immigration restriction. It was a clampdown
in immigration that year that a lot of people took
offense to. So let me just scroll through here, here
we go. I got a copy, actually reading of a
printing of a book actually from nineteen twenty five, just
a year after fifth printing able of contents. The first
chapter will be called The Question. It's thirty one pages.
They're very short pages because it's like a small paperback
kind of book. But I don't know if I'll get
through the whole thing today, But yeah, why don't I
start and let's see where this goes. There are audio
books of this on YouTube and everything, and I think
that I think I hypocrite did an interview with someone
from Antelope Hill, because Anelope Pill has their own version
of this. If you're going to pick it up, you
get it from Antelope Hill, the use the promo code
PETE pete Q five percent off everything in order there.
But yeah, let's get into this and let's read it,
and let's see see what his message is. In nineteen
twenty four, chapter one is excuse me. Chapter one is
titled the question let me take a sip real quick?
All right? These last ten years and more, I have
been asking myself, with increasing urgency, a number of questions.
Is there any significance in the distinction I have so
long cherished, the distinction of Jew gentile not to be
found in the class of distinctions implied in American foreigner
or Englishman foreigner? Is there between us Jews and you gentiles?
That is, between the Jew on the one hand, and
the Englishmen, the Frenchman, the American on the other hand,
that which transcends all the differences which exist among yourselves,
so that in relation to us you are gentiles. In
relation to us you are gentiles first and afterwards and
without particular relevance in this connection Englishmen, Frenchmen, Americans? Or
is there nothing more implied in that distinction Jew gentile?
Then in a general way, and the distinction's Jew American
American Englishman, Englishman, Frenchmen. In other words, are we Jews
but part of the Gentiles Americans, Englishmen, Jews, Frenchmen? Or
is there a deeper cleavage between us? Is this Western
world divided primarily into two parts? You Gentiles, we Jews?
From the outset? I shall be asked, quote, even if
you suspect the existence of such a primal cleavage beyond
the reach of ordinary national or racial classifications, what purpose
can you have in urging it upon the attention of
the world? Has it any practical application? Does it in
any fashion clarify the status of the Jew? Or give
greater cogency to such claims of his as are still unsatisfied.
This question will be asked of me by many Jews,
but in particular it will be asked with the utmost
insistence by those Jews who have based our case for
national rights national equality precisely on this assumption that we
Jews are people like all other peoples, similar in needs
and impulses. That we are Jews, you are Englishmen, you
are Italians, you are Americans, That we the world's races
or peoples are all of us? Are all of us
similar in our differences? Leaving on one side, those who
deny the existence of any distinctions at all, Those that is,
who say that Jew, that the Jew is either a Frenchman,
an American, or an Englishman according to the place of
his birth, I would answer quote for me, the ordinary
nationalist or racial classification has not sufficed. If I have
long pondered this question of Jew and Gentile, it is
because I suspected, from the first dawning of Jewish self consciousness,
that Jew and Gentile are two different worlds. Between you
Gentiles and us Jews, there lies an unbridgeable gulf. Side
by side. With this belief grew another which is related
to the practical aspect of the distinction. I do not
believe that, situated as we are in your midst, scattered
among you from one end of the Western Well to
the other, we have the right to retain our identity
if we are but another addition to the gentile peoples.
This is in parenthesis. Nor, by the way, do I
believe that we could have retained it so long had
this been the case. If we are but one more
people added to the long roster of peoples living and dead,
we have no claim worthwhile under these circumstances to continuity
of separate consciousness consciousness. Such a claim could never have arisen.
Had we remained secure, segregated on our own soil, it
would have been our tests at birth right. But as
it is, our existence has secured an infinite expense of
special effort on our part and of particular discomfort to you.
Wherever the Jew is found, he has a problem, a
source of unhappiness to himself and to those around him.
That's an interesting way to put it. That's an interesting
sentence for someone to admit. I wanted to say before
I moved on, you know, talking about the reason why
I wanted to talk so much about who he was
and how well he was believed to know, how in
his community, how well he was known and regarded, is
because I just watched this documentary called Protocols of Zion,
and it's from like two thousand five or two thousand
and six, and as a Jew, his name is Mark Levin,
not Mark Levin, and he basically goes through the protocols
and he his whole thing is that well, me, as
an individual Jew, I don't have the power to do this.
So this is pretty much all bull I don't when
writings like this, when writing is like two hundred years together,
when you have all the writings of Jewish philosophers over
the centuries, you don't need something like the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion. That is, I don't consider it.
I don't take it seriously. I'm not going to read it.
I'm not gonna I mean, I've read it, but I'm
not going to read it to you. I'm not going
to have a conversation, a serious conversation about it. When
you read a sentence like wherever the Jew is found,
he has a problem, a source of unhappiness to himself
into those around him, and it's from somebody who's prominent,
somebody who sold a lot of books, somebody who had
a radio show, somebody who was popular in his day,
somebody who you know, most Jews, I would say, and
I'll just say New York and New York was I mean,
if you remember from Race Warren High School, there were
sixty thousand public school teachers in New York in the
nineteen sixties, and sixty percent of them were Jewish. So
you're talking about I think at the time fourteen or
fifteen percent of the city was Jewish. These people knew
who he was. This is not some obscure writer. This
isn't a book that fell out of the sky. This
is someone who is taking himself very seriously, and not
only taking himself very seriously, but he's taking us very seriously.
That needs to be respected when you're listening to what
he writes. Okay, onward. Ever since he has been scattered
in your midst he has had to maintain a continuous
struggle for the conservation of his identity. It is worthwhile,
in the face of this double burden our own in yours,
to perpetuate what may be, after all, an addition of
one unit to scores of similar units. Were these centuries
of alternate torture and respite not a disproportionately high price
for the right to increase by one page the already
overburdened records of the nations were at my belief, as
it is at least in expression, the belief of many
fellow Jews, that our right to exist is founded on
our similarity to other peoples. That where American or Belgian
or Italian has a right to homeland, culture, history, parliament,
we Jews have the same right for the same reason,
and for no other reasons. Were this my belief, I
could not find the heart to continue the struggle, or
to urge the struggle upon others. The effort is too severe,
the price is too high, But arden is insignificant. Were
we like other peoples, we ought to have done what
other peoples under similar circumstances would do. A people driven
from its homeland, a people ground into dust and carried
by winds of misfortune into every corner of the world
has no right to inflict its woes and longings on others.
It should cease to exist. It should rid the world's
world of its importunate presence. Such would be my belief
if I saw in ourselves only the replica with the
proper variations of the rest of the world. But this
is not my belief, for I see otherwise. Years of
observation and thought have given increasing strength to the belief
that we used and apart from you, gentiles, that a
primal duality breaks to humanity, I know into two distinct parts,
that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences
among you, gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divides
all of you from us. So what he's saying is
he is saying is this isn't a crack in the sidewalk,
This is a chasm, This is the Grand Canyon, or
the distance across an ocean. I'm aware that this is
a thesis what can which cannot be supported by diagrams,
tables and logarithms. Basically, what he's saying is it's not
I guess what he's saying is not logical. It cannot
be urged with the apparent half compulsion of social and
economic laws. The cogency of what I have to say
it does not depend on reference to obvious and ineluctable laws,
natural processes acknowledged and accepted. I am also aware that
the weight of what we call what is called learned
opinion will be thrown against me, that my connection will
meet with the ridicule of facile common sense and of scholarship. Nevertheless,
I set it down clearly that in the Western world
there are essentially two people's as spiritual forces, only two
human sections with essential meaning jew and gentile thing about that, So,
in the Western world you have Germans, English, French, Spanish
peoples who've had empires, people people who've conquered the known world.
And what he does is he says there are only
two jew and everyone else, So basically we're lumped in
with each other. He's basically drawing the line boldly, all
of you and then us. But at least what credentials
I have to offer? Since the presentation of credentials must
always precede the presentation of the thesis, what claim have
I on the attention of the world. I can only
answer that this book, being a serious book, much must
carry its own credentials and does not attempt to borrow
importance from outside sources. I offer myself only as a
Jew who has lived, observed, and thought. My experiences in
contacts have been somewhat more varied than those of most men,
but this has little to do with my views. The truth,
which is spread over the whole world, is also contained
in any part of it. The laws of gravitation are
implied as completely in the falling of a pebble to
Earth as in the rush of the Sun against the
counter rush of its companion stars. The law of Einstein
works no less truly in the crawling of a snail
than in the dizzy vibration of the fastest atomic subunit.
These laws are more easily observed in the one set
of cases than in the other. That is all, if
I have touched a truth, it has been primarily through
contact with life, And I have regarded books as but
a class of living things, to be observed and interpreted
in place in their setting life itself, observation of men
and women singly and in masses, a knowledge of their works,
among which books are important, a feeling for their desires,
perception of their intent in cities, laws, theaters, games, wars.
All this has been brought me to, has brought me
to the conception I shall set forth all scholarship, particularly
that scholarship which deals with the manifestations of men's desires
and fears, consists of unauthoritative, marginal notes, which are of
interest chiefly as giving us some insight into the nature
of those who jotted them down. It does no harm
to know the history that is in the books, but
the only authentic history is around us. It has made
daily in newspapers, theaters, meetings, election campaigns. And it is
less valuable to know that the waiter said at the
simple Sissamus cabaret in Vienna when I was there three
years ago, than to know what Terence reports a slave
to have said in Rome when he was there two
thousand years ago. What if my neighbor the professor reads
Greek rather than fluently, rather less fluently than did a
certain thick witted Athenian citizen who lived in the time
of Pericles, and by no means as well as well
as I I read English? Is that proof of wisdom
or understanding? And supposing my neighbor on the other side
the history, the professor, the famous professor of history knows
rather less about the Peloponnesian War than the intelligent college
student knows about the World War? Is that professor therefore
wiser than most men? Is his opinion on life more valuable?
And supposing another scholar purports to tell us what the
ancient Egyptians believed, and from his account of this dead religion,
pretends to teach the secrets of faith, Can he tell
me what John Doe or Isaac Leviy believes? Does John
Doe believe that Christ rose from the dead? Really really
believe that as a plain truth as he would believe it,
believe it if his mother, whom he buried five years ago,
should suddenly come walking into his house wrote it away
and cladd in her tattered cerements believe it as simply
and as terribly. And does isaac Levi believed that the
waters of the Red Sea were divided? As he would
believe it if one day below the Williamsburg Bridge he
were to see the water split rear and fall again.
And if neither John Do nor isaac Levi believes as
cogently as this, then what do they really believe, if
they believe anything at all? And if the professor cannot
answer these questions, what does he mean when he says
that the Egyptians believe that Asiris rose from the dead?
And what do his reports matter? There is no test
or guarantee of a man's wisdom or of his reliability
beyond what he says about life itself. Life is the touchstone.
Books must be read and understood in order that we
may compare our experiences in life with the sincere report
of the experience of others. But such and such a
one who has read all the books extent on history
and art is of no consequence unless these are to
him an indirect commentary on what he feels around him. Hence,
if I have drawn cheap chiefly on experience and contemplation,
and little on books which others will discover without my admission.
This does not affect my competency, which must be judged
by standards infinitely more difficult of application. Life is not
so simple that you can give a man. You can
test a man's nearness to truth by giving him a
college examination. Such examinations are mere games. They have no
relation to reality. You may desire some such easy standard
by which you can judge whether or not a man
is reliable. Does he know how? Does he know much history,
much biology, much psychology? If not, he is not worth
listening to. But it is part of the frivolity of
our outlook to reduce life to a set of rules,
and thus save ourselves the agony of constant reference to
first principles. No standardized knowledge is no guarantee of truth.
Put down a simple question, a living question like this,
should A have killed? B Ask it of ten fools,
five will say yes, five will say no. Ask it
of ten intelligent men. Five will say yes, five will
say no. Ask it of ten scholars. Five will say yes,
five will say no. The fools will have no reason
for their direction. The intelligent men will have a few
reasons for and as many against. The scholars will have
more reasons for and against. But where does a truth lie? What, then,
shall be the criterion of man's reliability? There is none.
You cannot evade your responsibility. Thus, by entrusting your salvation
into the hands of a pre specialist, a simpleton may
bring you salvation, and a great philosopher may confound you.
And so to life direct as I have seen it
working in others and felt it within myself, I refer
the truth. I refer the truth of what I say,
And to books I refer only in so far as
the air men manifestations of life. Bessie, you can tell
of what he's trying to say is that he's going
to be going on experience, his experience amongst Gentiles and Jews,
Part two of chapter one. But another question, more subtle
and disturbing, must be faced. I have said there are
two life forces in the world, I know, Jewish and Gentile,
hours and years. If this be a truth, we must
not be driven from it. From it if, like many
other truths, it is overlaid and obscured by the irrelevancies
of life, by the intersection and confusion of currents. Here
is the gentile life force, Here is the Jewish life force.
What their origin was I cannot say. I can only
surmise dimly what circumstances, reacting upon what original impulses, produce
the Jewish life force and the Gentile life force. I
can only affirm to the Jews and the main belongs
to Jewish life force, a consistent and coherent force, a
direction in human thought and reaction. To you others belongs
to Gentile life force, a mode of life and thought
distinct from ours. But the borderline is not clear. Not
all of us Jews are representative of the Jewish life force,
not all you Gentiles are altogether alien to it. We
have lived for many centuries in close contiguity, and if
not in intimacy. Our prophetic books, our most characteristic influence,
have been read to you for many hundreds of years.
Something in these books has developed here and there among
you a latent individual impulse to our Jewish way of
life and thought. Essentially, our prophetic books cannot change your
gentile nature in wh dray predestined hearts. They bring forth
fruit your outlook on life. Your dominant reactions are the
same today as they were two thousand years ago. All
that has changed is the instrument of expression. You live
the same life under different faiths, but something clings to
you here and there, resembling the original form of the
faith we gave you. Here and there, our somber, earnestness
breaks out on the dazzling kaleidoscope of your history, and we,
for all our segregation, have caught, particularly of late, something
of your way of life. As a few Gentiles have
spoken in Jewish tones, so more than one Jew speaks
the language of the gentile. Jews live a gentile life
here and there, while while gentile lives give expression to
Jewish emotions, yet the cleavages there abysmal and undeniable. In
the main, we are forever distinct. Ours is one life,
yours is another. Such accidental confusions, as makes some Northerners
darker than Southerners, does not affect the law that the
Southerner is darker skinned. The law holds, nonetheless for accident
and contradictory cases. You may even have Jews in your
midst who did not learn their way of life from us,
and did not inherit it from a Jewish forebear, we
may have authentic gentiles in our myths, in our midst.
These single protests are of no account. They are extreme
and irrelevant variations. And of his little account are the
occasion occasional transferences of customs and conventions taken over in
the mass. We may have customs and conventions of yours
imposed on our fundamental way of life, even as you
have surface credo of a Jewish faith imposed on your
way of life. But in the end, your true nature
works itself into the pattern of the borrowed faith and
expresses it self undeniably. So we borrowing from you finally
assimilate the loan, and in time make it essentially ours.
Beyond all these irrelevancies, which hide at times but do
not change the issue, lies that clear and faithful division
of life, Jewish and Gentile. Because I am mingled intimately
with the Jewish world and with the Gentile world, I
know well how easily exceptions obscure the rule. But I
know just as well the unsounded, the unsounded abyss between us.
What I've learned in your midstands in my mind sharply
severed from what I have learned in the midst of
my people. I listen to your life, to the brilliant
course which goes up from lands, governments, cities, books, churches, moralities,
and in my mind I can no more confuse it
with the tone of Jewish life than I can confuse
the roaring of a tempest with the deliberate utterance of
the still small voice. I repeat, it is of life.
I speak of masses of men and women, of the
things they say and do do their daily selves, as
I have known them. It is of life at firsthand
that I speak of yourselves as you are in masses,
and singly of my own people as I know them.
My conviction came first from this contact, and from meditation
on its meaning. I learned this belief of mine not
in books, not in history, but in Manchester, Paris, Berlin, Vienna,
New York. So Gentiles, I concluded, have a way of
living and thinking wherever they may be. So Jews have
a way of living and thinking. Had no books ever
been written, were there no histories to refer to, I
would have come to this belief. I do not believe
that this primal difference between jew and Gentile is reconcilable.
You and we may come to an understanding. Never to
a reconciliation. There will be irritation between us as long
as we are in intimate contact. For nature and constitution
and vision divide us from all of you forever. Not
a mere conviction, not a mere language, not a mere
difference of national or religious allegiance. With the best will
on both sides, successful adaptation to each other will always
be insecure and transient waves of liberality may affect our
mutual relationship. From time to time, we shall delude ourselves,
you and we, with the belief that we have bridged
the gulf. Many will pass our lives in that delusions.
But as has come to pass so often, the difference,
which is deeper than will, deeper than consciousness, will assert itself.
There is a limit to our moral and mental possibilities.
We cannot climb out of ourselves. The complete and permanent
reconciliation of your way of life with ours is beyond
that limit. Some of you already made you know, are
already asked them the question, if you believe that, why
do you stay among us? Why don't you separate? Especially
since twenty three, twenty five years after this it's called
it twenty five, they'll have their own country of course,
it is the frequent theme of editors, of popular professional optimists,
and of gullible and facile publicists that the paths are
reconciliation between you and gentile. Is the path of knowledge,
or rather of information. The more you know concern our history,
our customs, our belief, the nearer you will find us
to you, the less you will dislike us. But this
is feutile and unreliable amiability. It is by no means,
even in general rule, that the best informed people are
the least successible to anti Semitism, the most backward countries
are the most infected. Here is a cult, or at
least a feeling, which sits with equal grace on the
grossest of your peasantry and the most refined of your aristocracy.
In the one case, it is fortified by superstition, in
the other case by all the information the scientific research
ins of philosophy, history, ethnography, and anthropology can accumulate. Not that,
in my opinion, the aristocrat knows us better than the peasant,
the scholar better than the bore. But even if you
should understand us, and I offer you this toward that end,
we would not find mutual tolerance any easier. This book
therefore cannot be presented as an effort to achieve an
end which from the outset is declared impossible. I do
not propose to combat antisemitism. I only wish to present
what seems to me it's true explanation, in the hopes
of changing some of its manifestations. I'm going to stop
right there. So basically, in this last paragraph he tells
you what the purpose of writing this book is. This
book therefore cannot be presented as an effort to achieve
an end which from the outset is declared impossible. Basically,
what he has said so far and what I have
read is the gulf cannot be. It can't be bridged.
He says, I don't even want to fight anti Semitism.
I only wish to present what seems to me it's
explanation in the hope of changing some of its manifestations.
So basically, what he's saying, what he would appear to
be saying so far we will read more another day,
is that, Yeah, the true explanation of what Anzie Semtism
is is that the gulf can't be. There will always
be enmity, and his only real hope in writing this
book is to change some of its manifestations. And when
he says that, he's not saying that for our benefit,
the gentile benefit. All right, so a little bit of
the way through this. It's gonna take a little bit
to get through this, but it's really not that long
a book. It's really only like one hundred pages. So yeah,
but it'll be a nice thing to spread out and
read over probably a couple of weeks, all right, So
be back in a couple of days. Watch out for
some really fun episodes coming up, and one in particular
that I think everyone's really gonna like a lot and
might go pretty wide. All right, take care everyone, really,
just take care of yourselves and take care of the
people around you later. All right, welcome back to part
two of my reading of Maurice Samuel's You Gentiles. We
read chapter one, parts one and two within chapter one,
and the one takeaway we should come away should take
away so far is that he's making the statement that
the chasm between you and gentile is too big. It
will never be it will never be bridged, it will
never in his opinion, it's always going to be a chasm,
and there's no bridge that can bring the two together.
I just want to say again remind everyone this is
written in nineteen twenty four. This didn't fall out of
the sky like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
which I don't take seriously. As a scholar of Jewish history,
somebody who studies their history, I don't take that seriously.
It means nothing to me. It's other than a curiosity.
This is a book written by a man who was
known in his time as a Jewish intellectual, known within
the Jewish community, had a radio show. This was a
serious scholar and a commentator on what he sees around him.
And he makes that It makes very clear in what
we've already read that there's no science to this. This
is what he is seeing, and this is He's not
putting together equations. He's not saying a equills be here
but not here. He's saying, this is just what I'm witnessing.
This is what I feel within me. So let's move on.
We shall not come to understand the nature of the
primal difference between Jew and gentile and Jew if we
attempt to treat it merely as a difference in accepted
dogmas and philosophies. A religion in its formulated essence is
seldom the real religion. The practice and belief creeds, which
in their formulated essence are alien to a people, may
be accepted by the people, but the true nature of
the people asserts itself. I actually agree with that one
hundred percent. He's basically saying anything you write down is sure,
this is what we believe, but it's really what you practice.
It's how it manifests in reality. But the true nature
of the people asserts itself. The form and dogma of
the religion are retained, but the fabric, the institutions, the
true reactions which make the religion what it is outside
of its sacred books, these are the indices to its
actual force and significance. There is such a thing as
conversion of a man's opinions. There is no such thing
outside the field of long and laborious psychotherapy and individual cases,
as conversion of a man's nature. That is beyond the
reach of conscious effort, certainly beyond the reach of the
missionary change. A man's opinions and his nature will soon
learn to express itself through the new medium. This I
preface to my observations on the difference between you and
gentile because I anticipate the commonplace illusion to the similarity
of our creeds. See the identity of source and the
origin of the founder of your religion, Christianity, the reality,
not the Credo, is not a variant of Judaism. Whatever
Christ or his chroniclers may have intended, your nature is
the same today as it was before the advent of Christianity.
Within the framework of another creed, your instincts would have
woven a similar design. So basically, what he's saying is
Christianity didn't change those who call themselves Christians. It could
have been something completely different, and we who call ourselves
Christians would be no different. That it won't change, that
this belief structure on the outside will not change who
we are at the base, And if not religious, this
difference certainly cannot be in the nature of a philosophy
or a Veltenschang. It is true that a man's nature
dictates his philosophy. In Veltenschang, start that again, clear my throat.
It is true that a man's nature dictates his philosophy,
and Veltenschiang sheng, that's a word, even as it does
his religion but we must also remember that our logic
is nearly always at variance with our natures. A man's
nature expresses itself only indirectly, is never found in the
face in the face value of his assertions. Surely we
differ in religion and philosophy, but only if we can
religion of philosophy not as assertions, but as the practice
or art of life presents it in their name. Though
you and we were to agree on all fundamental principles
as openly stated, though we should agree that there is
only one God, that war is evil, that universal piece
is the most desirable of human ideals, yet we should
remain fundamentally different. The language of our external expression is alike,
but the language of our internal meaning is different. You
call that line in that part of the spectrum, read,
so do we. But who will ever know what that's?
What that say? But who will ever know that the
sensation read in you is the sensation read in us.
Life is fluid, and dogmas are fixed, And life trying
to come to terms with dogmas, does not easily break
with them, but endows them with almost infinite plastice. Under
the same dogmas, a man will kill another or die
rather than lift his hand to kill. One generation means
one thing in a dogma, another generation means another thing.
And at last, even the elasticity of the dogma will
not stand the strain. A sudden wave of emotion comes
to reinforce accumulated resentment. There is a revolution, and a
new religion is founded. New dogmas are accepted. Perhaps they
do not answer the need. Perhaps they express only a
passing fashion. Perhaps they are no nearer than the old
dogmas to a reconciliation between philosophy and instinct. But they
may take root, and the process begins all over again.
Instinct endures for glacial ages. Religions revolve with civilizations. Let
us differentiate, then, between a religion as a dogma and
the same religion as a practiced art or way of life.
We may compare religion with religion. This is legitimate and fruitful,
But let us, in so doing compare dogma with dogma,
practice with practice. And even when we treat of dogma,
let us be careful to distinguish between the dogma as
proclaimed and the dogma as it is transmitted by the
transmuted by the emotions, and certainly between the dogmas of
your religion and ours is little difference, for we gave
you the dogmas. It is absurd to assert that the
sole difference between you and us is that you believe
the Messiah has already come while we believe that he
is yet to come, or that you believe, even in theory,
in the doctrine of forgiveness, while we believe in the
doctrine of retaliation. It's interesting, huh, Christians believe in the
doctrine of forgiveness, and he's saying that Jews their doctrine
is one of retaliation even in theory. This difference is
trifling in the face of the overwhelming bulk of common inspiration.
The difference between us is abysmal. It is not a
disagreement about a historical factor, about a commandment which neither
of us observes. In some of these dogmatic disagreements, we
may find the key to our differences. They do not
constitute a difference. A few of them, those which have
not been stretched to accommodate your stincts, but express them readily,
were caused by the difference between us. They did not
cause it. That primal difference which I have sensed more
and more keenly as I have tasted more and more
of life. Your life in our life, is a difference
in the sum total of our respective emotions under the
stimulus of the external world. It is a difference in
the essential quality or tone of our mental and spiritual being.
Life is to you one thing, to us another, and
according to these two central qualities we make answer to
the needs and impulses which are common to both of us.
To you, life is a game and a gallant adventure,
and all life's enterprises partake of the spirit of the adventurous.
To us, life is a serious and sober duty pointed
to a definite and escapable task. Your relations to Gods
and men spring from the joy and rhythm of the
temporary comradeship or enmity of spirit our relation to God
and men. When he for those of you who aren't
reading along, he says your relations to Gods and men,
he properly makes a G small case when he says
here our relations to God, and he uses a big G.
But he doesn't cross out the O. Why has become
so common in modern day? Our relation to God and
men is dictated by a sober subject subjection to some
external principle. Your way of life. Your moralities and codes
are the rules of a game, nonetheless severe or exacting
for that but not inspired by a sense of fundamental purposefulness.
Our way of life, our morality and code, do not
refer to temporary rules which govern a temporary and trivial pastime.
They are inspired by elite a belief, a true belief,
a belief which reaches below assertion into extinctive reaction in
the eternal quality of human endeavor. To you, morality is
the right thing. To us, morality is right for all
the changing problems of human relationship which rise with changing circumstances.
You laid down the rules and regulations of the warrior,
the sportsmen, the gentleman. We refer all problems seriously to
eternal law. For you, certain acts are unbecoming to the
pertinent ideal type, whether he be a knight or a fellow.
We have no such changing systems of reference, only one command,
and all your moral attributes are only varieties of Queensbury rules, Honor, loyalty, purity.
These are sets of regulations. The best of you will
not swerve from them. You will die in their defense
like the gallant gentlemen you are. But you will not
brook the question whether your system of honor is founded
on right, whether loyalty has relation to intelligence, whether purity
has relation to the state of mind. Honor means but
one thing, to do, the honorable thing, whether it be
honor and dueling, honor among thieves, honor of women. Loyalty
means the quality of being loyal, independent of right or wrong.
Purity means the chastity of the body or the denial
of desire. As such, it is related to the game,
not to God. For us, these distinctions do not exist,
for we are serious in our intentions. We will not
accept your rules because we are not. We do not
understand them. We will not accept your rules because we
do not understand them. Right and wrong is the only
distinction we are fitted by our nature to appreciate. We
are puzzled by your punctilios, your quoint distinctions, your gentleman's
call me faults. We are amazed when you fight for them.
We are struck dumb when you die for them a
song on your lips. Not that we not that we
do not know how to die for a cause. But
we must die for a serious cause, for a reason,
for right, for God, not for a slogan without meaning,
for a symbol for its own sake, for a rule
for its own sake. We will die for the right,
not for the right thing. This difference in behavior and
reaction springs from something much more earnest and significant than
a difference in beliefs. It springs from a different in
our biological equipment. It does not argue the inferiority of
the one or the other. It is a difference in
the taking of life, which cannot be argued. You have
your way of life. We ares in your system of life.
We are essentially without honor in our system of life.
You are essentially without morality in your system of life.
We must forever appear graceless to us, You must forever
appear godless. Seen from beyond both of us, there is
nothing right nor wrong. There is your Western civilization. If
your sense of the impermanence of things, the essential sportiness
of all effort, the gamesomeness and gameness of life, has
blossomed in events and laws like these I have seen
around me, it cannot, from an external point of view,
neither yours nor ours be classified as right or wrong.
Wars for Helen and for Jenkins's ear, duels for honor
and for gambling, debts, death for a flag, loyalties, gallant gestures.
A world that centers round sport and war, with a
system of virtues related to these, art that springs not
from God but from the joyousness and suffering of the freeman.
A world of play which takes death itself as part
of the play, to be approached as carelessly and pleasantly
as any other turn of chance. Cities and states and
mighty enterprises built up on the same rush of feeling
and energy as carries a football team, and in the
same ideology. This is the efflorescence of the Western world.
It has a magnificent, evanescent beauty. It is a valiant
defiance of the gloom of the universe, a warrior shout
into the ghastly void, a futile thing for us, beautiful
and boyish for all its inconsistencies and failures. Without itself,
it has a charm, arm and rhythm which are unknown
to us. We could never have built a world like yours.
The efflorescence of our life, given free room, is profoundly different.
We have none of this joyous gamesomeness. We fight and
suffer and die, even as we labor and create, not
in sport, and not under the rules of sport, but
in the feeling and belief that we are part of
an eternal process. We cannot have art such as you have,
a free and careless lyrical beauty, songs and epics. Our
sense of beauty springs from immersion in the universe, from
a gloomy desire to see justice done in the name
of God. Morality itself we take simply and seriously. We
have none of your arbitrary regulations, your fine flourishes and
discipline gallantries. We only know right or wrong. All the
rest seems to us childish irrelevance. When God speaks in us,
when his overwhelming will drives us to utterance, are great.
Otherwise we are futile feudal. With you, there cannot be
a question of utility. We belong to the one mastering God.
You belong to the republic public of playful gods. These
are two ways of life, each utterly alien to the other.
Each has its place in the world, but they cannot
flourish in the same soil. They cannot remain in contact
without antagonism. Though to life itself, each way is a
perfect utterance to each other. They are enemies. Moving on
to chapter two, sport. The most amazing thing in your life,
the most in contrast with ours, is its sport. By
this I do not mean simply your fondness for physical exercise,
your physical exuberance, but the psychological and social institutionalization of sport,
its organization, its predominant role as the outlet and expression
of your spiritual energies. I will not go into the
history of sports among you, contrasting it with its absence
from our records and emotions, but surely there is something
of extraordinary significance in the predominance of sports in your
first high civilization, their religious character, and their hold on
the affection and attention of the masses. That the overwhelming
significance of this manifestation of life has been ignored is
due essentially to the promposity of historians who care for
dignity and scholarship more than for truth, and who often
lacking the shrewdness, insight, cynicism, craftiness, vulgarity, affection, and live wiredness,
in brief the worldliness to understand what is going on
around them. In newspapers, politics and movements, think they can
nevertheless understand history, which they seem to regard not as
yesterday's acts of the people around them today, but as
a detached and peculiar system, inaccessible to ordinary and uncultured intelligence.
I need not go to ancient history when I read
serious accounts of the history of our own times, and
see is what a seeming conspiracy of stupidity Our historians
ignore the most potent manifestation of modern life, sport, football, baseball,
and concentrate almost exclusively on such trivialities as politics, which
no one takes seriously. I am filled with astonishment and despair.
Such men cannot write true history. But some records there are,
and however small the attention which serious historians have given
to this. We must feel that the chief chief free passion,
that is, the chief passion not inevitably aroused by the
struggle for exist The chief spiritual passion was sport. Witnessed
the elaborate religious celebration of sporting events built on athletic contests.
Witness the adulation the love that was poured out to
athletic prodigies. Witnessed the dedication of the highest, most inspired
talents to their glorification witness the tremendous mass passions enlisted
in sporting events in Athens, in Rome, in Byzantium, and elsewhere.
But in this regard, as in most others, history is
by far less important than contact with life. I need
not study history or read books to know what sport
means to you. I have only to feel the emotions
around me. Read your newspapers, watch the records of your universities.
The most certain, the most consistent, the most sustained. That intense,
free emotion in your life is sport. And when here
in America, as indeed elsewhere too, some of your professors
and educationalist deplore and condemned the prepondering role of sport
in the schools, they fail to understand your spirit. Your
spirit is sport, particularly your young men, who are not
yet absorbed in the struggle for existence, and whose emotions
are therefore for the largest part free, must find in sport,
in games in contest, the most satisfactory expression of their instincts.
This is exactly why they have to keep us distracted,
especially young men. Young men, says here, your spirit is sport,
particularly your young men who are not yet absorbed in
the struggle for existence. That is why when it comes
out that there is growing groups of young men who
see that they have a struggle for existence and they
decide to come together to talk about it and to
organize such a threat to them, they would much rather
have you playing sports because they understand the struggle for
existence they don't want you to have. They don't want
you to be cognizant of that, because then you become dangerous.
For the most part, of course, both professor and public,
despite occasional jokes at their own expense and at the
expense of the institution, sympathize with the attitude of the
young men, encourage it not only by their energetic interest
in organized sport outside, but by the passionate attention with
which they follow the sporting records of the colleges. It
is a commonplace that the scholastic achievements of the universities
are both unintelligible and uninteresting to the vast massive graduates,
and that academic work can in no wives compete with
athletic achievement in taking the heart and interest both of
these and of the general public. If this was really
in nineteen twenty four, You're what are your He's writing
it nineteen twenty two, nineteen twenty three, what's your professional
sports leagues at the time? Major League Baseball, that's probably
the biggest one. Football has not become Basketball has not
reached any kind of height. Hockey's in its infancy. It
makes you wonder why professional sports became so important, Because
if college sports can occupy the mind of the young
and do damage to it, and they don't understand the
struggle that they're in, and the older, if they have
professional sports to watch, if it's just right there on
the TV or on the radio at the time, then
they become subsumed in it and they don't see the
struggle therein Maybe there is a reason why at one
time basketball was a huge part of basketball was Jewish
and they stopped playing and they bought the teams, And
even those who can understand the content of scholastic achievement
are also drawn more powerfully towards sporting achievement. I do
not agree at all with the few critics of your
universities who see in this state of affairs a decline
of the spirit of the country and of its educators.
This state of affairs is not decadence, but the full
and vigorous blossoming of your spirit. This is your way
of life. What he's saying is he's saying that when
you see some professors in academ come out and say, really,
maybe the sports thing is distracting, what he's saying is no,
it's not being distracted and concentrating on sports and not
taking anything seriously. Is who you are. We depend on that.
The contention of the majority of your educators and the
moral instinct is trained in the football and baseball field,
in boxing, rowing, wrestling, and other contests, is it a
true one? Is truer perhaps than most of them realize.
So read that again. The connection to the majority of
your educators, that the moral instinct is trained on the
football and basketball field, and box wrestling and other contests
is a true one. Is truer, perhaps than most of
them realize. Your ideal morality is a sporting morality. The
intense discipline of the game, the spirit of fair play,
the qualities of endurance, of good humor, of conventionalized seriousness
and effort, of loyalty, of struggle without malice or bitterness,
of readiness to forget like a sport. All these are
brought out in their sheerest and cleanest darkness and well
organized and closely regulated sports. Sounds like he's saying, you
love your rules, stick to that because we're not playing
by any and on the experiences and lessons which these
sports imply, your entire spiritual life is inevitably founded. It
is therefore unjust to treat this aspect of your life flippantly.
You yourselves, often failed to recognize, except an unknowledged instinct,
how deeply it is rooted in your life, and having
sundered it from the overt and organized homage which you
pay to spiritual values in the church, that is, you
have split yourselves, hence the comparative weakness of your organized churches,
which are founded on a misconception. Sport is for you
a serious spiritual matter. It is the proper symbolization the
perfect ritual, wherein your spiritual forces find the expression, also
find exercise and sustenance. They were cleaner witted who They
were cleaner witted who before the advent of Christianity associated
sport intimately with your religious life. Today you are practicing
on a vast scale the troubled hypocrisy of unhappy converts
who have been convinced in reason of a new religion,
but whose proper and healthy instincts drive them to surreptitious
homage to older gods. Or sport given its right place
again in your acknowledged spiritual institution, the Church, you would
be happier, clearer, stronger. For the premise, once granted, that
life itself is but a joyous adventure, a combat, a
passage at arms. You cannot do better than symbolize this
premise in your athletic contests and olympiads, with local worship
conducted on the village green, and in the athletic halls
and academies of the cities. The rigor of the rules
or sacred rights which attended the open association of sport
religion testifies to the profound inner compulsion which makes the
two identical. Indeed, even when religion and sport have been sundered,
there is more moral odium attached to bad sportsmanship, cheating
in the game, cowardice, selling out, striking, foul, and so on,
than to the contravention of a moral injunction bearing no
sporting character. What's he saying. Basically, he's saying that there is.
We would have more outrage as gentiles if we found
out that someone was fixing baseball games than we would
a politician was cheating on his wife, a politician who
considered themselves to be Christian kind of Inarguable. You cannot therefore,
do better, from your point of view than instill into
your young a keen love and admiration of right sportsmanship,
and encourage your participation in sports governed by severe regulations.
Trained with sufficient consistency, they will carry into their adult
life in ever imminent sense of right and wrong according
to your lights. And no better training could be devised,
of course, than that which is associated with your powerful
educational institutions. It is true that the system, even when
seen from its own point of view, has its potential evils.
Partisanship may become so keen that it thwarts the purpose
of the sports sport institution. This is, the desire to
win or to be on the winning side may become
so bitter as to overrule the moral sense, and combats
between champions, as once between the principles of opposing armies,
may actually discourage individual participation. But every system, if it
is a living thing, is subject to this danger. And
even out of the evil side you may draw good
if millions watch with breathless interests the combat of champions.
That combat conducted under the truest sporting rules becomes a
great influence, and fine gentlemanly athletes may become the teachers
of the nation. And again seen within itself, sport morality
has as severe a discipline, if not, from our point
of view, any spiritual sincerity, as a god morality. It
is as difficult and as exacting to be a gentleman
as to be good in many respects. Of course, the
two concepts overlap, though they are differently centered. Both call
for restraint, for consideration of rules. Both are in advance
on moral anarchy. In thus characterizing your ethical concepts, I
have already indicated the essential difference with difference which separates
them from ours. There is no touch of sport morality
in our way of life and our problems of human relationship.
Our life morality cannot be symbolized in a miniature reproduction.
We have no play presentation of life. Our young, even
like our adults, are referred at once to the first source,
to the word of God, to the word of the
prophet or teacher speaking in the name of God. Or
to secularize this statement. Our young, like our adults, are
imbued with a feeling of the absolute in their moral relations.
Our virtues lack the flourish and charm of the lists.
Our evils are not mitigated by well meant and delightful hypocrisies. Murder,
except in self defense, is murder, whether committed a duel
with all its gentlemanly rules, or an unrestrained rage. When
we are set face to fit, so how would they
act in war? When we are set face to face
with an opponent, and one must kill the other, we
proceed in the most effective way. We cannot understand the
idea that rules of conduct governed murder. We cannot understand
a man who, attacking another, insists that the other, in
self defense shall strike only above the belt. That strange character,
the gentleman thief, the gallant and appealing desperado, who recurs
with such significant frequency in your fine and popular literature,
perhaps points by meaning best. The idea of a gentleman
thief is utterly impossible to the jew. It is only you, gentiles,
with your idealization of the sporting qualities, who can thus
unite in a universally popular hero immorality and ridd or kite.
That's a very long German word. It is probable, of
course that the majority of your robin Hoods and Claude
Duval's we're nothing but low ruffians, devoid even of chivalry.
But their significance is not what they were, but in
what you make them, make of them in worship. The
persistence of the types is evident today as much as ever,
when popular fancy is charmed and you've tempted into emulation
by the raffles and lupins of the world of books.
At no time have we Jews sympathized with this type.
We are insensible to the appeal of the correct and
the graceful as a substitute for our morality. Nightly or unknightly,
courtly or uncourtly sportsmanlike are the opposite in our real
life means nothing. We only ask is it right or
is it wrong? For the rules which you bring into
life from the athletic field have no relation to the
ultimate moral value of your acts, and serve only to
give you the moral satisfaction of having obeyed some rule
or other while doing exactly what you want to do. Thus,
grown and intelligent as you may be, you govern the
hunting of animals with the most curious and seriously taken regulations.
You must not shoot a pigeon or a rabbit in
sport unless such and such regulations are obeyed. It is
unsportsmanlike you make a great moral to do about these regulations.
But what in God's name has this to do with
right or wrong of killing defenseless animals for sport. You
have attempted to infuse into business, which you have made
the stark translation into modern social terms of the old
kill and be killed, chaos and ineffectual gallantry, which will
again give you the sense of playing the game, while
giving free course to your worse instincts. I mean that,
apart from the necessities of the law, you attempt to
bring into the field of business to curious punctilio of
defencing master courtesies and pretenses, slogans and passwords which mitigate
only an appearance to the primal savagery of the struggle
service the good of the public, a square deal, all
the catchwords of the advertising schools, which give a flavor
of games, some friendliness to a world that is essentially merciless.
This is not intentional lying. It is not deliberate hypocrisy.
You believe that homage to these forms constitutes a morality,
It does constitute a morality of a kind. We, on
our part, recognize no particular system that divides business from
the rest of life. One is as honest in business
as in anything else. For us, business has not a
specialized idealism or a court etiquette, a particularized code of honor.
We are honest and truthful, or we are not honest
and truthful. It has nothing to do with our being
in this game or in that game a shopkeeper, or
a tailor or a banker. And because we cannot, by
reason of our nature, you in these playful chara calls
or curvetings, but drive straight to the purpose using the
plain common sense and honesty or dishonesty of the occasion.
You're bound to regard us, as many of you do,
as lacking an etiquette that is in your morality. A
similar division in other essential opinions illustrates the primal difference
between us. Your attitude towards combat, duels, wars, and all
the virtues pertaining to it is one from which we
shrink to you. Courage is an end to itself to
be glorified, worshiped as imparting morality to an act. To us,
courage is merely a means to an end. Hence, your
courage is combative ours passive Yours offensive ours defensive heroics
play a great part in your idealism none in ours.
To fight is never a glorious business. To us, it
is a dirty business. We perform it when we must.
And I suppose there is very little to choose between
you and us and the matter of courage. But we
cannot pretend that the filthy necessity is a high virtue.
Dulce et decorum s pro patria mori is not a
Jewish sentiment. For it is not sweet to die for anything,
but if we must die for it, we will. Nor
do we glorify the warrior as a warrior, despite occasional
individual defections of hours. From that view, if my brother
goes mad and attacks me, and I must slay him
in self defense, how can I be happy over it.
It is a cruel and miserable business to be finished
with as soon as possible, to be forgotten as soon
as possible. This is essentially the Jewish attitude toward war
and warriors. I do not find it in the Bible
delight in war and warriors. Our exultation in victory was
not the glorification of the warrior, but only a fierce
joy of having survived. We fought bitterly, vindictively in order
to kill, and our God was a god of war.
But however this may be, I know with utter certainty
concerning us as we are today, that the conscious Jew,
the Jew steeped in Jewish life, despises the fighter as
such a boar's war, And though he can die for
his faith as well as anyone else, refuses to make
a joyous ritual of combat. For when you gentiles assert
that you a bore war, you deceive yourselves. War is
the sublimeness to the sports, and therefore the most deeply worshiped.
Do you mourn when you must fight? Is a nation
plunged into gloom? When a declaration of war arrives? Do
you search your hearts closely, cruelly to discover whether you
yourselves or not to blame that this monstrous thing has
come to pass? Does a tremor of terror go through you?
Perhaps we are guilty? Do you clamor for the records
of the long complications which have ushered in this horror.
Do you go to your task of defense or offense darkly, grimly, bitterly. No,
You hang out your most gorgeous banners, you play merry music,
your blood run swiftly, happily, your cheeks brightened, and your
eyes sparkle. A glorious ascension of strength marks the throwing
down or the acceptance of the gauge. From end to
end of the land, the tidings ring out, and every
man and women, woman of metal, every red blooded man
and woman, itches for a hand in it. Let me
say clearly that I do not think all of you
are fighting heroes. I have no doubt that millions of
you in every country went to war reluctantly. But this
does not contradict my contention. It only means that millions
of you are not capable of living up to the
ideal morality which you cherish. But even the greatest coward,
even the most unwilling conscript, toys in his emotions with
the adventures and triumphs of war. I speak throughout this
book of the ideals to which you aspire and from
which you draw your moral inspiration. And it is certain
that war itself independently of all aims and justifications, is
a prime necessity to you, and a declaration of war
is a long awaited signal of release, greeted with extravagant,
nons hysterical joy. It is not love of country which
induces the flood of happiness. It is combat, the glory
of sport, the game, the magnificence of the greatest of
all contests. Again, they were cleaner witted those of you
who declared openly and frankly that war is a natural
pursuit of noblemen and of kings. The highest and most
life passionate among you, the most exalted, were to be
dedicated above all others to your way of life. Conversely,
the basist among you were accounted as unworthy of admittance
into the splendid company of warriors. The scullion must not
dare to aspire to combative distinction. Today, as of old,
you have nothing but contempt revealed in its true intensity
and time of war. For the true pacifist, your nature
is today what it was a thousand years ago, And
the somber obstinacy of the British worker still survives. The
tacit rage of the Scandinavian berserker and vain, and feudal
and foolish are all those efforts to dam up and
choke the extremest and most cherished outlet of your natural instinct.
But in war, as in all other games of life,
you satisfy your morality by means of amazing punctilios. To
kill thus leaves you clean to kill otherwises, ungentlemanly. In
a few of these fine points in the conduct of
war and of duels, there may lurk some true moral significance.
But it amazes us that in the exercise of this
punctilio you find sufficient righteousness to ease your conscious altogether.
Were you truly concerned with right and wrong, instead of
with the sporting right thing with honor, what a flood
of horror and of pity of prostration would follow each
of your wars, With what frantic haste you would fly
to the consolation of each other, With what tremors of
moral terror you would examine again and again the catastrophic
madness from which you have just emerged. Merciful God, slain
one hundred thousand men, fathers and sons in the red
rage of combat. You have disemboweled them, suffocated them, drowned them,
torn them limb from limb, blinded them. A million, loving parents, children, friends,
have we awakened, sweating in the night, out of a
terrible vision of last despairs of contracted, screaming agonies. And now,
when it is over, do you run to your churches,
and with streaming eyes, flinging yourselves at the foot of
the priests and altered, terrified, Lest the murder you have
committed might have been avoided, Let lest at least some
of the guilt rest upon your head. For surely it
is if even the faintest stream of culpability, the minutest
blot a grain, and all but indivisible fleck and oversight,
momentary impatience, pride, carelessness, leave you not utterly, utterly, utterly blameless.
You have need of all the divine compassion, all the
infinite forgiveness of God. But your wars have never ended
since history records of them, save with the same outbursts
of pride and insolence as began them. Was there ever
to tedaem turned into a cry of mea culpa? Was
ever a war entered in a history book, save as
a glorious adventure, glorious in victory, glorious in disaster. And
even if, after one hundred years a historian here and
there it tarnishes this the stainless records of your purposes,
with a single plausible doubt? Was there ever an awakening
of guilt a thousandth part as strong as the awakening
of pride and happiness which accompanies the recalling of the
exploits of any war, however remote, you have just passed
through the wildest and most universal of all wars. Search
your memories and your press. Well, where was the hushed humility,
the awe, the shuddering amazement which should have fallen on
the world when the armistice was declared? It's talking about
World War One? Did you not straight did you not
straightway send forth emissary to bargain and barter, to accuse
and to denounce, and above all to maintain your dignity?
What dignity prey? What was left of dignity to a
single one of you? What was left of decency to
any of you? Had joined in the furious and blasphemous
revelries of those five years? You hate war nonsense, you
enjoy it if in the passing tiredness which follows to
strenuous exertion, you pause a while to reflect. You do
not dare to think into the root causes and evils,
lest indeed you make war impossible. You tinker with a
few regulations, gas laws, flowment, war for rules, armed and
unarmed ships, and similarly feudal trivialities. You call each other
bad sports, and a day later you are prepared if
the occasion offers, to embark again on the exhiliarating, exhiliarating enterprise.
Yet I say for all this, you can never be
guilty in your own eyes, not one of you. Denunciation
can only come from one who does not share your morality.
Your conscience cannot be seared. You have done no wrong
or as the high mark of your life, the true
and triumphant expression of your instincts. And therefore, whatever church
and religion may preach, in the intervals between actual fighting,
you remember all your wars with wistful and longing pride,
as the greatest events in your existence. The splendor of
war in preparation and in action and in recollection, in
the rhythm of the training of the armies, in the
frantic excitement of battle in the glorious commemoration of monument
and song in tapestry is the flower of your civilization,
material and spiritual. In nothing are you as efficient as
in war. In nothing as true to yourselves strains to
the utmost. In this terrific game, your splendid faculties find
full and vehement exercise. And whosoever from under the shadow
of God upbraids you and discourages you as your eternal enemy.
I cannot undertake, while developing this theme, to answer all
of the objections which occur even to me. In part,
of course, some of these objections are on answerable, and are,
in my opinion, only overborne by counter objections. In part
they are feudal objections. But in touching on some of them,
I may make my viewpoint clear. I shall be reminded
that wherever war was declared, we Jews have responded as
readily and as equally as you Gentiles. Statistics, which are
quite reliable in such ual thumb matters, bear this out.
But I do not believe that we did so from
motives that resembled years. Many reasons compelled us. We are everywhere,
to a large extent, aliens a sense of inferiority in
status drives us to extremes of sacrifice in justifying our
claims to equality. More than that, we Jews are so
frequently and so vigorously reminded in all constitutionally governed and
liberal countries that we ought to be grateful for permission
to live there, that we developed a gratitude which is
not only disproportionate, but occasionally grotesque. Our children, in schools
and elsewhere are taught year in year out, contrasts their
present freedom, equality of opportunity with the oppression and bitterness
with which was the lot of their parents elsewhere. Frequently
the contrast, as painted in their imagination, is not a
duplicate of the reality. However this may be, these incessant
and vehement reminders produced their effect. The child almost comes
to believe that it was for the especial benefit of
oppressed foreigners that America became a free country, and instead
of accepting American forms of government level headedly, with the
proper degree of appreciation and criticism, he develops a suppressed
hysteria of gratitude. This is not a healthy and natural feeling.
Children should not be made to feel such things, and
if it comes to the matter of contributions to liberty.
We Jews have done as much for the enfranchisement of
man as any other people. But the Jew, the oppressed
par excellence, begins to look upon America's liberty as a
personal favor. Favor No wonder then that Jews will rush
to fight for America. Yet, despite the contradiction of figures,
there is still a strong impression abroad that the Jews
failed in their duty, were slackers. This feeling rises from
an instinctive appreciation of that difference between us. We Jews
don't like fighting. You Gentiles do Moreover, because you like fighting,
You are much more skillful than we in hiding occasion
occasional reluctance to fight. Indeed, it is obvious that the
more fearful you are of taking a hand in the combat,
the more you will glorify and idealize it. While the
Jew who is afraid adds actual and overt dislike to
his cowardice. Yeah, he's although I know, I'm sorry. I
agree with a lot of what he has to say
about how we fight wars. I don't agree he is
applying his scholarly academic He's applying that to all Jews
at this point by saying that they don't like war,
that they're reluctant to fight. They're reluctant to fight for others,
but when they think it benefits to them, they will fight.
We look at the pograms, so many of them were
started by Jewish revolutionaries and then put down, and then
they screamed pogram or you know, especially the sixteen forty eight,
which was just them going on to Jews going on
a murderous spree and Kamel Neetsky coming in to put
it down. It just isn't true. And yet I can
look at what he said about how Gentiles think about
war and agree with a lot of what he hasked
to say. And remember, he's not talking about northern white Europeans.
He's not talking about Eastern Europeans. He's not talking about
Western Europeans or Southern Europeans. He's talking about Gentiles. He's
talking about West, the West as a whole. But apart
from this, we must not forget that what the schools
of the Western world open to our children, your view
of things is gradually being imposed on our alien psychology
of the real and apparent successes of your effort. I
write elsewhere in this book, but here let me note
that the Jewish child in your schools is made to
feel that not to like fighting is a sign of
complete inferiority. Determined to become your equal, he essays, often
with success to become warlike in his attitude. But it
is an artificial success. He does from an imperious sense
of duty. What you do by instinct, He fights by
forcing himself to. He has not your natural gift and
inclination for it. I don't agree. I think it is there,
and I think that if he would have, I wouldn't
need to. I mean, he lived till nineteen seventy two,
so I need to read some of his later writings
on the founding of Israel. I'm assuming if he were
to discuss Irgun, Hagana stern Gang, the founding of Israel,
the war subsequent wars, I would assume cope. But who knows.
I would have to read more, and his books are
out there, so maybe I shall. But onward, this is
almost done. Of course, I shall be told in establishing
this distinction among others, that it is dangerous to generalize.
It is curious with what finality this commonplace is supposed
to crush the generalizer. Suppose it is true that it
is dangerous to generalize. Are not many necessary things dangerous,
like bearing children and digging coal? A truth is nonetheless
a truth because it is a dangerous truth, open to
easy abuse. Nevertheless, the most serious truths can only be
stated as generalities, and this most serious truth is among them.
This contrast and attitude towards war of jew and gentile.
And as long as the contrast exists, it will be
stronger than will, stronger than reason. As long as we
are at opposite poles, we shall have to make continuous
and strenuous efforts to get on side by side. All right,
that's the ending of chapter two. Sport, finish up chapter one,
and finish all of chapter two, and on the next
episode we will touch chapter three. Gods, but I will
say a lot of what he had to say made sense,
And if you're honest with yourself, you will know it
made sense. If you're not just being reactionary and not
wanting to agree with him because of who he is,
think about it. Take it to heart. Now. I think
that he's his saying that they are not a warlike people.
I tend to differ, especially when you consider this was
written in nineteen twenty four and there was already violent
violence being inflicted upon the inhabitants of Palestine at the time.
So anyway, thank you for listening. I'll be back in
a couple of days and we will continue with chapter three.
Take care, right, let's get back into this. Sorry, I
needed a few days off there recorded a lot, also
had a lot to do personally. So the last episode
we finished up chapter one, and then we finished up
chapter two, which was on sports and more specifically on war.
So chapter three is called titled Gods. So let's see
what mister Samuel has to say Chapter three. Gods. This
is the essence of our difference. That we are serious.
You are not. The French shading of the word comes
nearer my meanings. Puni pa seeru sorry French people. Not
as a matter of intent, but as a matter of constitution.
This lack of seriousness, thus uttering itself in your ethics
and governing the character of your relations to each other,
must also govern your religion, your symbolized relations with the universe.
And I've always felt, in contemplating your religious experiences and declarations,
the same alienation from them as from your morality. Your
feeling for Godhead partakes of the imaginative and lyrical playfulness
which is your essential nature. And whatever may be the
formal creed in which your feelings are rapped, their true
nature cannot be hidden. You Gentiles are essentially polytheists, and
to some extent idol worshipers. We Jews are essentially monotheists.
I hope my reading of Israel shahaks two hundred years together,
not two hundred years together. Apologies, mister soulshaniesan, but Jewish
history religion puts the bed that Jews are a monotheists
for the most part. Their leadership especially is polytheist. Their
religious leadership. I would assert this even if it were
not known that we have been singled out for centuries
by our obstinate monotheism. I would assert it on the
basis of my observations of the worlds I have known.
Monotheism is a desperate and overwhelming creed. It can be
the expression of none but the most serious natures. It
is a fundamental creed which involves individual and mass, and
and unfathomable sea of unity. In monotheism, there is no
room left for individual prides and distinctions, no room for
joyful assertiveness. I will agree with a lot of that.
There in monotheism there is no room left for individual
prides and distinctions. But a certain brand of monotheism that
is fairly recent when you take into account the history
of the Church, definitely leads open everything for individual prides
and distinctions and individual interpretations. No room for joyful assertiveness. Well,
I don't even really know what to make of that.
Monotheism means infinite absolutism, the crushing triumph of the one,
the crushing annihilation of the ones. So if you're just
listening to this, says monotheism means infinite absolutism, the crushing
triumph of the one capitalized, the crushing annihilation of the ones.
Ones is lowercase. To the serious natred is inconceivable that
this world should be at the changing mercy of opposing
and uncontrolled forces, that gods of varying power and purpose
should be making a sport of their own with us
and themselves. But to the sporting nature, the ghastly unity
of all life and power, the grim and paternal, settled
predestination of all effort, is when accessible and intolerable thought,
we Jews are incapable of polytheism, You gentiles are incapable
of monotheism. Let's see where he goes with this given
in the most explicit terms, the definition of monotheism, which
you have tried as sincerely as lies in your power
to accept, you still fail to make it your own.
If life here is a sport, an heroic epic, the
origins of life must be the same. Let the exceptions
among you proclaim what they will. I know that the
creeds of your masses, as I have heard them expounded
from pulpits and in homes, as I have read of
them in books and imperiodicals, are poleistic creeds of the
three and one. The three is stressed. The one is
a reluctant concession to the dogma. For where there is
the happy and imaginative gentile spirit, there cannot be the
complete and unconditional prostration of the individual. The utter breakdown
of self, which is revealed in our prayers before God
and our feelings toward Him, is an experience which you
are too proud to share. Most of our prayers are
helpless repetitions of our helplessness. The stammerings of a child overwhelmed,
overmastered by contemplation of the supreme unity capital you unity.
You cannot pray. Thus, at no time, even in the
presence of the gods, do you lose your self possession
your dignity. You too pray, but your prayer, compared with
ours a requests. Your offers of service to Christ the God,
are the offers of a vassal to a powerful superior.
Our prayers too beg something, but requests of ours are
folded in an abasement, a humility which would be revolting
to you. Hence it is that you have never, in
these many centuries of Christianity, produced utterances like those of
the prophet of Job and of David. Your inspirations come
from other sources, not from the one source. Your gods
are universal gods of the world, not of the universe.
The universal aspect of divinity, its attributes of infinity and eternity,
it's omnipotence. These find only your formal acknowledgment. But emotionally
you are unfitted to give them the true acknowledgment of
complete and almost incoherent abasement. That language is alien to
your spirit. The terror of the infinite cannot touch you
the eternal. You know, as it were, by symbol and formula,
but not by horrified experience. Your very professions and humility
are like proud trumpet blasts. Your habsburg burial ceremonies and
annoyance things by priests are but artistic flourishes which bring
into graceful relief the true soldierliness of your character. I
do not remember even having met the exceptions which must
exist among you. I do not remember ever having heard
a gentile pray with that abandonment, that objectness, that as
it must seem to you, fulsomeness of homage, which characterizes
our prayer. Only they who, like us are broken under
the burden of realization and the infinite can pray thus.
Only they who, in dreams and awaking ecstasies, and above
all in instinct, have been touched with the rage of
the undeniable power, of the undeniable power, can utter such
adoration of ours. Our very anthropomorphisms reflect the difference in
our spirit with our personified God. We hold speech such
as you would never hold. When we translate infinite extent
into infinite individual power, we shadow forth a being charged
with an intensity of existence. The concentration of life and force,
which you are unable to apprehend, being too free in
spirit to attribute to any outside force such untrammeled and
unapproachable tyranny. So your gods, too, are playthings, higher powers
in the tempestuous game of life. All your mythologies retale
of adventure for your very gods are not serious. And
most fascinating are the tales of those gods which you
fashioned when your first brilliant blossoming in Greece started out,
started out of your turbulent soil. Who could conceive the
mythology of Greece as a product of the Jewish people,
that grace, that sunny charm, that adventurousness, that quarrelsomeness. Could
gods like these ever have sprung from us? The emptiness
of life and space and time brought forth out of
your free and bounding imaginations a host of beings which
you imagined with infinite loveliness in stone, one god for
heaven and one for the bowels of earth, and one
for the sea, and God's for music and tragedy, God's
for commerce and for voyaging. Was not this a changing,
a charming game, a game of children? Can anyone say
that this was a serious and desperate attempt to become
in concept, the one with the universal spirit of life.
All right, let me just stop right here so I
don't forget what I'm going to say when I finish
this chapter, because I'm only going to read this chapter,
and this chapter is rather short. Yeah, I'm sorry, mister Samuel,
for the Western tradition, the Greek tradition, the Aristotilian tradition
being that of homogeneous societies in which people live free
and people be the shire. What you're telling me is
is that, yes, you want a homogeneous thing too, but
your goal is to enslave humanity. And that's what you
get from your quote unquote monotheistic God. It's it's literally
what he said in the first chapter. It's gentiles against
the rest of the world. I mean, it's Jews against
the rest of the world. There should be Germans, there
should be French people, there should be the English. There
should be the Americans who broke off away from you know,
broke away from that and started their own thing, the Japanese,
the Chinese, and they all should live where they live,
how they wish, and they should only interact with other
people when they want to or need be or a
hand is outstretched, but you don't outstretch the hand, do you?
You bring the sword? And I'm not talking and I'm
talking about a metaphorical sword too, whether it be briefcases
or checkbooks or loans. Up until a certain point when
you took over governments and now you have nuclear weapons,
I get it. It's you against everyone else. And you think,
because certain groups don't want to go forth and subject
everyone to their whims, you think you're better than us.
Just understand that it's exactly what he's saying here. This
is exactly how I'm interpreting it. If somebody else has
a different interpretation, please please put it in the comments.
But this is what I'm reading. We have this monotheistic god.
You guys, you're out there doing it's polytheism. You're doing
everything you want. You know, you have this group over here,
this group over here, and you're never going to be
able to beat us because you can't come together like us.
And plus your whole attitude isn't to subject the other
like ours. Is continuing compare with this, our own first gropings,
our own first clumsy expression of the universal spirit which
sought utterance in us. Even as an absolute tribal ruler.
Our God was one was master, a serious god. And
out of that god unity, which we felt even in
our primitive limitations, grew at last that concept which touched,
with under dying ecstasy, the lips of our prophets, and
cast over the life of the entire people for all
time the shadow of omnipresence and omnipotence. Even when our
God was a jealous god, his jealousy was absolute. He
would brook no homage, no homage but to no homage
but to him, no acknowledgment but of him. But the
jealousies of your gods were only the jealousies of sport.
They did not seek universal mastery and exclusiveness, only superiority.
To be primis interparus was the ambition of your gods,
with mastery, each in his own domain. But our gods
sought universal dominion in our hearts. Such dominion has made
all other homage inconceivable. Your gods gave you loveliness and
joy and battle. You liked your gods and served them
with alternating loyalties. You pitted one against the other, appealed
from one to the other, plotted with one against the other.
Your gods were kings and princelings, mightier than you and
more splendid, But no God of yours was the king
of kings in your soul. Your gods have never grown up,
nor any single one among them, Nor have you grown
into your God, but have always remained external, proud and
warlike and free, paying homage as of old, but retaining
the mastery over yourselves. You do not know of a
God who is all a God in whom you are,
a God who has reduced you to the dust, to
the infinitesimal, in whom you are breaking foam, a bubble
on an infinite sea. It breaks, and it was born
and is gone forever and ever. And so, despite occasional exceptions,
which I acknowledge freely, the dedication of all life, all being,
to God's will and way is alien to you. You
are not naturally steeped in God. You salute Him and
bring him homage. Your relations with your gods are occasional,
even if inevitable, that you cannot compare that with the
imminence and intimacy of Godhead. In Jewish life, God is
a commonplace experience. In Jewish life, He is a tacit
continuous miracle of all our days and knights, thoughts, and experiences.
We cannot conceive of a duality religion and life, the
sacred and the secular. A Jew is a Jew in everything,
not merely in prayers and in synagogue. In the eyes
of a Pietist, a Jew who does not follow the
rules and regulations of the synagogue, who even denies all dogma,
is not a non Jew. He is a bad Jew,
a sinful and rebellious Jew. In the orthodox world of Jewry,
every act and incident in an acknowledged Jewish pheno is
an acknowledged Jewish phenomenon, acknowledge that is openly by prayer,
the whole day is saturated with God or with Jewishness.
Our Jewishness is not a creed, It is our self,
our totality. Indeed, it may be fairly said that the
surest evidence of your lack of seriousness and religion is
the fact that your religions are not national, that you
are not commonised and dedicated and masked to the faith.
For what value has God for you if you do
not surrender to Him, even formally, all your gifts and faculties,
all your skill, and emotion. This is an amazing duality
of allegiance. One is an Englishman first and then a Christian,
an American first and then a Baptist. Your most generous,
generous loyalties, your readiest sacrifices, are inspired by your nationalism.
Faculties are nationalism. You claim this is typically American, this
is typically British, this is typically French. You cut this
off at once from God and the best of yourselves
you hold with you withhold from Him. But in the
Jew nation and people and faculties and culture and God
are all one. We do not say I am a Jew,
meaning I am a member of this nationality. The feeling
in the Jew, even in the free thinking Jew like myself,
is that to be one with his people is to
be thereforeby admitted to the power of an enjoying the infinite.
I might say of ourselves, we and God grew up together.
If you want to understand exactly how people like Benjamin
net Yahoo and all of these Zionists who do not
believe in God can be so obsessed, can be so
cult like, can be so fanatical, this is how what
does he say here, I am a member of this nationality?
The feeling in the Jew, even in the freethinking Jew
like myself. What's he saying about free thinking? He's not
part of He's not Orthodox, he's not part of some
hyper religious sect. He's a free thinking Jew, an atheist.
God is just from everything I've read and even things
I've heard anecdotally, some Jews say their God they all
are individually their God, and is one their God. That's
when you come to that realization. That's so lots to
think about. So it builds up a great nation, millions
of human beings, schools, armies, art, galleries, books, legislatures, theaters,
immense newspapers. Is not this the all in all of
national achievement? The best and strongest in you? To have
done this without your God is a central idea. By
taking over our newspapers. It's almost like they're just mocking, like, look,
how you're not even taking this seriously. You're so unserious
that we just walk in and take it, We just
buy it with money, and you allow it. Let me
read that sentence again, because he follows it up well.
To have built up a great nation, millions of human beings, schools, armies, art, galleries, books, legislatures,
theaters and men's newspapers. Is not this the all in
all of national achievement? The best and the strongest of
you to have done this without your God is the
central idea? Is that taking your religion seriously? No, any
nation that takes us religious seriously is a nation of priests.
Not too long after this, they're going to see a
nation of priests, as he describes it. You will tell
me that such things have been among you, that you
have had national religions national gods. I do not believe it.
I've certainly seen no evidence in any record which has
come to my attention. For we must distinguish between a
patron or tout or to tutelary god and a national god.
The first isn't especially assigned power. The second is to
complete reflex of the people, a God who was born
with the people, who is to raise on detra, without
whom the people would not have come into national existence.
You have had paid, you have had patron or appropriated gods.
We have a national god in the heart of any
pious Jew. God is a Jew, is your god, an
Englishman or an American? There is no real contradiction between
this confessed anthropomorphism and my claim that we choose alone
understand and feel the universality of God in anthromorphism. In anthromorphism,
we merely symbolize God. We reduce the infinite temporarily to
tangible proportions. We make it accessible to daily reference. For
neither we nor you can carry on the business of
ordinary living on the plane of constant abstraction. It is
not because of your anthropomorphism that I accuse your religious
feelings of being trivial. It is because of the manner
of your anthropomorphism. It is because of what your anthropomorphism produces.
And thus, by natural reaction, we, in our anthropomorphism, are
all the more personal, because in our abstraction we are
truly abstract, because we alone are dedicated to the infinite,
our God. When anthropomorphized is our own God. I might
say that there is no Jew who does not believe
in God. The free thinking Jews. The agnostic or atheistic Jew,
like myself, simply does not anthropomorphize him in his religious emotions.
The atheistic Jew is as different from the atheistic atheist
Gentile as the confessing Jew from the confessing gentile Christian.
For if gods are the rationalized explanation of religious emotions.
They differ in acceptance and denial. Even as these emotions differ,
and of course, by religious emotions, we only mean one
aspect of all emotions. Your emotions, your life reactions, differ
fundamentally from ours. Why I can't tell. But as in
morality you are freer, sporting, and very variegated, so your
gods are many varied and manly, and our gloomy and merciless. Monotheism,
intolerant and abstraction and in personification is the eternal enemy
of your gods. I don't know that there's much more
than I can already say that I've already said the fact.
You should go and read this for yourself. It's a
very short chapter. You can find PDFs online of this.
Read this chapter yourself, and remember that when he gets
to the end, he's going to say I'm an atheist,
and then you can start to begin to realize what
we're up against. All right, thank you everybody for tuning in.
It's off to you in a couple of days. Take
care bye. All right, let's knock out another chapter of
You Gentiles by Maurice Samuel. The last one was called
Gods and considering some of the comments I got. Yeah,
that raised some people's ire. But uh, having read this
so long ago, I'm trying to remember what this chapter
is about. So I'll be rediscovering this while you're discovering
it if you've never read it before. Chapter four is
called utopia. The dreams of men concerning the latter days
are a common index to their ideals of life, for
no one will think of the future except as his own.
These dreams, their close kin the night dream, are extraordinarily
difficult of interpretation, much more difficult than the psychoanalysts would
have us believe. But on occasions there are presented with
unmistakable clarity and directness by the by the prophets. The
functions of the prophet as a seer and a foeseer
have been confounded. For this reason. The true prophet sees
into the ultimate longings of his group, longings which may
even run counter to the day's desires. These ultimate longings
are shifted into the far future, beyond the reach of
temporal complications and compromises, and he that unveils Amen's in
most longings, when's credence is having foreseen the true finality
of life, I have chosen Plato's republic in our own
Hebrew prophets as the basis of contrast between your dreams
of the latter days and hours, between your longings for
perfection and hours. I have chosen Plato because of all
the seers who have sprung up in your midst, he
is the most universally adopted, and of all utopias, your
thinkers refer to his most frequently, that is to say,
he comes nearest to your desires. Hence, in discussing him,
I am discussing you. I've used the phrase of all
the seers who have sprung up in your midst because
it is true that you still mention the Hebrew prophets
more frequently than Plato. But it is of singular and
final significance that as soon as you develop free intelligence
and desire expression for it, you turn from our profits
to your own. The overwhelming bulk of your intelligent discussion
of life and the end of life centers around the
free philosophers or seers, and among these you have made
Plato preeminent. Plato's analysis of the of the analysis of
the ideal life still approaches your dreams most intimately, investigating
the true nature of morality. Plato bodies forth his ideal
of a perfect state, and with the license of a dream,
giving free reign to his imagination, unfolds step by step
his famous Republic. No considerations of practicality or of feasibility
were there to check the career of his fantasy. The
republic is to him life as it should be and
as he would like to see it. The apotheosis of
human aspiration. Contrasts this with the visions of his almost
contemporaries to Jewish prophets, and in this contrast you will
find again the key to our essential difference. The Republic
of Plato is an institution organized with infinite ingenuity and
dedicated to the delights of the body of the mind.
It draws its inspiration from the pure jorjois a vive
of the ideal man, of a perfect physical, of perfect
physical and psychic health. You would seek in vain that
extraneous compulsion of a God, which to Hebrews called inspiration.
There is no somber passion driving to creation, no intolerance
demands impossible of fulfillment. It is not God creating man
in his mold, that is man creating God or the
gods in his mold gods that are companionable and comprehensible.
He sets before you a pretty intriguing little model, a
city not too big to lose, the characteristics of a
city which sundered from universal humanity, untouched by the universal hunger,
restricts supreme goods to the possession of a comfortably secreluded group.
It is a city for the prosecution of the happy
and artistic life. The harmonies and symmetries shall be carefully guarded,
the satisfaction of body and of mind wisely and cleverly pursued. Nay,
in that supreme human product, they shall even be astounding triviality.
A censor. There shall even be a censor. There is
a wealth of ingenuity devoted to these questions. How shall
children be initiated into the art of war? How shall
cowards and heroes treated? What about the plundering of the
slain and the perpetuation of deeds of battle in monuments? Now?
Is it not of the greatest moment that the work
of war shall be well done? Or is it so
easy that anyone can succeed in it and be at
the same time a husbandman, or a shoemaker or a
laborer or any other trade whatever, Although there is no
one in the world who could become a good drought
player or dice player by merely taking up the game
at unoccupied moments, instead of pursuing it as his special
study from childhood. And will it be enough for a
man merely to handle a shield or any other of
the arms and implements of war, to be straightway confident
to play his part well that very day in an
engagement of heavy troops, or in any other military service.
Is it not the greatest moment that the work of
war should be well done? This is this in a
vision of human perfection? For it never occurs to Plato
that perfection if in humanity precludes the possible ability of
war and treating of God? He says, surely God is
God in reality, and is so to be represented. But
what can we make of his ultimate good? Is not
his God merely a good thing? As right is for
you the right thing? And what can we make of
his God? When after talking of the goodness and dignity
of God, he goes on to talk of the gods,
and of how the poets are to be arranged for
not treating them respectfully in that they make them laugh
or portray them in undignified occupations and postures. Well, does
he say the inquiry we are undertaking is no trivial one,
but demands a keen sight. He does not say that
it demands the aid of God, or of a loving heart,
or hunger after righteousness. But the very question of God
is a trivial one. For, as one says in this book,
it is urged, neither evasion nor violence can succeed with
the Gods. Well, but if they either do not exist
or do not concern themselves with the affairs of men,
why we need concern ourselves? Why need we concern ourselves
to evade their observation. It's amazing that he's already admitted
that he's an atheist, but he just keeps bringing up God.
This graceful skepticism, which strikes the opening note of the book,
sets the tone for the entire theme, What is justice? What?
Indeed does any man that loves the true justice, not
the game, ever asked this question? Can anyone truly believe
that the subtlest and sk skillfulest analysis of justice will
help one shot in creating love of justice? Desire for justice,
a vision of the perfection of mankind, and children being
trained for war. Contrast it with this. In that day
there shall be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria,
and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian
into Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians.
In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt
and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of
the land, whom the Lord of Hosts shall bless, saying,
blessed be Egypt, my people, and Assyria the work of
my hands in Israel mine inheritance, or with a better
known passage. And it shall come to pass in the
last days that the mountain of the Lord's house shall
be established on the top of the mountains, and shall
be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow
into it. And many people shall come and say, come,
let us go up to the mountains of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob. And he
will teach us of his ways, and we will walk
in his paths. And he shall judge the nations, and
shall rebuke many peoples, and they shall beat their swords
into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall
lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn any
more war. I think I've said before, and Israel Shahak
pointed out in his book Jewish History Jewish Religion, for
a people who don't believe in God, they are addicted
to this book because this They take that book to
mean that it's talking about them. That is it. Is
it talking about someone named Maurice Samuel from Romania? From Europe?
Is it talking about a European somebody who has less
DNA in him, tying him to the land of the
Middle East than the average Palestinian. A vision of the
perfection of mankind, with censors and with carefully groomed gods
the limit of his imagination. But this and the arth
shall be filled with the knowledge of God, as the
water has covered the sea. And this and it shall
come to pass afterward that I shall pour out my
spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters
shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young
men shall see visions, and also upon the servants and
upon the handmaids. In those days I will pour out
my spirit referencing spiritual what spirit is he looking for.
And because his world is not God's world and the
world of his self created gods, he must sit down
and argue anxiously what is justice? But he that really
loves justice asks no questions. He cries instead, seek good
and not evil, that ye may live. And so the Lord,
the God of Hosts, shall be with you as ye
have spoken, hate evil and love the good, and establish
judgment in the gate, and let judgment run down his waters.
And righteousness is a mighty stream. And when baffled by
the inadequacy of his human standards, your philosopher refers justice
to the categoric imperative, he betrays the triviality of your world.
What is that categoric imperative that helpless compromise and confession?
What man recognizes it will bow to it, That phrase
itself as its own denial. For he that refers mankind
to a categoric imparative is himself neither categoric nor imperative.
But even the death will hear and tremble when the
prophet thunders. Thus saith the Lord, there is the categoric imperative.
For me, conscious of being Jewish and of the meaning
of being Jewish. It is impossible to write of this
contrast without bias, as if this book were merely an
intellectual exercise. Because I am Jewish, I look with ultimate
aversion on the world which finds supreme and ideal expression
in Plato's Republic. And though I may repeat that this
is no question of right and wrong in these two worlds,
yours are ours, I cannot but feel profoundly and vehemently
that ours is the way and the life. I can
feel how many of you would have loved to meet
him right now. Yet I would pay what tribute I
can to the dreams of one like Plato. I have
at least touched your world closely enough to have caught
some of the beauty of its freedom. There's a Jewish
legend which tells that when God brought the Law his
Law to the children of Israel assembled at the foot
of Sinai, after he had offered it to all the
other peoples, only to have it rejected. He left them
no choice, but said, either you'd take my law, or
I will lift up this mountain and crush you beneath it.
There are any of you who are familiar with Citeriology
and the New testament thing king what I'm thinking, who's
been crushed beneath it? For rejecting it? I attach no
psychological significance to the fable. The practice of interpreting fables
psychologically is as a rule, a dishonest one. But quote
it as a handy illustration. We are not free to
choose and to reject, to play, to construct, to refine.
We are a dedicated, enslaved people predestined to an unchanged relationship.
Freedom at large was not and is not, a Jewish
ideal service love consecration. These are ideals. With us. Freedom
means nothing to us. Freedom to do what? Yet in glimpses,
I understand the charm of your life, and sometimes lose
myself in the fascination of your Plato's dream such a world,
as he foreshadows, a world of sunlight, exercise, singing fantasy,
a world of graceful and elastic bodies, of keen, flashing minds,
of clash and effort, war and heroes and monuments. A
life wheel and dashing and splendid formations, rejoicing under free
and loving scot lovely skies. A life without brooding in gloom,
without the intolerable burden of this unrelaxing imminence man in
man's effort, Man's love and agonies are ends in themselves
to be exploited for themselves, the coming and going of
men and nations and gods, or without ultimate significance, a
dance of atoms, a passing ecstasy, without thought of the sinister,
beyond beautiful, But not for us. While this dance goes on,
while nations and gods enter the game and leave it,
we continue through all time and apparition, almost a dread
reminder of infinity. He is so jealous, it's ridiculous. He's
so jealous that you and I can look upon beauty,
that these things mean so much to us, and he
rejects them out of hand. Hope singing, being able to
imagine your dreams of perfection are only a piece of
your present life. The transient become permanent. The skies will
be blue forever, Your dance will never end, Your bodies
will always be strong, your WIT's keen, your battle's glorious.
The game will reach its limit of enjoyment. But for us,
this is not an apotheosis, this is not a vision.
For us, the end is ecstatic unity, the identification of
man with God. You get the idea that God has
basically every you know, there's the glory of God, which
is to be worshiped, but there's also the wrath of God.
There's his as church fathers have written in the past,
his terribleness, the catastrophic things he can do, and you
get this idea that that's the only part of God
that they want associated with them. He's saying that that's
the only part of God that he wants to associate with.
He doesn't see joy in God. He only sees that
God wants things done a certain way, and only a
certain way, and everything outside of that is sin, and
that's what he wants the world around him to see him.
As you would like to play with your gods forever
we will not we will return to God to the universe.
Yours is a sunlight afternoon with a combatants swaying forever
in a joyous struggle. Ours is a whole world with
the spirit of God poured through all things. Your ideal
is Plato's republic. Ours is God's kingdom. Yeah, I just
don't it's baffling some of the some of you have
commented that this is just frustrating and it is because
you can't relate to it. And then that's his whole
point from the beginning. We're not going to be able
to that's it. Be back in a few days, all right,
take care, There is a short one, but all right,
everyone ready for chapter five of You Gentiles. This one
is called loyalty. Whenever friendly tribute has been paid to
the higher ethical nature of the Jew, let me start
over again. Whenever friendly tribute has been paid to the
higher ethical nature of the Jew, it has always been
made to appear that the Jew obeys the law of
a common morality more strictly than does the gentile. Jews
and friends of Jews have wanted to make it appear
that if we differ from you ethically, it is that
we are more self sacrificing, more generous, more loyal, honor, honest,
et cetera. I do not desire to make it appear so,
and in the foregoing pages I have tried to avoid
any such implication. Within our system, we need to better
within our system, we need be needed, We need be
neither better nor worse behave than you within yours. Not
only is most of this is just such an inversion.
He just writes it in such a way as to
be like, oh, look, look how smart I am. He's
writing in the nineteen twenties, and basically what he's trying
to write in old English, or trying to write in
one hundred year old English. Prior to this, we get
a I'll even give you a grant you you're smart.
You're smart. We may transgress as frequently as you, perhaps
more frequently I cannot tell. It is on the nature
of the systems that I base the distinction. We deny
your very system, you hours, so that casually we must
seem immoral to you, you to us. That is why
even the lowest type of gentile despises the Jew, the
lowest type of Jew the gentile. For it is well
to remember that criminals do not deny a system of ethics,
They only transgress it. To the criminal, the subverter of
a nation of morality is a horrible creature, as which
I have already intimated. To the coward, the pacifist is
particularly abhorrent. This must spring from the fact that for
the professional criminal, it is essential that humanity would otherwise,
that humanity should be moral. His very existence as a
criminal would otherwise be impossible. Indeed, he has more reason
than anyone else to foster a sense of morality in mankind,
for the more exceptional he is the better for his trade. Hence,
his greatest enemy is not the policeman, for the policeman
maintains a social order which is his prey, but the
moral anarchist. And since the Jew is to the gentile order,
and since the Jew is to the gentile order of
conduct a moral anarchist, the gentile criminal who has come
into contact with Jews will be the aptist to hate Jews.
It is for this reason I think that criminality is
so closely allied to anti Semitism. This it's the moral anarchist.
And since the Jew is to the gentile order of conduct,
a moral anarchist, the gentile criminal who has come into
contact with Jews will be the aptist to hate Jews. Wow.
In the attitude of the public towards literary and stage censorship,
I find the clearest illustration of this distinction between the
breaking of law and the denial of law. A play
which is indecent may be so for one of two reasons.
Either it deals with sex within the frame of morality,
or it denies the validity of this morality. In the
first case, which covers most successful plays, we have no
attack on current notions of what is right and wrong
in the sexual relationship. We have indeed complete acceptances of
the current principles of sex morality. But with this acceptance
and princip goes a generous denial. In practice, plays of
this kind cover countless breaches of morality with a knowing wink,
a tolerant appeal to human weakness. It is ludicrous to
deny that the desire to tickle and provoke the sexual
appetite and covertly to encourage its promiscuous satisfaction, governs these plays,
but it is not made a principle at all. It
is the breaking of the law, not the denial of it. Hence,
such plays, except when they become too obvious in their
purpose and thus become an overt attack and mass, are
tolerated by the censorship and encouraged by the public. But
the play, which has little sex appeal yet seriously denies
the validity of accepted sex morality, is dealt with promptly
and severely. And among those who condemn it most vigorously
will be found those who frequent assiduously the first type
of play, I see nothing incongruous. Incongruous in this nothing
illogical even for the first type of play is perhaps
the safety valve to human nature. It remits us our
unavoidable allowance of license, without which morality would become an
insufferable imposition. But the second type of play breaks up
morality completely to the system of law. The a moralist
is more dangerous than the criminal, then well, yes, But
why I would say the amoralist is more dangerous than
somebody who seeks to destroy morals, is more dangerous than
someone who seeks to steal. But why does he think
that as such? The naked chorus girl is less dangerous
than the naked truth. Such a danger, a danger not
merely of malpractice, but of essential denial, is the Jew
in your morality and against the Jew. There is a
union sucker of all classes and conditions of men, the prince,
the labor or the professor, the saint, the thief, the prostitute,
the soldier of the merchant. There does not seem to
be a single country with a history which has not
been anti Semitic at one time or another. Why why
if there is a country in the world where Jews
have not gone, there's no anti Semitism there. But once
they show up, anti Semitism appears. And I've heard Jewish
philosophers say this. They say it. I think he even
said it in a previous chapter. There is no country
today of which the Jew can say. In this country,
anti Semitism will never become triumphant. You're dislike of us
finds uneven and unequal. Expression is lulled into rest for
a time. At times is overborne by generous impulses. But
it is equality inherent in the nature of things. Nor
is it conceivable to me that as long as there
are Jews and Gentiles, it should ever disappear. Well, why
for your system of morality is no less a need
to you than ours to us, And the incompatibility of
the two systems is not passive. You might say, well,
let us exist side by side and tolerate each other.
We will not attack your morality nor you hours. But
the misfortune is that the two are not merely different.
They are opposed in mortal though tacit enmity. No men
can accept both, or accepting either to otherwise than despise
the other. No single attribute or virtue shows our mutual
enmity more clearly than that of loyalty, which, among all
the attributes contributing to your morality, is perhaps the most
dearly cherished and most vehemently advocated. It is impossible for me,
in writing of it, to take up a purely analytical
attitude analytic attitude, but I believe that the prefaces and
aversions which I hear express will at least serve to
make clear the irreconcilable difference between Jewish and gentile morality.
The abstraction loyalty is not related to good or bed.
Loyalty is preached naked as a virtue for itself. It
is proper and right to be loyal, to do a
thing out it is proper and right to be loyal.
He so, I already said, he's an atheist. He's what
is his philosophy? He has no philosophy. His philosophy is
to call himself an atheist and then say that he
obeys God. How do you deal with someone like that?
It is proper and right to be loyal to do
a thing out of loyalty. Loyalty to a man, to
a group, to an idea is in itself a sort
of justification. To develop a loyalty is in itself commendable
to the jew Naked loyalty is as incomprehensible a bewildering thing.
That men should be called upon to keep a quality
of this virtue on constant tap, to be applied on
instruction to this or that relationship is not merely irrational
to us. It is beyond the apprehension of our intelligence.
We can understand love born of a natural relationship, But
the quality of love differs essentially from the quality of loyalty.
Loyalty is demanded as an independent quality, as a thing
in itself. It is cultivated. Love cannot be cultivated. He
quotes cultivated. There it is stimulated and forced. It is
not demanded essentially that you love. It is demanded that
you be loyal. Very often, indeed, loyalty is demanded where
a demand for love would be too obviously ludicrous, For
the application of loyalty is to you, as seemly in
the case of an association of shoe salesman, as in
the case of country itself. It is expected in your
world that a man should be loyal to his country,
to his province, to his city, to a section of
the city, to his college, to his club, to his
business associations, to his fraternity, to every chance group in
which events may bring him. So where you're born, your country,
that's a chance group owes no loyalty. Where you live,
what section you live in. No loyalty city, no loyalty
section of the city, No loyalty college, No loyalty that
makes sense. Club well, Fraternity well, he says, fraternity up
here has to be loyalty, business associations. It's not a
blind loyalty to every chance group into which events may
bring him. In the first instance, country, the distinction between
love and loyalty startlingly clear. Love of country is a
profound spiritual quality. It may go hand in hand with
a dangerous and exalted morality. But loyalty merely says, my
country must triumphit all her undertakings, whether they be right
or wrong, or rather, there is no such thing as
my country wrong. And in loyalty to king, class or church,
the same distinction or substitution is observed. Loyalty is a
rigid code of behavior, not an emotion. He's just going
black and white. You can have a loyalty to your country.
But he doesn't even know how to say. I don't
know that he knows how to separate country from government.
Because nation is people, government is government. How many people
have a loyalty to the nation but don't have a
loyalty to this government. It's all black and white in
his estimation. But the real nature of loyalty is only
seen in its application to those relationships which are much
more fortuitous than those of country, church, class, And these
loyalty is clearly revealed as a fictitious and artificial regulation
with no roots in moral conviction. Let us take the
case of a young man who's faced with a choice
of college. He may have preferences, but there is no
compelling association which identifies him with any one institution. The
choice is socided finally by some quite irrelevant influence. He
goes to any one college as he might have gone
to another. Well, what if his father went there, his
grandfather went there, I mean, But once he is there,
loyalty demands that he regard this college as the best
in the country, perhaps in no particular for particulars or
occasional to tangible, but at large, the best, the finest,
the noblest. I never felt that in any college, I
want to one to three of this college, he must
think and above all, speak with enthusiasm, passion, and devotion.
He must defend its name against all aspirations without investigating
their foundations. If he even stops to consider the plausibility
of these aspirations before denouncing them, the quality of his
loyalty is already second rate, or he is just a
nuanced thinker. The scholastic reputation of his college may be
less than mediocre. It's staff may not number a single
scholar of note. It's alumni maybe an indistinguishable mob of
obscure failures. Worst of all, it's football and baseball teams
maybe the laughing stock of the locality that does suck.
As somebody who has been on as at least high
school team that was the laughing stock of the locality.
It does suck. So what, But his college is the
best and noblest in the country and the world. The
astonishing feature of all this being being that not only
his schoolmates except him to say, expect him to say,
and seem to believe so, but that everybody outside the college,
convinced of its worthlessness, also expects this of him and
considers him rather a cat if he acquiesces and what
to them may be obviously true. I don't. I've rarely
been around somebody who made their you know, I mean,
I know you can see people who make their college
and where they graduated from, and people even do this
with the military, where that becomes their identity for the
rest of their life. You know, if you see an
older man and he's wearing the hat of the ship
that he's served on or something like that, he's obviously
made that his identity. I don't know how I feel
about that. I mean, I just have to say to
each his own, because I don't feel that way. There
has to be a reason why I'd be loyal to something,
not just because I've sunk money into it or something
like that. That makes no sense to me. Maybe I'm different,
and maybe he's right. I don't think he is. At
least most of the people listening to this. This obligation
of loyalty must pursue the man to the end of
his life. Forty years after he had left his college.
He will be regarded with suspicion as something less than
a gentleman. If he should be discovered that his alma
mater was is an extremely inferior and uninteresting institution. It
may be all that you know, but a man's got
to be loyal to his college. Who's he talking to?
He heard one person say this, two people say this,
and I mean basically this to me just sounds like
a straw man. That's that he's erected and he's burning down.
I mean sorry. Which is true of college loyal What
is true of college loyalty is true of other loyalties.
A man who joins the army and is assigned to
any regiment must have loyalty for his regiment, which means
that he must seem to lose the faculty of discrimination
and criticism as soon as the regiment he was accidentally
assigned to is under consideration. Should he, in later life
become a member of a fraternity, of a business association,
of a poker club, he must be loyal. He must
be loyal even at large without an organization's be loyal too.
He must be loyal to the paperman, facturing trade, to
the cleaners and desires to the transport business. And if
he goes down into a factory to earn by the
sweat of his brow and under the bitter dress, a
bare livelihood. He must at once be loyal to his employers.
But the application of loyalty is sometimes pushed to extremes
which are nothing short of grotesque. One finds in surface cars.
One finds in surface cars, One finds in surface cars
notices like this, be loyal to the Bronx, to Bensonhurst,
to Wopping, to Pendleton, to Charlottenburg, to the Ring, to
the Marshall Kowska to mont Martra. Sometimes I have wondered,
if you live in the Bronx and are loyal to
your neighborhood grocer, how long are you supposed to yearn
for him after you have moved to Brooklyn? And how
soon may you, with the seeming with seemliness, develop a
loyalty for your neighborhood grocer in Brooklyn. He's he's fucking
out of his Sorry, he's out of his mind. He's
a he's a madman. Now you can make the argument
that maybe people should be loyal to their local grocer.
Maybe someone wants to make that argument. It's not me,
But how many people do you know who've like? You know?
There are believe me, when I left Atlanta, there are
some things that I missed. It wasn't that I was
loyal to them, It was because they were convenient and
I liked them. There has to be a reason for
me to be loyal. Or are you supposed to leap
into your loyalties at once, as into a bathtub, and
be immersed in them without a moment's loss. And similarly,
how if you attend two or three colleges in succession,
or are attached to a number of red mins in succession,
or changes change your business or your fraternity or your
poker club. It is clear to me that the very
quality of loyalty and its place in your life again
bespeaks the sport origin of your morality. The success of
a football team depends not on the physical aptitude and
fitness of its members, but also on their spirit. They're
a spirit de corps. There must be atmosphere for sporting effect.
It is as important as physique and must be cultivated
as assiduously, as carefully, as skillfully, as artificially. Whichever team
you join, your loyalty is essential to its success. And
your loyalty must be instantaneous and unconditional, neither curtailed by
delay nor mitigated by reflection. Your loyalty has nothing to
do with ultimate moral values. It is part of the game,
and life is to you a game on the football
field in the college, and the factory on the battlefield.
The game alone can make loyalty a transportable quality of
this kind. The game alone can give birth to the
concept of loyalty. In our life, the Jewish life, loyalty
is unknown. There is no equivalent for it among our attributes.
We understand love, which is serious, profound, which must be treated.
Therefore we do dignity, But we do not understand loyalty,
which is trivial, gallant game. Some conventionalized believe believe people
when they tell you things that you instinctively know are true.
If someone you do not trust, this is me speaking
though you're just listening. If someone you do not trust
says something, you go instinctively, you're in your instinct is
to go, yeah, I don't know about that. But isn't
it weird that you when people you trust, when they
speak the truth, you know it, you know they're speaking
the truth. You may actually say things like, oh wow,
they just told them themselves, just revealed themselves. They said
the quiet part out loud. They can't hide it. Yeah,
as students, we Jews are accused of lacking the right
attitude towards the college. It is perfectly true that we
have not the loyal attitude as you have it, or
despite occasional efforts to the degree in which you have it.
We are apt to see the college as an institute
of learning. We go there to study under competent teachers.
What has loyalty to do with this organization? We may
develop love for the place, it may in later years
become a beloved memory, or it may not. But we
cannot attach an immediate combative value to our connection with
the college and instantaneous regimental pride. We cannot attach a
moral value to the prescribed set of sporting emotions and
thrills which are supposed to be a proper part of
college life. I'm maybe it's just my experience and my lifetime,
but if anybody knows, like back then this is written
I think in twenty two, twenty three, nineteen twenty two,
twenty three, twenty four. If you know that it was
different on college campuses back then, that people were almost
demanded a loyalty, let me know that'd be interesting history
to look into actually continuing, we are unquestionably an alien
spirit in your colleges, I would say everywhere within our society.
For your colleges are the most coherent mouthpieces of your morality,
and that morality is not ours. Your college is a
miniature world in which you first developed the sporting instincts
which must accompany you through the real world. We, with
our proper exceptions, see the college only as a center
of study and incidentally, occasionally of valued friendships. The idea
of a rivalry with other colleges in which each student
must defend his own college seems us childlike. It is
not to the purpose, to the purpose at all. It
is not serious. College to them is also a place
to set up secret society so that they can push
Zionism get us into world wars. That seems kind of important.
But I have touched on the college only as a
single illustration of the predominance of the virtue of loyalty
in the concept. In your concept of the proper human relationship,
all your society is divided into teams with a fictitious
morality to correspond. It has little to do with direct utilitarianism.
One might object saying this morality like any other, is
merely the adjunct of the economic or biologic struggle. What
we call morality is merely the assistant illusion in the
struggle for existence. And in this regard, Gentile and Jew
are alike. But this is an irrelevant truth. There was
a time when among you gentiles, one man would courteously
challenge another to mortal combat, without real motive, without enmity,
without passion. So it was when no excuse for combat
was available, you dropped even the pretense of an excuse.
Do not answer that this was a passing phase. For
I say that when men actually kill each other from
mere sport, it betokens a profound, almost eternal instinct. That
instinct today finds expression and equally moral less relations, equally
passionless associations and enmities. You arrange your life in such
wise as to get the maximum of sport out of it,
And for the purpose of sport. It does not matter
to which team you belong England or America, Harvard or Yale,
the Black Watch or the Old Guard, the Neighborhood Association
of Wigan or the Rotarians of Los Angeles. The good
Rich Rubber Factory or the Sunlight Soap Garden Club, the
Alpha Sigma MoU or the ninety five Club, the Progressive
Republicans or the Decorators Association, the United Cigar Makers or
the FASCISTI. There's good fun in all this. It is exciting, jolly, sporty.
It puts Russian gaiety into life. But we Jews are
no good at it. Just as we are inaccessible to
the meaningless exhilaration of college loyalty, so are we bewildered
by the fast and furious games of your general life.
We Jews cannot play the game. Perhaps you will answer
that it is you who taking the chance relationships of life,
as the all in all of existence, are really serious.
That it argues seriousness in a man if he gives
the every passing association, all faculties, all his emotion, such
an argument would be a quibble. A woman may take
an absorbing interest in dress to the exclusion of everything else.
One could hardly call her serious serious absorption and trivialities
is not seriousness. Then you may answer me, but all
life is a triviality, which would reveal clearly the difference
between your outlook and ours. No one's saying that. No
one said that, Oh man, This truly is a look
behind the curtain. So if you want to read this book,
if you want to get it for yourself, go to
Analope Hill and get it there. I think Kevin McDonald
and I forget who who does the uh the intro
for it? Let me see you? And so sorry about that.
I should have had this pulled up Antelope pill. Oops. Sorry,
there we go. Yeah, the there is and there's a
forward by Kevin McDonald, So yeah, okay, so that's it.
There's a forward by Kevin McDonald, so you might want
to check that out. It's one hundred and fifty pages
over there. And I have a promo code. That's not
why I'm showing Analope pill. It's just that this is
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you want to follow along with this and or you know,
just this is probably a book you should have. It's
a good reference. But yeah, I'll continue this on in
a couple of days. We will look at chapter six,
which is discipline. All right, everyone, take care, see you
a couple of days, all right, let's knock out Chapter six,
A Few Gentiles by Maurice Samuel. I know you all
are enjoying this so much, but a lot of you
have heard of this haven't had a chance to read it,
So we'll read it together. Chapter six is called discipline.
Do you get the idea there's going to be a
lot of projection here or I don't know. We shall
see one of the best illustrations wherewith to contrast your
adaptability to discipline in our li lack of it is
to be found in the difference between your behavior in
church and our behavior and our unmodernized synagogue, the Orthodox synagogue.
In church, all is order, intocorum, rhythm and regime. In
the synagogue, all is chaos. In the church, leaders and
responses are carefully prepared, carefully followed and observed. It is
clean and neat, charming and exact. You behave well, you
do as you are told. In Mass, you create a
spear of the core. In the church, there is a
suggestive hypnotizing decency in the trained correctness of your service.
In the synagogue, all is disorder. We talk during service,
we answer out a turn, and when we answer in Mass,
one begins earlier another ends later. It is babbel itself.
People walk in and out, Some take longer than others,
who get through a certain prayer, and the ones who
read more rapidly chat in the end. Part of the
congregation is standing, part sitting somewhere prayer shawls others do not,
and the perishawls are not all alike. Sometimes there is
so much babbling that the voice of the cant or
leader cannot be heard. One of you at our services
would be amazed. Our own young generation, which has picked
up your ways, is disgusted, and the last couple of
generations has seen reform synagogues conducted on your models. He's
specifically talking about Catholic and Orthodox here, and more of
the high Church if you know that term, the difference
between high Church and low Church. And yeah, I would
have say there's middle churches too, but I don't want
to dive too deep into that. So yeah, I think
he's talking a little more about h He's talking about
high Church here. Taking this illustration as one fairly may
of model discipline and lack of it, we may say
as is offer and said, you Gentiles are discipline, we
Jews are not. And it is not in church and
synagogue alone that we find this contrast. It persists equally
clear cut in all branches of organized life. Compare any
gentile institution with an uncorrupted corresponding institution in Jewish life,
and you will observe it at your secular public assemblies,
the same decency and unified restraint at ours, the same
scrambling irregularity. Jewish meetings never begin on time, never end
on time, so you're on your own schedule, your own clock.
You don't show up on time. So comments I've made
about being like another group pretty much land okay. In
your clubs and societies, order in harmony. In ours, noise, disorder,
and wastage. Your programs are observed with fair strictness. Our
programs are merely points to the part in your homes,
calm and even systematization. In ours, boisterous affections, formlessness, and
despite much effort, we cannot introduce your rhythmic exercise of
discipline into our life and retain our individuality. We can
imitate you excellently, produce a substitute as good as the original.
Can definitely imitate, and you get fool some people. But
the institution then no longer has Jewish spirit. It is
a gentile institution artificially maintained by Jews, like our reformed temples,
and in these the jew gradually learns to present a
gentile exterior. But wherever we are unrestrainedly Jewish, we shock
you by our uncouthness. We lack social grace, the disciplined
and distinguished social grace of high society, as well as
the mean and spiritless, punk punctiliousness of your middle classes.
In the colleges, in the street and the surface cars,
in the clubs, in the army, we betray ourselves. Indeed,
your very breaches of discipline differ from ours by a
certain conscious rebelliousness, which is partly homage. Our breaches a
discipline are offhand, unconscious and insolent. Okay, So if you're
my age, and I mean it's a classic, so I
think a lot of people have seen it. The movie
Caddyshack Rodney d Angelfield. Rodney plays a guy who, you
know it, wants to be part of this club, and
this club is orderly, has a way of doing things,
and he comes and he wrecks it. And the whole
point of that movie is to make you think that
Rodney's the good guy and the other ones to the
bad guys. I think what really reveals it about the
movie is when he reveals what he does for a living.
He's made his money by building low cost housing, and
he implies in nice neighborhoods. So I think it's funny
that Rodney Dangerfield and his character in that movie basically
reflect what he's saying here and carrying this still further.
We choose the most clannish of peoples and helplessly disorganized.
We have never achieved compared of unity, not even in
a single territory, much less throughout the world. All our
organizations are small, but never too small to be unwieldly
because of dissension, and worse than dissension, because of unameniability
and amenability to regular discipline. To those who have known
the comparative evenness of your organization's political, religious, social, commercial,
we are an unsightly people, and every effort to impose
this sense of form on us only accentuates our formlessness.
This distinction between us again points to the root difference
between us, your triviality and our seriousness. The fact is,
of course, that in true discipline and effectiveness. We are
by no means your inferiors. No one would dream of
asserting that our religion is not more effective than yours
in compelling obedience or in perpetuating itself. Remember he's he's
an atheist. But I'm probably going to say this over
and over again. But remember he's an atheist. What is
the purpose of this religion to an atheist? Why does
he keep talking about it? The mere fact that we
have persisted for eighty generations and maintaining a racial and
spiritual identity in the face of so much persecution, and
more significant, of so much infiltration of blood, bespeaks essential discipline,
of amazing rigor and power. Hmm. Do I want to
get into Kasari and ah? Leave that? We talk enough
about that? On two hundred years together and other places.
Disorganized as we are, we have outlived the most ably
organized nations. We have failed to imitate the Roman legion
or the Order of Jesus. We have survived the first,
and shall no doubt outlived the second. We have not
your skill, your German or English or American skill, and
wheeling perfectly vast masses of perfectly subordinated men. Yet I
have no doubt that when Germany and England and America
will know well long have lost their present identity or
name or purpose, we shall still be strong in ours well.
Who's responsible for Germany, England and America losing their present
identity or name or purpose? For true discipline should always
be seen in relation to a purpose. Your discipline is
goose step discipline. Remember you wrote this in the early
nineteen twenties. Your discipline is goose step discipline. It is
the hypnotic discipline of imposing rhythms possible only in the
absence of the individual discipline. There is hypnotic charm in
your discipline, but it is not effective. As soon as
the organization crumbles, the individuals are lost. We have never
been the victims of organization. Your organization. Discipline, moreover, is
a necessary part of your sport life. Games cannot be
conducted without discipline. Discipline is the essence of a game.
When two perfectly disciplined beings are opposed, the game is
at its best, and the same feeling runs through all
your manifestations of life. The game of nationalisms, the game
of society, the game of commercial success. The most startling
and compelling monuments of your gentile genius are not individual productions,
but the productions of mass. Most of the wonders of
the ancient world were wonders springing out of the great
organized rhythmic effort, and your chief wonders today, those which
dominate your general life are like these great buildings, great countries,
great ships, great wars, great the Pyramids, the Olympic, the
Colossus of Roads, the Hanging Gardens, the Eiffel Tower and
the Woolworth Building, the Red Cross, the Catholic Church Babylon,
New York, the Daily Mail. These are the distinctive triumphs
of your civilization. The final appeal an individual ingenuity is
subordinated to the production of your mass effects, your discipline monsters.
What single individuals can alone affect, play, what single individuals
can alone effect plays a very minor role in your
way of life. Mass and rhythm and teamwork the game
that is your ideal. It is not ours, and we
are impressed only superficially and transiently by their productions. The
individual is our climax, as the mass as yours. One
hundred thousand men labored for twenty years to build the
Great Pyramid. One man wrote the Book of Isaiah, you
will answer. One man also wrote Hamlet and the Critique
of Pure Reason and the Republic. But I ask our
Plato and Shakespeare and Kant in your life, what the Bible,
the Talmud, and the Rabbis are in ours? To our
very masses, the Jewish masses, the wonders of the world
are Moses, Elijah, the Rambam, the Vilon, the Domna, Maguide,
the Hasid in the neighboring village. These actually dominate our life,
as governments, mass radio exploits, armies and woolwards dominate years.
We are the people of the book, but we were the
people of the book before a million copies could be
printed in a single day. The intractability of ours to
your disciplines is one of our chief and to you,
most unpleasant characteristics. It is best noticeable in our new
arrivals in western countries, those who Eastern and Eastern ghettos
have lived a more nearly Jewish life. It is much
less noticeable in our modernized types through here, though here
still noticeable, for despite our clever imitativeness, we do not
retain our natural character and cannot hide it consistently, but
betray ourselves at intervals in the colleges and the army.
Least here except during the Great War, for in peacetime
only the westernized Jews joined the army. In business associations,
we irritate and disgust you by our obdurate, seeming singularity.
We don't fit in properly. We don't keep a straight
line on the social or public parade. We don't cheer
in unison, we don't bow with the waving of the
wand we don't play the game. He's separating palest settlement
and Eastern Jews from Western Jews, and he's degrading, and
he's insulting in his own way, the Western Jews. And
he's raising up those who came out of the stettles,
those who didn't even know that there was a continent
called America until the early nineteenth century. You can read
about that in Israel Shahak's book Jewish History Jewish Religion.
When the first Jewish book, when the first Jewish history
book outside of their own history, was written, they did
not include America because it was impossible that America existed.
He's basically saying the Jew who has been Europeanized is
not as good as the one who hates you. If
you've been following two hundred years together, you understand there's
a reason why when German and European Jews came here.
You hear this all the time. Oh, Jews were kept
out of golf clubs. They weren't allowed to join golf clubs.
And you know who kept them out, European Jews because
they thought that the Eastern Jews, the palest Settlement, the
Jews that came from Russia, I will not say Russian Jews,
but the Jews who were in Russia, Ukraine, palest Settlement, Poland,
they looked down upon them. Well, why you're reading it,
we're reading it together. This is comprehensibly irritating in the
highest degree. And in your irritation you have ascribed these
in actions to our savagery. You have said, we are
not fit for civilization. We have not the ability to
subordinate the individuals of the community, or if we have
the ability, we have not the desire, not having the
ethical impulse with us. You have said it is every
man for himself. We are too impudent individually. We cannot
behave as gentlemen should, unobtrusively submissive to the code tacit
unassertive regular This is what you mean saying we are undisciplined.
But the fact is that we consciously despise the code itself.
It is not that we recognize its validity and refuse
to submit to it out of individual and selfish reasons.
It is rather that the whole game disgusts us, and
your seriousness in it. Most of all, it is to
us a ludicrous and not an impressive thing to see
ten thousand grown up men, a large proportion of them
actually marching in step up and down a street or
across the field. This blaring of the trumpets, this beating
of the drums, this left right, left right, this rhythmic
snappy form force, this intoxication of united mass movement, which
sends you, gentiles frantic with excitement, is a laughable exhibition
to us, Foolish gentiles, we say contentiously to us, ten
thousand fools are no more impressive than a single fool.
Where you see the flash of swinging ranks, a mighty
lifting and falling power magnificence, we see only ten thousand
serious faced men engage in astonishing antics with astonishing skill.
The best that you can say about what he's saying here,
is that sure? Yeah? I mean, you know, we're a
tight knit group, but we all do our own thing,
and we really only come together to defeat you, to
fight you. Whereas you got your default is to be
as one. But you have this discipline about you that
doesn't allow you to do the things we're willing to do.
The drill of your regiments, the drill of your colleges,
of your social usages, your clubs all impress us alike
with their triviality. We do not understand it. Perhaps you
will reply that this contempt is merely rationalization. We despise
discipline because we lack it, and secretly we aspire to
acquire it. But in fact, it is the most severely
disciplined Jew who most heartily despises your disciplines. It is
to modernize Jew who has thrown off the discipline of
Orthodox Judaism, who comes nearest your spirit. It is the
Orthodox Jew, the most Jewish Jew, who least understands you.
Remember he's saying he doesn't believe in God? Why is
he siding with the Orthodox Jew? Does the Orthodox Jew
believe in God? And it is this Orthodox Jew this
ghetto Jew, who whose apparent individualism deprives his mass life
of all form and discipline. It is the Orthodox Jew
who seems, of all Jews to be least accessible to
your orderliness. It is this Orthodox Jew who nevertheless submits
to an amazing discipline unknown to most of you. I
have said that the obstinate maintenance of our identity and
our religion through eighty generations of oppression, bespeaks a rigorous
and effective discipline. But what that discipline is in practice
you do not realize. The Orthodox Jew submits to an
unrelaxing regime which you gentiles would find intolerable. It governs
him in all his actions, from birth to death. That
controls and directs with an iron hand, his daily occupations.
It pervades with obsessive eminence every moment of his time,
every moment, every function. The Orthodox Jew begins a day
with long prayer, closes it with long prayer. He cannot
take a glass of water without a prayer. He cannot
satisfy his physical needs without a prayer. He stops for
long intervals afternoon and evening to pray. The discipline extends
to his relations with his wife. It imposes on him
the obligation of study. It binds him to daily and
hourly use of a language Hebrew, artificially maintained. It intersperses
his years with numerous facts and feasts, each with its
enormous burden of ritual and tradition. All this over and
above the fierce discipline of the world's enmity and contempt,
the discipline of me your existence in an alien and
unfriendly atmosphere. Much of this religious ritual covers eventualities which
you would regard as secular dietetic laws, sanitary laws, sex laws,
social laws. For all life is religion to the jew
and all life proceeding from God must be governed by him.
But when the ritual is reduced to what even you
would call the religious, it still presents a bulk of
tyranny to which you would never submit, a discipline which
you are incapable of suffering, a discipline which demands incessant
vigilance lest a prayer be omitted, A discipline that detail
that a discipline, the details of which it takes years
to acquire, and into which one must be trained from childhood.
And what is most relevant in this connection is that
this discipline is a corporate discipline. It is directed to
a common purpose outside of the individual, to the perpetuation
of a people through its religion. In our religious ideology,
the selfish salvation of the individual soul is a very
minor theme. It is I believe in acquired dogma, and
its irrelevance is proved by its unimportance. Our prayers are
largely common prayers. We pray little attention to the afterlife,
and even our dreams of an afterlife are associated with
the Jewish people as a whole. What does that mean?
As individuals We sometimes pray for personal benefits, but so
infrequently that we could omit these prayers without changing the
bulk of our ritual. Most of our prayers, or prayers
of glorification, they link the people as a whole to
God's service. They praise God for the burdens he has
placed upon us, and with passionate iteration, they thank Him
for having made us different from you. Again, he has
said he does not believe in God. It does not
need a Jewish scholar. It needs only an intelligent jew
who has lived in an Orthodox or semi Orthodox environment
to appreciate that all this tyranny of discipline was bent
to one end, to our preservation as a distinct and
separate people. We feel that we are not merely different
from you. At points. It is a totality of difference
and of separation, which they don't want. We have carried
out with us into exile. The complete atmosphere of our
national life, our holy festivals are largely national, and even
in those which are predominantly religious, there is the continuous
minor theme of our separate nationalism. One holiday celebrates celeberation
of the Jewish people from Egypt, another the deliverance of
the people from the Asiatic Greek oppressor, another the confusion
of a national enemy. Still others celebrate the time of
the Palestinian Harvests, the irony and tragedy of it, with
appropriate prayers and ceremonies. And even in our pure religious festivals,
the memory of our national institutions, our Temple, our hereditary priesthood,
maintains an unbroken background of suggestion. In eighty seventy, when
the temple was destroyed, and it was destroyed, so were
the birth records. Think about that they're all gone. Nobody
calling themselves a Jew can prove that they have any
connection to that land, they have any connections to jud
to historic Judaism, to that temple, to that regil industry,
It's all gone. And with these recurrent climaxes in our
religious life, dominated by the national consciousness, the general tenor
of all our religion repeats this theme from day to day.
The discipline of our religion, of our Jewishness, is a
corporate discipline, the subjection of the individual to the mass.
I repeat this to remind you that, contrary to your accusation,
the intractability of the jew to your forms of discipline
does not spring from individualism or from lack of a
social consciousness conscience. We are disciplined more bitterly than you,
and we bear the discipline without the assistance of narcotic rhythms.
We bear our burden like civilized adults. Nor do I
see any contradiction between this fierce insistence on separate national
existence and our dedication to a universal ideal. We believe
and feel that for such as an ideal, we alone,
as a people, possessed you especial aptitude. The Orthodox Jew
bases it on divine will and choice. Others like myself
know not on what to base it. A special racial psychology,
the results of inbreeding, the results of accident, but believe
it nonetheless. Me repeat that again. The Orthodox Jew bases
it on divine will and choice, others like myself. He's
not an Orthodox Jew, but he is. He does this
trick where he's trying to when he talks about the Orthodox,
he's trying to include himself in there, although he says
he's not. But by continually bringing up the Orthodox, it's
you have a tendency to relate it to him, but
he's not. Others like myself. No, no, not on what
to base it. A special racial psychology, the result of inbreeding,
the results of accident, but believe it nonetheless, there's a
lot there. We shall not further that ideal by losing
our identity to mingle with you and be lost in
you would mean to destroy the aptitude forever. Thus universal
ideal and national identity are inextricably bound up to the
maintenance of this high union. We have given, consciously, seriously,
without kings and courts, without metals and reviews and orders,
without cheering, and without drills, a bitter and obstinate devotion,
more exacting than anything you have known, and in its
deliberate effects, more successful. What's he got? What's the next job? Oh?
The reckoning? All right, we will save that for next time.
I mean, this is just a bundle of contradictions. It's
extremely difficult to figure. I think the best comment I've
gotten so far from somebody who's been reading along and
listening to this is he is just a bitter, angry
and just someone you wouldn't want to be around, which
is all well and good. But they insist upon being
around us. People like him insist upon being around this.
It's like doctor Johnson says, individually, you know, you make
choices you grow up. If you grow up in a
certain area, you're going to know, you're going to know
some people who are Jewish, and some you're really gonna like,
and some you're gonna be like, eh, whatever. But really,
what it's what it what it all comes down to
is how does a group act if they're acting in
their own self interest? As this whole thing that he's
written here so far as self serving. Well, then there's
a lot of questions. Anyway, that's it. I'll be back
in a couple of days with uh. Chapter was this seven? Yeah?
Chapter seven? Take care? All right? My apologies. I've been uh,
I've been really busy, and I know it's been about
eight days since I did chapter six, but I'm back
ready to read, and let's continue. You Gentiles by Maurice Samuel.
Chapter seven is called the Reckoning. I've spoken of Jews
and Gentiles in mass. Certain of you will assuredly object.
You cannot deal with masses as with men. You cannot
indict a nation. The objection is futile. Not only has
it been the universal practice to indict and to punish
masses as if they had personality, and to treat nations
as such, but you're doing it today everywhere. I think
it's interesting because you know, he's getting ready to indicte
US as a whole, specifically probably Americans as a nation.
And I wonder how he would have felt about indicting Israel.
I would almost guarantee that every Israeli and every Jew
would have to be judges an individual. And I believe
the fundamentally the practice is just, despite the objections of
the few whom I shall answer here, particularly consonant is
to practice with your gentile philosophy. Here is your nation X.
It is composed of militarists and pacifists and mobs. The
government is militaristic. Whether it represent a minority or a majority, well,
now it represents in its militarism, especially in the Western Asia,
if you want to call it the Middle East, it
represents Israel Jews. And the militaristic government engages the whole
country in its acts, is responsible for a war for oppression.
How shall we treat that nation. Single out the militarists
and pacifists go into the workings of it. Separate out,
separate out the constituent elements. You cannot. Every member of
that country is a member of the team. Must take
the good with the bad, must pay the debts contracted
by the government. It cannot be in nation otherwise. I'm
going to apply that to Israel, mister Samuel, and I
guess you have to apply it to this government too,
because yeah, Israel's taken over and we've pretty much allowed it.
Social engineering is the social engineering regime has been rough,
and I know people don't like to hear this, but
we have been victims of it. We've been subjected to
it our whole lives, our parents, grandparents, all of us.
How else would we how else would this government support
such a disgusting anachronism like Israel. This from your point
of view, and from the point of view of the
workings of justice, that happens to be less defensible when
the whole of a nation reaps reward or punishment, a
rough general justice is executed. If it is only the
will of a minority which has brought on catastrophe, and
the majority must pay, then it pays for having suffered
the will of the minority. H Well, I mean makes sense.
You know, we've been suffering the will of a minority
for a while now. Had the German masses foreseeing defeat
and its consequences, Germany would never have gone war. Militaristic,
militarist minority or none. The masses which obeyed their masters
readily or sullenly must pay for the obedience which gave
their masters strength. And the same is true of every
other nation which is guilty. I mean, I believe in,
you know, metaphysical justice. We allowed ourselves to be taken
over by a foreign entity and we're paying for it.
I know a lot of you won't believe that and
won't accept that, but pretty true if you think about it.
If you want to get past the cognitive dissonance, all
extenuation is irrelevant. How shall the majority learn that it
must not acquiesce indolently in the will of the minority,
shall it not suffer the consequences of its indolence? A slow,
almost impossible process, but assuredly a just one for the
impotent or corrupt. Acquiesce of a acquiescence of the majority
made the minority effective. But if, on the other hand,
a nation suffers for the will of its majority and
the minority suffers with the majority, then very clearly effective
justice is being wrought, and just as clearly as the
payments opposed to alter the will of the nation. You
look at Israel now and probably yep, yeah, yeah. Just
hold this, hold Israel up to a mirror. I think
a lot a lot of people on our side, even
people listening to this, watching this, I think Israel's like winning.
I don't know how anyone who's paying attention could think that.
That's why I'm not black pilled. So I want to
allow people to black pill me. I know more than
a lot of people. I will not say I know
more than you, because that would be speaking generally, but
I know more than a lot of people. We've seen
this before, You've seen this in history. As long as
there are nations in groups, these laws must hold. And
as soon as these laws collapse, nations and groups will
see to be It is not meaningless to say this
nation is parsimonious, this nation is treacherous, this nation is cruel.
It is a relevant answer. You must judge by the individual,
not by the nation. When we say Scotchmen are parsimonious,
we simply mean that out of a thousand Scotchmen, a
larger number are parsimonious than out of a thousand Englishmen.
A Scotchman whom I do not know, has therefore more
probability of being parsimonious than an Englishman whom I don't know.
If therefore, I have to choose for generosity between two men,
an Englishmen and a Scotchman, both of whom I do
not know, I would choose the Englishmen. I stand a
better chance of being in the right. Naturally, the entire
assumption may be wrong, and that is another matter, But
it is ludicrous to deny the tendencies or characteristics in nations.
In nations exist, Yeah, let's just keep applying this allt
to Israel day Israel, which didn't exist when he wrote this.
Only the shallow demagogue insists that a thousand Englishman, a
thousand Frenchmen, a thousand Germans, a thousand Jews picked up
at random, or ten thousand or one hundred thousand would
react similarly to the same stimulus. Assuredly, if I have
the opportunity to check up on the individual, I will
do it. But if I must take him on trust,
I shall sensibly assume him to possess his race characteristics.
As for you Gentiles and US Jews, we have both
acted on the assumption that the mass must be treated
by a general law. The instinct of the gentile is
to distrust the Jew, of the Jew to distrust the gentile.
We only make exceptions. There is nothing inconsistent in the
anti semi who says, some of my best friends are Jews,
Oh dagger. I say therefore, that in the conflict between us,
you have fought us physically, while our attack on your
world has been in the spiritual field. Again, love, When
an atheist talks like that, it is a nature of
the gentile to fight for his honor. In the nature
of the Jew to suffer for his whether because we
are so inclined by first nature, or whether because we
have so become we have so become through lack of
land and government and army. This is true. You revel
in force. We despise it even where we can and
do exert it. It's amazing to me that like it's
like what he's saying with that last sentence is everything
that Jews have done since the founding of Israel, since
they first started going there. Irragoon Hadana, the Stern Gang.
Everything is happening in Gaza West Bank. Now they despise
doing it just has to be done. And so since
we have lived among you, you have instinctively appealed to
brute force in combating our influence. When the reckoning is
drawn up, your guilt cries to Heaven. Whatever have been
your relations to each other, we Jews have at least
been the common denominator of your brutality. Compared with each other.
You are gentlemen, warriors, democracies we sought set side by
side with us. You are bullies and cowards and mobs
in vain. In vain, do your keyscant majorities wash their
hands their key cints is their effective guilt. I care
not that your minorities struck the blow. I should not
acquit the majority, even if I could give judgment and
impose punishment. That you are unable to meet us on
the spiritual level is made evident by the following. We
are a disturbing influence in your life, not through our
own fault. If you remember the essay Israel the Psychopathic Nation,
all of the Jewish philosophers, especially ones that came after
this French school, guys Levinus and Ashkenazi, they all said
we are never wrong. And even when they say, try
to quote them, when we say, when you say we
are wrong, we believe more that we are innocent. First,
we are not in your midst by our own will,
but through your action. And second, which is more to
the point, we do not attack you deliberately. We are
unwelcome to you because we are what we are. It
is our own positive way of life which clashes with yours.
Our attack on you is only incidental to the expression
of our way of life. You too have this field
open to you. As surely as we are a spiritual
discomfort to you, you are a spiritual discomfort to us.
Nearly is we attack you peacefully, so you waste us peacefully,
and we can our numbers. But you do more than this.
You bring the attack down to the physical plane where
we are defenseless. You do that, you do with us
as your animal whims dictate. You rob us, you slay us,
You drive us from land to land, and while one
of you drives us, drives us forth, the other shuts
the gate in our faces. He can say this seventeen fifteen, sixteen,
seventeen years after the nineteen oh five revolution in Russia,
we never we attack you peacefully. From the first day
of our contact, since the first of our communities in exile,
you have made us the sport of your brutality. I
think that's or bully, But you know you could always
ask why if you feel that way. There is at
least one clear note in Gentile world history, one consistent theme,
the note of our agony, the theme of your cruelty
because you because Jews go into cultures that they clash with.
What is something that when Thomas and I did the
JQ series talked about how when Jews were in Spain,
a Jew and a Catholic, the fact that they could
live without murdering each other. Just doesn't It doesn't compute
if you understand historical Catholicism, not what you see now,
and use them. And then when they're given power, like
many Muslim Muslim where they've been in Muslim nations and
they they've been made police or they've been made quote
unquote peacekeepers, what do they do? They always end up
abusing Christians. Christians let them into Christians have let them
into their society. I mean, you're reading two hundred years together.
They did everything they possibly could, ten twelve conferences on
how to deal with these people in the nineteenth century
alone in Russia they institute laws and they don't even
really keep to them, don't really enforce them. But I
guess because you don't let them get away with everything
they want to do. That's cruel. I guess because your
society that you've built for Christians or Englishmen or Germans
or Spaniards and the system is designed for that, because
you don't allow them to come in there and change that,
that's cruel. Even from your point of view, you have
been guilty on our side. At least the fighting has
been clean. We have not misrepresented you on your side,
the fighting has been dirty from the dawn of civilization.
You have lied about us. You have accused us of
murdering children that we might use their blood for ritual purposes.
You have accused us of poisoning wells. You have accused
us of precipitating wars. You and war is the breath
of your nostrils. And you accuse us today of fomenting
a worldwide conspiracy to seize the government of the world. Well,
Israel Toof's book, Passover of Blood, precipitating wars? What is
the what was to perish them? What was the Balfour Declaration?
And worldwide conspiracy? What is all? Do not answer us
that a minority does this. Does it matter to us
that a minority of America preaches in the clan virtual disenchantment,
disenfranfranchisement of the Jew Well, you might want to. You know,
the Klan was pretty pretty much neutral not neutralized, but
they were sleeping around nineteen thirteen, Leo Frank, clan didn't
even Jews, weren't even on their radar. So, Leo Frank, So,
I don't know. Does it matter to us that a
minority of America preaches in the clan, virtual disenfranchisement of
the Jew, that a minority in Germany preaches death to
the Jew, that a minority in Poland slew hundreds of us.
Don't get me started on Poland. I ask an accounting
of you, as you ask it of one another, as
the Allies ask it from Germany, as Germany asked it
from France, from you as a whole. Do you see
the hatred for I mean, just the seething hatred for Germany.
Just these crazy national socialists just know, came together and
just took power, and you know, directed their hatred at
these people because they were jealous of their wealth, They
were jealous of how smart they were. That's it for
this minority which spreads these lies. There is a complacent
majority which tolerates or accepts them. And it is because
in your opposition to our way of life, you stoop
to such lies that your masses respond with physical force.
I care not how I care not, how ignorant a
Jew is, You will not get him to believe of you,
believe of you, of you such foul untruths as millions
of you believe of us. Yet we have more cogent
reasons for hating you, And as I hold you all
responsible for these lies, so I hold you all responsible
for the cruelties in which they issue. And I know
that soon enough these crimson slices will be opened again,
and we shall bleed from a thousand wounds as we
have bled before in the Ukraine, or in Russia, in Poland,
or in Germany. And who knows when the same will
not come to pass in England and America, in France.
What guarantees have we beyond the guarantee of public opinion?
And from a public opinion which tolerates a slaughter of
hundreds of Negroes, how far to the public opinion which
will condone the slaughter of Jews. Let us spark, but
carry far enough down into the recesses of your animal natures.
There's the uh, there's calling us quilliam. How you gloated
among the Allies over stories of Germans blown to pieces,
cut to pieces, and in the Central Powers over stories
of Englishmen Frenchmen done to death. Your comic journals made
merry over them a good oak from life. An Englishman
shaking his head, saying, Molly, I don't think this air
bayonetal go through more than two Germans at a time.
Your women applaud them, your children scream for blood, democracy
vibe in bestiality with an aristocracy and royalty. How shall
we trust you? You mean like how Randy Fine says
he want to see more dead children and celebrates it.
He's not the only one the way. Don Bacon, a
allegedly a gentile, says that we need to amend the
First Amendment to for anti anti Semitism laws. If we
are willing to forget the past. Is not your past,
You're present? Is not the blood libel alive today? Blood libel? There?
It is one more for the Bengo card and it's
convent companion viper the elders of Zion? Well POI yeah,
he's uh? Has he mentioned Henry Ford? Yet? Henry Ford
was talking about the elders of Zion will poison work
forever in the blood and never break out? Did not
hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Americans read these
legends without protesting, without seeking to punish the libelers. Do
we not know how easily your morality fits your mood?
Kill the Jews, kill the Jews, the christ killers? Does
indeed ring strange these days. But does a damn good
dose of lead for the Jewish Bolsheviks sound very remote? Huh? Well,
I mean the Bolsheviks. I don't think they were a
majority Jews, majority of the thought leaders were definitely over represented,
according to Juris Leskin in his book The Jewish Century.
But is are we going to deny that the war
on the Orthodox Church and on Christians that the Jewish
Bolsheviks carried out? See he's so close to the event.
Now there's no Internet, none of this, you know, He's
just this is this is still going on as he's writing,
this revenge against Christendom in Russia. And if arguing from
the individuals the mass, your clans and your awakening maggyars,
your chester Tins, and your dow Dets shall call us
choose sharks and swindlers, shall we not answer with better
warrant by the millions of our murdered by the Inquisition
and the Crusades, by the smoking ruins of the Ukraine,
and the swinging body of Leo Frank Dastard's murderers and thieves.
There it is there, it is the Inquisition, in the
Crusades based they were based I'm sorry the Inquisitions. It's
probably the greatest legal system in the history of mankind,
and the Crusades. One of these days maybe the Inquisition
will have to cover the Crusades. We have talked about it.
But that as that is the end of chapter seven.
So I will leave you with that, and I will
try to be back seriously in a couple days with
part eight. Once again, I apologize for how long it
took me to get out part seven. Take care now,
thank you bye. All right everyone, Once again, my apologies.
I wish I could get these out quicker, but I
have been insanely busy. Let's do chapter eight of Maurice
Samuel's You Gentiles, and the title this is but as moderns,
all right, let us have done with recollections and recriminations.
You say you have spoken hitherto of conditions which you're vanishing,
of Orthodox Jews, mostly of old customs and emotions which
you're dying out. You yourself are not an Orthodox Jew,
nor are we medieval Christians. We see the Jew gradually modernizing.
He becomes more like us, more difficult to recognize as
a Jew. Granting there are occasional relapses, we are still
moving toward real tolerate rance. The present age is not
like any age before it, and the modern Jew is
not like any Jew before him. You have lasted two
thousand years in exile. You will not last forever. All
those ceremonials of yours are breaking down your discipline, your
defensive mechanisms. At least in America, England, France, Germany, Russia.
You are changing, becoming like us, taking your share in
all our activities, sports, civic duties, achievements, arts. You have
spoken hitherto in the terms of a world which is
fitfully dissolving. You've ignored the liberal Jews, the radical Jews,
the modernized Jews, the agnostic Jews, now becoming the dominant
element in Jewry and approaching us, mingling with us, solving
the problem without deliberate effort. Do not your own radicals
renounce their Jewish connections. Will not your modernized Jews be
the first to denounced the thesis of this book. I
have already said, anticipating the subject, that there is the
same difference between the Jewish atheists and the gentile atheists,
between the orthodox Jew and the believing Gentile. I have
said or implied that the religion itself is but practical
expression of the difference between us, not the cause of it.
It is true that the expression of a view serves
to strengthen it, as the exercise of a faculty serves
to develop it. But expression does not create a view,
nor exercise a faculty. Even conscious adherence to the Jewish
people is but partial expression of our Jewishness. It was
not the conscious desire to remain a people which gave
us the world to endure. It was our unavoidable commonality
of feeling which made us and continued us as people.
Repudiation of the Jewish religion, or even of Jewish racial affiliation,
does not alter the jew. Some of us Jews may
delude ourselves, as some of you gentiles do, but in
effect modernizations seems to have done nothing to decrease the
friction between us. Interesting the dislike continues, and though your
masses may not know why they dislike us, there must
be a sufficient reason. It is Germany, the mother of
the modernized Jew, that gave birth with him to modern
anti Semitism. Where the old ostensible reasons for disliking the
Jew collapse, new ones, more self conscious were substituted. When
modernization removed the old, superstitious form of expression. The professor
replaced a priest science religion. We are disliked on scientific grounds,
as we were disliked on religious But both the scientific
and the religious reasons were rationalizations. The true reasons underlay
these analyzes. Nor can the revulsion of the war, with
its release of primitive instincts, be blamed for this German
anti semitism as dates the war. The higher anti semitism
has nothing to do with it, either conscious religion or localizations.
Like patriotism. It is true modern anti semitism. It is
the old dislike of the Jew, transvalued into modern terminology,
and it has been evoked by the appearance of that
new phenomena, the westernized Jew. For many Jews were fooled
by appearances. They took the word of the gentile literally.
The gentile said, we dislike you because you are different
from us in religion and usages. You are separate, you
are old fashioned. And the Jew, believing these charges to
mean what they say, abandoned his customs and his usages,
took to baptism, became externally similar to the gentile, thinking
thus to evade the issue. It failed, for no sooner
had he made this change in himself, than the gentile
shifted ground went from the religious to the ethnic. That
is not why jew stopped being religious. If you're listening
following the two hundred Years Together series, the Stettl system
kept most of the Jews as basically slaves to the
higher elite Jews. As soon as they had a chance
through rising democracy laws that gave people more liberty individually,
they jumped at the chance to get away from their elites.
Maybe there were some who were like, oh, the gentile
will treat now now this he's deceiving and for sooner
had he made this change in himself, and the gentile
shifted ground went from the religious to the ethnic? Well,
why is it? Because there is just something inherent there? Okay, yes,
but what is it if they didn't like you when
you were religious and then you gave up your religiosity
and now you're just ethnic, what's the problem. What happened
in Germany is happening elsewhere. As fast as the Jew modernizes,
so fast does dislike of him adapt itself to the
new situation and find a new excuse where the Jewish
dislike it is the modern Jew who is disliked equally
with the old fashioned, the klan, the console, the dearborn, independent,
the dwa gross the action. Francais no longer preached a
modernization of the Jew as a solution to the Jewish problem.
No Jew, however modern or radical, is acceptable to the
anti semi. It is now a racial question. But you
still have an answer, you say, these new forms of
anti Semitism are hangovers. We have had anti Semitism with
us for a long time. It is hard to get
rid of the effects linger along after the cause disappears.
But in time again, why this I deny? For I
am convinced that the modernized Jew, as long as he
retains the quality of the Jewish people, that is, as
long as he inherits predominantly Jewish characteristics, is as objectionable
to you as the orthodox Jew was to your fathers,
And for the same basic reasons. The effort of the
Jews to enter your modern life, to become part of it,
has been essentially ineffective, by which I mean that through
hundreds of thousands, though hundreds of thousands of us have
taken on your garbs, speak like you, look like you,
share your countries, institutions, games do all we can to
avoid friction. Yet we fail to offer in cross section
the same significance as any cross section of hundreds of
thousands of you. Our ability to imitate extends only to inessentials, appearances,
surface desires, and ambitions. We fail to be gentiles. The
modernized Jew still stands apart from the modern gentile world,
and his effective contribution to its life is as disastrously
different as if he put on the phylacteries every morning.
The old racial seriousness, somberness, still persists in one hundred
years of modernity. We enable race, have given little more
than mediocrity to your way of life. Our best work
has been the old true work of our people, fundamental
and serious examination of the problems of man's relations to
God and humanity. In the arts we have been second rate,
third rate, while in moral effort we have exceeded any
living race and have produced an overwhelming number of revolutionaries
and socialists and iconoclass of the true prophetic type. We
have in science, bell letters, and the plastic arts been
a thoroughly minor people. And even if in these last
fields we have done comparatively well for our numbers, which
I doubt our preponderant contribution of fundamental moral effort still
makes modern Jewry a secularized replica of old religious Jewurry. Again,
why the astonishing thing is that this took place despite
desperate conscious efforts on our parts to become like you.
We joined your armies and fought in them beyond our numbers. Well,
that's questionable. Yet Jewish passivism. Yet Jewish pacifism and pacifist
gave the tone to your world's pacifism. We have joined
your capitalistic world. Oh man, Oh, he's really going to
do this all right. We have joined your capitalistic world
in deliberate emulation and rivalry. Yet Jewish socialism and Jewish
socialists are the banner bearers of the world's armies of liberation.
Four million modernized Jews, a ludicrous, ludicrously small number, have
given to the world's iconoclastic force, its chief impetus and
by far its largest individual contribution. American England put together
with they're almost two hundred millions have not played that
role in world iconic's icono clasm, which a handful of
Jews that played. Had we produced as vigorously in art
and science, we should have flooded the arts galleries and
the libraries. But in these we have shown no special aptitude.
We may have done as well for our numbers as England,
as France or Germany, though even this I doubt well.
It just gave it a couple more decades, and you
had the libraries and the art galleries and the trash
we see there. We modern Jews of the Western world
are this fundamentally, are this in this fundamentally different from you.
The occasional in you revolution and against the game is
dominant in us. Your instinct is truer than you know.
The dislike of your modern world for the modern Jew
is as relevant as the dislike of your old world
for the Orthodox Jew. He's basically saying that Jews had
nothing to do with capitalism technically, that is, they have
nothing to do with capital They're not creators for the
most part, they're subverters. They subvert other people's businesses, worm
their way in, or they financialize everything. So he's basically
saying it's almost like he's saying that capitalism, which if
you look at it, and especially once you start getting
into late eighteen hundreds, you see who the most prominent
quote unquote capitalists are, then you and you see that
he's celebrating that it's a socialists and as the radicals,
that's who the Jews are. Yet Marx clearly said we
need capitalism. Yeah, it's kind of remarkable. He doesn't really
have a He's either lying or he's just clueless and
has allowed himself to be blinded. All right, this is
probably the most famous chapter out of this book, So
let's knock it out. That was such a short chapter.
I'm not going to leave you at twelve minutes. Let's
run through this. We the Destroyers Chapter nine. If anything,
you must learn and are learning to dislike and fear
the modern and assimilated Jew more than you did the
old Jew, for he is more dangerous to you. At least,
the old Jew, kept apart from you, was easily recognizable
as an individual, as the bearer of the dreaded Jewish
Jewish world idea. You are afraid of him and loathed him,
but to a large extent he was insulated. But as
a Jew assimilates, acquires your languages, cultivates a certain intimacy,
penetrates into your life, begins to handle your instruments, you
are aware that his nature, once confined safely to his
own life now threatens yours. You are aware of a
new and more than disconcerting character at work, and the
world you have built and are building up, a character
which crosses your intentions and thwarts your personality. The jew,
whose lack of contact with your world had made him
an effective, becomes effective. The vile is uncork. The genius
is out. His enemity to your way of life was
tacit before today it is manifest and active. Help himself.
He cannot be different from himself, no more can you.
It is futile to tell him hands off. He is
not his own master, but the servant of his life will,
For when he brings into your world his passionately earnest, sinisterly, earnest, righteousness,
absolute righteousness, and speaking in your languages and through your institutions,
scatters distrust to yourselves. Through the most sensitive of you,
he is working against your spirit. You, gentiles, do not seek,
or need or understand social justice as an ultimate ideal.
This is not your nature. Your world must be fashioned
as to give you the maximum of play, adventure, laughter,
animal lyricism. Your institutions frame themselves to this end. Your
countries and ideals flourish most gloriously when they serve this
end most freely. All ideas of social justice must be
subservient to this consideration first, then ultimate justice only as
it can serve the game. I do not believe that
we Jews are powerful enough to threaten your way of
life seriously now. Yet we are only powerful enough to irritate,
to disturb your conscience, and to break here and there
the rhythmic rush of your ideas. We irritate you as
a sardonic and humorless adult irritates young people by laughing
at their play. For the real irritation lies in the
fact that to our queries regarding your life, there is
no answer on our level. As to yours. Regarding our life,
there is no answer on yours. We Jews are accused
of being destroyers. Whatever we put up we tear down.
It is true only in a relative sense. We are
not iconoclass. Deliberately, we are not enemies of your institution
simply because of the dislike between us. We are a
homeless mass seeking satisfaction for our constructive instincts, and in
your institutions we cannot find satisfaction. They are the play
institutions of the splendid children of man and not of
man himself. We try to adapt your institutions to our needs,
because while we live, we must have expression, and trying
to rebuild them for our needs, we unbuild them for years,
because your chief institution is the social structure itself. It
is in this way that we are most manifestly destroyers.
We take part in the economic struggle for existence, this
necessity we share with you, but our free spiritual energies
point away from this struggle, for unlike you, we have
no pleasure in it. You gentiles fight because you like
to fight. We fight because we have to and in
order to win. It is not in a spirit of
hypocrisy that you have turned your business world into a
sporting arena with joyous flourishes, slogans, pretenses. It is not
in a spirit of hypocrisy that you talk of playing
the game while you cut each other's throats in the markets.
That's hilarious, you mean it. You're advertising propaganda books with
their sentimental appeals or not lies, they are the true
evidence of your spirit. I'm sorry, sir, but Edward Burnet's
not a gentile, and as you're writing this book, he's
writing propaganda. It is only when we Jews to use
these methods that there is hypocrisy. For we see starkly
through your life illusions, yet we are forced to use
them in self defense. But our inmost longings turn from
this fierce and clamorously happy struggle. While your inmost longings
are part of it. You give your best to it,
your souls, yourselves, your souls. We give only our cleverness
to it. This is why, in spite of the popular
delusions of the contrary, there are hardly any Jews among
the world's wealthiest men. Please yeah, I mean is that true? Now?
What's the percentage of billionaires? The greatest financial institutions, as
well as the world's greatest businesses, are almost exclusively non Jewish.
Dislike of the Jews in business springs from the feeling
that we regard all your play conventions with amusement or
even contempt. Our abominable seriousness brings jarringly into your life mood.
But you feel our disruptive difference most keenly, most resentfully
in our deliberate efforts to change your social system. Yes, correct,
we dream of a world of utter justice and God's spirit,
a world which would be barren for you devoid of
all nourishment, bleak, unfriendly, unsympathetic. You do not want such
a world. You are unadapt for it. Seeing in the
dazzling lights of your desires and needs, our ideal is
repellently morose. I mean, so is that what they're doing?
Is that what Eretz Israel is is building a is
we dream of a world of utter justice and God's spirit,
a world which would be barren for you to avoid
of all nourishment, bleak, unfriendly? Is that what it is?
Is that nourishment? What you do? Is it friendly? Is
it sympathetic? Is it hopeful? How then shall we live?
We do wrong to thrust these ideals upon you, who
are not for justice or peace but for play living.
But we cannot help ourselves any more than you can
help resenting our interference. While we live, we must give
uttering to our spirit. The most insistent effort on our
part will fail to change our nature. What is an
atheist believe spirit and nature? Is not that you are
untouched by poverty, by human degradation, not that you do
not wish at times that these unhappy things could be destroyed.
But this is not in the direct line of March
of your life in social injustice. If social injustice will
remove together with the game, you would unquestionably recall both
life before everything, freedom, joy, adventure. I talk here of
the modern and not of the orthodox Jew. I talk
of the Jew as alien as you to forms of
our orthodox and consciously Jewish life. This is the Jew
who forms the backbone both of the audience and contributor
to your radical and revolutionary organs. The Jew who is
precipitating center of spasmodic and inconsistent efforts for justice. This
man in your midst is not to be recognized on
the surface as a Jew. He himself repudiates in all
sincerity his Jewish affiliations. He is a citizen of the world.
He is a son of humanity. The progress of all mankind,
and not of any single group of it is in
his particular care. It is to this Jew that liberals
among you will point to refute my thesis. And it
is precisely the Jew who best illustrates this truth. The
unbelieving and radical Jew is as different from the radical
gentile as the orthodox Jew from the reactionary gentile. The cosmopolitan.
The cosmopolitanism of the radical Jews springs from his feelings
shared by the Orthodox Jew, that there is no difference
between gentile and gentile. You are all pretty much alike.
Then why this fussing and fretting and fighting. The Jew
is not a cosmopolitan in your sense. He is not
one who feel feels keenly the difference between national and
nation and overrides it. For him, as for the Orthodox Jew,
a single temper runs through all of you, whatever your
national divisions. The Radical Jew, like the Orthodox Jew, is
a cosmopolitan in a sense which must be irritating to you,
for he does not even understand why you make such
a fuss about that most obvious of facts, that you
are all alike. The Jew is altogether too much of
a cosmopolitan, even for your internationalists. Nor is the handful
of you who, against the desires and instincts to the
mass of you, proclaim social justice as a life aim.
Is a Jew any more truly at home at one
with Ismailiu than the old time Jew in his world.
Our very radicalism is of a different temper. Our spur
is a natural instinct. We do not have to uproot
something in ourselves to become radicals dreamers of social justice.
We are this by instinct. We do not see it
as something revolutionary at all. Think of the video of
the Witch with the all seeing eye speaking for the
world Jewish Congress, talking about all the things that Jews
have done for America, every single one of which has
sought to destroy our culture, the founding culture, and did
it is tacit with us, But with you it is
an effort and a wrench. Your very ancestry cries out
against it in your blood, and you become silly and
enthusiastic about it, with flag waving and shouting and battle
hymns in all the regular game psychology property your world
in a way of life. Even of this you make
a play. But such as these radical and international movements
are the modern Jew, the best and most thoughtful modern Jew,
that is, is nearer to them than to your anything
else in your world. He is the only true socialist
and cosmopolitan, but in such a true and tacit sense
that he is completely distinguished from all of you. It
is one of many vital paradoxes, a thing illogical and
yet true to life. It is our very cosmopolitanism that
gives us our national character, because we are the only
ones who are cosmopolitan by instinct rather than by argument,
we remain forever ourselves. That's read that again, because we
are the only ones who are cosmopolitan. By instinct rather
than by argument, we remain forever ourselves. Basically, what he's
saying is if you have a Jew, if you have
a Jewish radical out there, and you have a Gentile
radical out there, the gentile is arguing the Jew just
is in everything we are destroyers, even in the instruments
of destruction to which we turn for relief. The very
socialism and internationalism through which our choked spirit seeks utterance,
which seem to threaten your way of life, are alien
to our spirits, demands, and needs. You're socialists and internationalists
are not serious. The charm of these movements, the attractions
such as it is which they exercise, is only in
their struggle. It is the fight which draws your gentile radicals.
And indeed, it is only as long as there is
an element of adventure in being a radical, that the
radical movement retains any individuality. And it is only in
the fierce period of early combat that you welcome us
choose as allies. You're deluded in this, so are we.
You go into the movement boldly adventurously, we darkly tacitly. Basically,
what he's saying is, if those people, those gentiles who
ran to join the Bolsheviks, ran to join any kind
of far left psychotic movement, Genziles are running their bold
and adventurously. Jews were running there because they are. You
make it a game. We do it because we cannot
help ourselves. And sure enough, in the end the split
comes again. The liberal and the radical er is apt
to dislike the jew as the reactionaries are. The liberal
and the radical do not use the weapons of the reactionaries,
but the dislike is there finds expression in anti Semitic
socialists and workers' movements, and in the almost involuntary contempt
which springs to the lips of countless intellectuals. Philosophies do
not remold natures. What your radicals want is another form
of the game with our rules. Their discontent joins hands
with Jewish discontent, but it is not the same kind
of discontent. A little distance down the road, the ways
part forever the Jewish radical will turn from your social movement.
He will discover his mistake. He will discover that nothing
can bridge the gulf between you and us. I believe
the movement has already started, the gradual secession of the
Jewish radicals, their realization that your radicalism is of the
same essential stuff as your conservatism. The disillusionment is set
in a century of partial tolerance gives us Jews access
to your world. In that period, the great attempt was
made by advance guards of reconciliation to bring our two
worlds together. It was a century of failure. Our Jewish
radicals are beginning to understand it dimly. We Jews, we
the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing that you
will do will meet our needs and demand. We will
forever destroy because we need a world of our own,
a God world which it is not in your nature
to build. Beyond all temporary alliances with this or that
faction lies the ultimate split in nature and destiny, the
enmity between the game and God. But those of us
who fail to understand that truth will always be found
in alliance with your rebellious factions until disillusionment comes. The
wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust
that unwelcome role upon us. I don't think I need
to explain anything. I think it's all right there. All right,
be back in a couple of days. I'll try to
be back in a couple days as soon as possible.
You take care of everyone, right, all right again, I
apologize for doing this what seems to be a week
apart on episodes. I really need to be doing this more.
Make every effort to do it. Sorry, no promises, but
let's move on to episode chapter ten of Maurice Samuel's
You Gentiles. Let's see what he has to say. This
one's called the Games of Science. Illusions changed the instruments
of their expression, but they remain the same illusions. Religions
changed their gods, but remained the same religions. The atheist
gentile has made science as god he, but it has
not changed his religion. In the scientific field, the atheist
gentile tells me, we will find world unity in science.
There is no room for the subconscious. For the subconscious,
and it is a subconscious which dictates the eternal enmities.
Place your relations on a conscious basis, and you may
have differences to be adjusted, but not enmities. The solution
of the Jewish gentile problem, as of every instinct problem,
lies in the pursuit of truth through science. All other
problems are not really problems, but purely technical matters to
be settled by the application of mathematics. And as we
will learn to make this distinction between instinct problem and
technical task, the greater is a discredit into which the
former falls, the clearer is the attention that we bring
to the latter. The greatest contribution to science to human
advance has been the opening of paths to our free intelligence,
so that the unconscious and subconscious mind, with its inheritance
of the best, might fall into decutude. The truth alone
will save us, and in science is truth. I do
not wish to go into an examination of the nature
of truth. I do not wish to question the validity
of scientific truths. I don't believe that for a second.
I am ready to admit that scientific truths are truths
in an accepted sense of this word, or if there
are mistakes, if this or that scientific theory is wrong,
I will not argue that therefore the scientific method is wrong,
or that science itself does not go nearest to the truth.
My contention is at science. The examination of facts in
literal terms is quite irrelevant to the spiritual problems of man,
and we're get in someplace. I mean, what does an
atheist mean by spiritual? But you know, hey, science is accurate,
but its accuracy is pointless for spiritual purposes. The truths
which are unveiled by the scientific method, and which it
is to which it is the special aptness of this
method's unveil, do not matter to anybody. Science teaches us
that the Earth goes around the Sun rather than the
Sun around the Earth. Does it really matter which is
the case? Science teaches us that the occasional retrogression of
fact and the observed motion of the planets is not
due to cycle to cycle in epicycle, orb in orb
but to change the perspective produced along the plane of
the ecliptic ecliptic during the revolutions of the planet around
the Sun. Well, what of it? It has revealed the
fact that certain diseases are due to the action of
minute parasites, that there is a marvelous structural parallel between
man and beast, that forms of energy are interchangeable, that
the Earth is extremely old, that there were other forms
of life on the planet before us, that we are
merely a point in space. All this is accurate. But
is any of it? But is it of any importance?
I ignore, of course, the obvious advantages which were supposed
to accrue from the application of these facts, the conquest
of nature, as it is bombastically called. Though even these
advantages are vitiated by our inability to exploit them decently,
it should be vitiated. I believe it is not to
these advantages that the science hasts alludes. When he talks
of the spiritual value of science, he means pure science,
the perception of these truths for their own sake, or
more accurately, for the sake of the change which may
produce in our attitude towards life, the universe, each other.
But science and revelation of scientific truths have no effect
on our attitude toward life, the universe, and each other.
The mood of the mind of man, the temper of
his outlook, is essential nature. This totality of spiritual reaction
has nothing to do with the additional number of facts
which science reveals. It would not alter the effective mood
a civilized man if it happened that light will reveal
this the radiation of corpusles, rather than as waves in
the ether. Whatever that may mean there may be eighty
eight elements or eight hundred and eighty eight. The atom
may be a kind of solar system, or it may
be a figure of speech. Life, may be the function
of a complicated molecular structure, or it may be an illusion.
Whichever should turn out to be true, we should remain
the same. Our only concern is with the exploitation of
these things for physical advantages, and as far as that
is concerned, it does not matter whether we have the
truth or have hit on a method by conventional hypotheses.
The ptolemaic system of astronomy could permit the calculation of
eclipses as accurate, as accurately as the Copernican cycle cycle
in epicycle orb in orb works as effectively if the
figures are closely enough washed as ellipses with the Sun
at one at one of the foci. For science as
a game, a particular systematization, which might well be any
other systematization. Indeed, despite the prodigious number of facts which
science has unveiled, no new type of spiritual outlook has
been evolved. Is the general consciousness or self consciousness of
the modern materialists different in effect from that of the
civilized stoic or more than or more than two thousand
years ago. If you substitute stress in the ether for
the numa, if you substitute the laws of gravitation or
some electromagnetic formula for each other, or for tension, will
that alter your response to the universe? Science is so
far a game, indeed that self confessedly it deals with symbols.
Only these are pure abstractions. The ion x to the
end the theory of relativity. We juggle with figures, with symbols,
with arrangements. The things or truths or facts which are
supposedly represented are utter utterly beyond our apprehension. To take
the simplest illustration, the sun is ninety two million miles
from the Earth, the moon a quarter of a million miles.
Neither one of these distances means anything to any human
being a million or ten million, or one thousand billion.
We have no spiritual reaction to any of these figures.
They are symbols or counters in the game, and themselves
intelligible to no one. Or to take the most significant
of new scientific facts a truths the truth theory of relativity.
Its application is only to the game or system. No
man himself reacts to its implications. He uses it in
the laboratory, in the observatory, he cannot bring it out,
He cannot even lift it off the paper. Indeed, such
a revolution was brought in our conception of the universe
by the exposition of the theory of relativity. That if
scientific truths had any significant, any spiritual significance, there should
have been a religious revolution in its wake. Since the
dawna science, we have been I mean, he doesn't understand
how revivals work, which is not surprising at all. Since
the DNA science we have been blind to a tremendous
and fundamental truth, and all inclusive and inescapable truth, namely
that the motions of light rules all our measurements of
a time and space and mass, that the length of
a lign or of a period of time is nothing
but a function of varying values. A terrific and sublime discovery,
one might say. Yet not only does it fail to
make a particle of difference to the spiritual attitude of
scientists towards the universe, they cannot even theoretically integrate it
into a spirit with a spiritual system. All the effective
spiritual value of the theory of relativity is things are
not what they seem. To this suspicion, which is a
basic spiritual reaction of a man to the universe, the
theory of relativity adds nothing, and most of the theory
of relativity is an additional but superfluous illustration. But as
shall be told by the scientist, it is not any
individual scientific revelation which matters. What matters is a scientific outlook.
As such, the conception of the universe as an ordered
and harmonious process, the elimination of the providential and accidental,
the final and decisive removal of the Taumatollurgical science means
neither the theory of evolution, nor the discovery of the basilis,
nor the theory of relativity. Science means a cancelation of
the inherited instinct errors. In brief, science is a substitution
of reason for superstition. But even at that variation, I
can tend the scientific pursuit of truth has given nothing
to our knowledge of the ultimate secret of things. What
the scientists would call the scientific outlook in accordance with
the above definition, has nothing to do with the scientific
study of phenomena manner by nature untraumaturgical or traumaturgical in
their reaction to the universe. Well that one second, I
want to look with this. Let's see what taumaturgical refers to.
Something related to taumaturgy, which is the practice of performing
miracles or magic, especially in a religious context. If you
knew that, good on you. I'm very unfamiliar with those terms,
and I've studied, studied a lot of things. Science in
its modern sense does not make them untraumaturgical. It is
one of the most basic qualities of human life. This
particular variety of outlook on the universe. I say it
existed before the advent of what we denote under the
restricted term of science. I say it would exist just
as strongly in these types of men, though not a
single discovery had been added to human knowledge of phenomena
since the time of Aristotle. I say that those science
should add a million startling new revelations to its old ones,
it would not increase or decrease the number of men
who have the untoumaturgical outlook. I referred to the Stoics
and said that Stoicism contained as untoumaturgical and outlook as
any that modern science claims to have inspired. But even
if this were not true, I should not change my opinion.
For life at firsthand taught me this view, and what
I know of history I used only as an illustration.
Life at firsthand was taught to me taught me that
knowledge of science has nothing to do with the superstitious
or unsuperstitious, with a taumaturgical or untaumaturgical, with idealism or materialism.
I have known thoroughly ignorant men who see life quite rationally,
apparently untroubled by unconscious impulses, men who see life quite rationally,
apparently untroubled by unconscious imple men who have the scientific
outlook without knowing or needing science. I have known thoroughly
scientific men who are profoundly taumaturgical, who are saturated with
the spirit of superstition. It is not the knowledge of
facts which changes the man. A man may believe in
ghosts and yet may not be superstitious. He may merely
be mistaken. Another man may believe neither in ghosts nor
in anthropomorphic God, and yet be essentially of the superstitious type.
It is not even a question of sophistication. I have
known simple and primitive peasants, quite illiterate, who are as
clearly rationalist and scientific and outlook as any professor inspired
by complete knowledge of the revealed mechanics of the world.
I've known cultured city dwellers rotten with sophistication, whose surface
cynicism could not hide their subjections to the terror of invisible,
unrevealable possibilities. Scientific genius is only the genius of the ingenious.
Men who by their nature are materialists, spend their energies
in building intensely ingenious scamata, wherein the known facts of
life constitute the soul material. But these ingenious scamata do
not alter their nature with their shape or with the
quantity of their material. The mechanics of the universe might
be thus or thus. Things might work in this way
or in that way. It might be one formula or
another formula, but the spirit of the thing is the same.
For hundreds of years, capable minds of search constructed, reconciled,
their knowledge of the mechanism is indefinitely greater than any
man's knowledge a thousand years ago. Yet men who know
as little of these mechanics as was known a thousand
years ago have come to the same conclusion regarding the
nature of the universe. There is in science a certain
naivete the belief that facts differ in their nature, the
belief that a fact which it is more difficult to
unearth is therefore profounder than a fact which is obvious.
The belief that a microbe, because it needs a microscope
to reveal it, touches truth more deeply than the flea
which can be seen with a naked eye. Yet a
fact is not more valuable for being difficult to access,
any more than a thought is more profound by having
been made obscure. In the end, it comes to this, science,
which is the accumulation of literal fact, hopes that the
accumulation of facts will reveal the nature of fact. Science
seems to believe, if I may use these rather clumsy locutions,
that some facts are of a different order from other facts,
going nearer to the sources of the nature of things.
This is untrue. All facts are on the same plane.
Facts are not explanatory but expository, and what they expose
is of the same natural or material as that which
we know. Without science to expect facts to reveal the
nature of facts is to expect the microscope to reveal
the nature of the microscope. You can examine one microscope
by means of another, but its nature or secret is
not accessible to this mode of examination. It is of
a different order. The chain of facts is everywhere uniform.
When you know one inch of this chain, you have
learned as much as you can learn from a mile.
If the chain of causes and effects fact related to
fact is indefinitely long, any length of it is equally insignificant.
A thousand years is not nearer to internity than a
moment of time in time. There is indeed a certain
vulgarity in the appeal to quantity. It is a democratic vulgarity,
the belief that one million mediocre people have more spiritual
significance in one mediocrity, that size affects quality, that one
thousand new facts mean more than a hundred old facts.
There is in all this even the vulgarity of provincialism
and cockney fashionableness, the belief that the latest is the best.
But vulgarity is most patent in the common assertion that
science is of spiritual value because there reveals to wonders
of the universe. So marvelous a structure, they say, arouses
our astonishment and our reverence, the glory of God's house
and the infinite wisdom of his ways. Science leads to
religion because it teaches us both our insignificance and the
amazing cleverness of creation. I hold this to you to
be patently vulgar, because it is an appeal to headlines,
recourse to the stimuli of the advertiser for the benefit
of a stupid and jaded public. The thinking man needs
no science as to teach him the wonder of creation.
He needs neither a telescope nor a microscope in order
to see God, nor do formulate teach him the nature
of God. Life itself, being the staggering wonder of mere existence,
feels completely the crams beyond all possibility of addition the
faculty of astonishment and bewilderment in the sensitive man. Those
doom existence has become commonplace by familiarity, or who have
never been smitten prostrate by the riddle of existence, need
a crescendo succession of shockers to touch their British minds.
They didn't know the marvel of the universe until they
learned of electricity, but now that electricity is commonplace as sunlight,
they need a theory of relativity. And when that has
played out as an advertising stunt for the ingenuity of
the Almighty, they will need something else. It's hard to
tell if he's if he's against learning, if he's scared
of it, if if this is just simply you can't
know anything, so don't bother goy. I mean, reading all this,
and I mean I understand most of it. Sometimes he's
just going off on tangents that make no sense. But
I mean there's a certain there's a certain nihilism in
all of this, this chapter more than any other. He's
not really It's almost like he's just taken a time
out after he's told you that we are the destroyers
and we will never stop, to basically try to convince
you that you can't know anything, that there's no truth
and it's all doom. Maybe somebody else sees see something
else in this other than frustration just in trying to understand,
trying to make sense of somebody who, in my opinion,
is just basically trying to sound smarter than he actually is,
or he's insanely intelligent and he's doing all this to
convince you that facts don't mean anything. He keeps coming
at it from a spiritual sense, but he keeps referring
to the spirit. It's a god. And I mean, but
he doesn't believe in any of these things. I mean,
I assume most of you at this point believe that
when he talks about gods, he's God. He's talking about
himself and the Jewish masses. That's all I can think of.
Such vulgarity and sciences is not a whit different from
the vulgarity of city mobs, which with astonishment when first
they see an electric light, but afterwards smile pityingly at
those who manifest astonishment. Well, I mean, that's just familiarity
breeding contempt. That's a human It's very human. I think
everyone knows that the man of the mass mistakes impudent
familiarity for understanding. Because he uses the electric chair, the telephone,
and the telegraph every day, he imagines that he is
wiser than the barbarian who has never known of them.
If at all, he is less wise, being too impudent
to know his own ignorance, the fool to say it
in his heart, there is no God is the city
fool to whom nothing is wonderful anymore. And those who
do not wonder do not know God. I think that
there is some truth in that, that the greatest way
to keep and perpetuate a good relationship with God is
through mystery. But I don't That's not what he's saying here.
It's almost like he's quoting this to try to create
a common ground. It is not significant that the greatest
human cry of wonder of the Bible was the utterance
of men who knew nothing concerning the Plesiosaurus, the Amiba,
the nebula of Orion, Mendon, Yelev's tables, Bodie's law, the
theory of Kwanta. In them, the marvel of existence shocked
like a clash of symbols. The echoes of that first
fresh amazement still put to shame the sophisticated stammering of
the wise age. Have all the revelations of science brought
just a single utterance like that of job. Though a
man should master all the ingenuities of science, though he
should should double and trouble them, though he should know
all the workings of his own body and of the
stellar systems. Though Earth's past and future, that through Earth's
fat past, and though Earth's past in future, the past
and future of all life should lie open before him.
Can he say or feel more than this? Can sciences
even add anything to skepticism? In doubt? Shall he who
suspects that all life is a phantasm perception itself the
shadow of a shadow, and are very whispers to ourselves
that ten times tampered with instruments of things which are
not ourselves. Shall he that suspects that between himself and himself, himself,
speaking in himself, listening, himself, thinking, and himself thought of,
there looms world without end, system within system, aberration within aberration.
Shall such a one be rendered more doubtful? Because the
sky is not an inverted bowl above our heads, because
disease is carried not by demons but invisible fleas. If
the whole is insecured, it's the double insecurity of a
part make any difference? If all is illusory? Does it
matter that there were particular little illusions within the general illusion.
If we suspect the very instrument of our perception, if
we doubt our senses and our thoughts, if we doubt
our very doubts, and in the end from a frantic
hunting of protein shadows relapse into utter silence and impotence.
What additional impotence is to be derived from the correction
of unscientific errors? The worlds wonder, the world's debt, the
terror and illusion of life. These things lie patent to
the naked eye life at first, and teaches everything the
blind cannot see, even through a microscope. What then, is
science and wherein lies its lore? Why are men drone
to its service? Why do why do the best enables
give up their lives to its pursuit? Science which can
be of no ultimate value in bringing us nearer to
the roots of life, to Godhead, and to its secrecy.
Science is a game, a convention. The charm of science
is the charm of gentile life. The ultimate does not matter.
Within the system, there is the lyric grace of rhythm
and harmony. If science, you know, if if they believe
that the charm of science is the charm of gentile life,
if they believe that that is what gentile gentile has
just looked to, science would be any Is it any
wonder that they would seek to take over the science
and absolutely slant them into their direction, especially the soft sciences,
the social sciences, the scientific development of your Western world
is an inevitable consequence of your nature. It is inevitable
that you should worship science because your very skepticism is
a substitution of one set of illusions for another, the
adoption of one set of conventions in place of another.
I do believe that that is something that Westerners and gentiles,
Gentile Westerners, they worship science. I think that it's hard
to argue against that. Now, you may not, but you're
just proving the rule there. So if he recognizes that
other Jews are recognize that, and they've seen sorts of
take them over as much as possible and lean them
in your direction. And that's when when you hear Thomas
talking about a social engineering regime. One of the easiest
ways to do that would be to influence science as
much as possible. I mean, basically all of psychology is
for You are bound to find spiritual value in science,
because you do not want ultimate spiritual value, only the
spiritual value of immediate lyric enjoyment. You who worship gods
instead of God must naturally worship science. Science is merely
idle worship for icons, instruments, for incantations, formulae, the palpable,
the material, the enjoyable. Science is not a serious pursuit,
your grave professors of chemistry, astronomy, physics, Your Nobel Prize
winners are but bald or bearded schoolboys playing mental football
for their own delight and the delight of spectators. That's interesting.
Does I vote the argument? I've always heard it's a way,
you know, one of the ways they try to prove
high Jewish iq is their Nobel Prize winners. They did
Jews somehow after or this seek Nobel prizes, but they're
just bald or bearded schoolboys playing or did they have
to become Nobel Prize winners to surpass that? And how
are Nobel Prize winners picked? Does God pick them Nobel prizes?
Nobel Prizes are chosen no differently than oscars are given out. Science, then,
is an art, though it's technique is of so peculiar
in nature as it divided from all the other arts.
But we most easily recognize that as an art because
the true sciences takes an artistic delight in science, and
because your science is not serious, we Jews have never
achieved it in any peculiar pre eminence. We have our
few exceptions. We can master as well as you the
system and the scheme, but we lack the spiritual urge,
the driving joy, the illusion that this is the all.
In all, we know nothing of science for science's sake,
as we know nothing of art for art's sake. We
only know of art for God's sake. If there is
art or beauty in our supreme production, the Bible, it
is not because we sought either. The type of the
artist is alien to us, and just as alien is
the delight of the artist. The artist is one who
seeks beauty, goes out of his way to find her.
But the Hebrew prophet, who who wrought so beautifully, did
not go out of his way to find God. God
pursued him and caught him, hunted him out, and tortured
him so that he cried out. Until this day, you
have no artist in your sense. Such art as we
have created has been the byproduct of a fierce moral purpose.
Let's see. But what do we have upcoming after this
Hollywood pornography? It's never it's about money. It's about money
and corruption. That's it. Art and science. This is your
gentile world. The lovely and ingenious world, kaleidoscopic, graceful, bewilderingly seductive,
A world at it's best of lovely apparitions, banners, struggles, triumphs, gallantries,
noble gestures and conventions. But not our world, Not for
us Jews, for such field of the cloth of gold delights.
We lack imagination and inventiveness. We are not touched with
this vigor of productive playfulness. Under it arrest, we take
part in the ringing melee and give an indifferently good
account of ourselves. But we have not the heart for
this world of yours. I could almost picture him, and
I'll finish with this. I could almost picture him looking
at all the Jewish artists and scientists and everything these days,
the people who relish it so much, the Weinstein's and
the Weinstein brothers, and he would from what he says here,
I would almost picture him. If he's being completely honest
in all this, which I doubt that he sees them
as like the downfall of Judaism. Why would these Jews
care about these things unless they were subverting, which I
leave all doors open, all right, thank you. I'll try
to come back to the next chapter is called the Masses.
I will, and I doubt he's talking about the Catholic Church,
so I'll try to come back as soon as possible.
All right. I apologize for taking so long in between these.
I want to get it over with and move on
to something something new. This is as much this needs
to be read. This person is insufferable, and I'm so glad.
I was so glad. I never I would never have
a chance to know him. Take care everyone, Thank you, bye.
All right everyone, here is part ten of you gentiles.
I'm gonna try to knock these out a little faster now.
I'm probably just going to do two chapters because I
have an idea for the next book, and I'll be
completely off of this subject because I need a break
too much talking about this lately, and uh, we'll look
at something else. Have an idea, might change my mind,
always do, but yeah, it's there, so all right. This
is chapter eleven, The Masses. It would be absurd to
pretend that the Jewish masses are distinguished from your masses
by a conscious by a conscious appreciation of the differences
the difference I've described. Indeed, very few, even of the
thinking Jews, understand the nature of the problem. It is
certain that the westernized masses of Jews are doing their
best to minimize or to ignore the difference between jew
and gentile. They and their leaders assert frequently and vehemently
that there is no difference. Jew and gentile are alike
except in their opinions regarding certain very simple matters of faith.
You too, will assert, even if we grant this distinction
between gentile and Jewish genius, are we to understand that
it permeates the masses, that the strain of seriousness is
to be found in your households of thousands, what thousands
of yes, westernized workers, lawyers, salesmen, merchants, manufacturers, contrasting with
a corresponding levity or a lack of seriousness, and the
same classes among us. It is incredible. The same language,
the same occupations, the same sports, the same pursuits are
common to both of us. Let any intelligent man live
first for ten years among middle class gentile families and
then change his miliu completely and pass into the environment
of middle class, assimilated Jewish families. What will there be
to give him the impression of another world? Will he
not find the same amusements, the same ambitions, the same morality,
the same taboos, the same abilities, and the same stupidities.
Did not the Jewish and gentile middle class families admire
the same heroes, vote for the same politicians, read the
same newspapers and magazines, frequent the same theaters, weep over
the same movies, laugh at the same comic strips. But
the question cannot be put so simply. The world is yours,
and you are the ones who set the standards. You
are the ones who supply the material for the reactions.
And when the Jews want to become part of your world,
enjoy its privileges and pleasures, we must accept your standards.
Speak as if it were the same language. But just
as a word can never mean quite the same thing
to two persons, so a common expression does not mean
the same emotion. The fact is that as long as
Jews retain their identity, there is a same tension between
your middle classes and hours as between your geniuses and hours.
Our middle classes, even when thoroughly modernized, retain a certain
individuality which is repugnant to you. And though at four
and though if forced to a yes or no questions
answered to the question above, enunciated I should have to answer. Yes,
there is a difference, difficult to describe, but felt it
resents it. Nonetheless, our modernized Jews have done their best
to take up your life and become part of it.
But despite outward appearances, they have failed. There is, first
of all, too eager and intensive desire to be gentile.
What you do tacitly, and by the grace of and
by the grace of God, we do deliberately and in
the gracelessness of ambition. You go into this new life
of yours. We can toort ourselves into it. In one
or two generations. We would achieve what it took you
one hundred generations to reach. We take up your life
with an anxiousness, a ferocity which is its own undoing.
Whatever in you can be imitated, we do imitate admirably.
But though you cannot quite define it, you are aware
of a deception. It's interesting they haven't had their own
nation at this point for I guess nineteen hundred years,
but it's longer than that. I mean, first the Greeks
and then the Romans, and look look at how they failed.
They can't even survive on their own. They lash out
at everyone around them, They want to kill everyone around them.
They have delusions of grandeur of taking over large swaths
of land in the Middle East. It's it's evil in
a sense, and I hate to say evil because yeah,
I'm looking for a better word. It's it's malicious in
a sense, the things they do. But it's also very incompetent.
I mean, they could easily have destroyed the Palestinians, destroyed
their neighbors simply if they're so smart, they could have
figured this out a long time ago. They don't have
to be going through this now. But either this is
the only way that they in their being can do it,
or they like it. I don't know. I don't know. Violence,
and you know mega violence and war has always been seen,
is something that just happens, not that you would enjoy it.
Whatever in you can be imitated. We do imitate admirably.
But though you cannot quite define it, you are aware
of a deception. Our patriotisms are hysterical, our sports pursuits
are unnaturally eager, our business ambitions artificially passionate. He's describing
that it's this is not who they are. So when
they it almost seems like when they and I don't
think he's trying to say this. I'm trying to figure
things out here from what he's saying. He's basically saying,
when we try to imitate you, it's forced and we
don't know how to do it. It looks like inevidently
becomes failure, Like they are a people who are meant
to wander. And the fact that they found this thing
and they stopped. Even if you buy it, even if
you buy the cause cause our theory, which I do,
there still are Jews there that are probably direct descendants,
but it's I think they've just even the cause AARs
have just taken on a spirit of if any of
you know your old Testament, just how obstinate every forty
to eighty years, they would just revert back to child
sacrifice and things like that, which is why they kept
being punished over and over again. We see the same
apparent ends as you, but not in the same spirit.
Would you have us fight and die for country, We'll
do it as well as you would you have us
run fast box skillfully, We'll do it. Would you have
us build up enterprises, We'll do that too. But one
thing we cannot do. Do it for the same reason
and in the same spirit, and they can't do it
for the benefit of anyone else but them. I'm not
saying for the benefit of all Jews, because that's bullshit.
I mean, anyone who's following two hundred years together knows
that the elite Jews do not the lower class Jews
and the poorer Jews and even the middle class Jews.
That's he's mentioning here, or look down upon German Jews
at this time, we're looking down upon pali settlement Jews.
When you hear about oh we were we couldn't go
into we weren't allowed into golf clubs. Yeah, most of
the time that was German Jews who were the Enlightenment
and hit them a lot earlier. Looked down upon palae
settlement Jews trash. Since you insist we will measure values
with your standards and register the results, but you know
you feel that the standards are not ours. We betray
ourselves singly and en mass. We haven't the manner we
have and we haven't the manners, for manners are but
a manner with you. We Jews are lacking in manners
because manners, as you have evolved them, are a spirit,
a reflex of your playworld. Manners cannot be copied. One
must have the aptitude for this charming triviality. A single
note of insistence spoils at all, and we choose insist
too much. And just as Jews are without manners, so
they are without vulgarity. Well, I have observed that between
the vulgar gentile and the so called vulgar Jew there
is a singular and dreadful difference. The vulgar type of
gentile is not repellent. There is in him an animal
grossness which shocks, embraces, but does not horrify. He carries
it off by virtue of a natural brutality and brutishness,
with which provide a mitigating consistency to his character. But
the lowest type of Jew is extraordinarily revolting. There is
in him a suggestion of deliquescent putrefaction. The gentile can
be naturally healthily vulgar. The Jew corrupts into vulgarity. He
has not the gift for it. What is vulgarity in
the gentile is obscenity in the Jew. I am able
to watch, either with amusement or indifference, a vulgar performance
on the gentile stage. On the Jewish stage, I find
it intolerably loadsome in the company of low and Brutish gentiles,
in the company of low and British gentiles loose. I
may not feel at home, but I can be an
unmoved spectator. But when Jews try to imitate this behavior,
I feel my innermost decency outrage. Well mannered gentile society
rejects us. So does vulgar gentile society. Wow. That says
a lot. An individual genius cannot be taken as the
higher type of the people which produced him. But in
the mass, there is an inevitable correspondence between the product
of the geniuses of a people and the people itself.
Studied actu actuarially, the people finds utterance in the geniuses.
There is an undoubted consistency in all the products of
the greatest Jewish minds. Whether we take their statistics laterally
through an age or vertically through history, we will obtain
a similar result. Whether we begin with the Bible and
take the sum total of our work down to Karl Marx,
or confine ourselves to a single country and generation America today,
for instance, with Untermeyer, Lewis sohne frank hect We will
find the same appeal to fundamentals, the same passionate rejection
of your sport world and its sports mentality, the same
ultimate seriousness, the same inability to be merely playful, merely romantic,
merely lyrical. It is unthinkable that the masses of a
people can mean one thing, its genius is another. Or this,
so the utterances of great minds will lose all relevance,
would become pointless and impotent. If we symbolize a people
as a single organism, its geniuses may be likened to
an organ of self consciousness. And the self consciousness of
a man is not an independent function, but the instrument
of all of him. All his body and being. Thinks
through the brain that which genius illuminates in the life
from which it springs, the amorphosis crystallized in it. The
confused diffusion is brought to a focus, so that the
pattern is made clear. Our geniuses in the midst of
your world are an alien and destructive element. More clearly
revealed that such, because they are articulate, they are spokesmen,
or better said, ourselves in utterance, They like us, being us,
cannot join your game. You say, because they lack imagination.
In a sense, it is true. We are unimaginative, as
old people are unimaginative. In the presence of young people.
We neither play with emotions nor with things. We lack romanticists,
as we lack inventors, because we lack inventiveness. That is
true even among the masses where diffusion confuses. An apt
instance points to the truth. Among our simple people, you
do not find the delight in constructive trifles, which is
one of your characteristics. Your simple people like to build things,
fix this and that in the house, play the handyman.
They take pleasure in putting up shelves, looking to the plumbing,
adding and altering. We're devoid of this kind of craftsman's pleasure.
We do what is necessary only because it is necessary,
and as a man, engage happily in such pleasant, childlike pursuits.
Resents the chilling indifference of an unsympathetic onlooker. So your
world resents are uncalled for analysis of your acts and occupations.
This is your life, and you enjoy it. Why do
we disturb you with questions concerning ultimate values? We lack inventiveness.
You will say that springs from our lack of vitality.
Men are lyrical because life sings in them. They are
inventive because life is restless in them and drives their
fingers to activity. Some may call that the faustian spirit,
which I'm sure he would decry. I will not argue
the cause of the difference. But lacking inventiveness, we also
lack sympathy for it. And you're to let you call
inventiveness the conquest of nature. But the boast is to
us a foolish and childlike boast. The problem with which
man is faced cannot be answered by scientific inventions. The
conquest of nature does not lie in evolving keener sight,
swifter motion, larger strength. This is about magnification, which leaves
the element of the problem untouched. Can you conquer not
nature but the nature of things? For it is in
the nature of things that the bitter problem resides. If
science should double the span of human life, will the
nature of life and death be altered? Will we not
feel as mortal as insignificant? Will we even be able
to be aware of living longer? If science should bridge
the planet's in the stars, will the new playground be
larger than the old? To those that live in it,
you have found a whole world. Since the days of
the Greeks, they lived on a tiny plot of land
and ant hill, and you have a gigantic globe to
build on. What differences it made? What significant conquest have
you achieved? Not things, but the nature of things baffle us,
the dreadful circle, the eternal balance. For every gain, a
compensating loss, for every new revelation, a new deception, for
every new extension, a loss of intensity. The nature of
things cannot be solved because we partake of that nature.
We can never get round ourselves. We can only turn round.
Your world spends an enjoyous illusion of progress. We untouched
by that illusion, destructive of your mood. Stand aside, static
serious we will be satisfied with nothing but the absolute.
That alooftiness speaks clearly or obscurely in our masses as
well as in our geniuses. Dealing with objects instead of
with laws, they betray the same enthusiastic object activity in
their attitude to your world. And as long as they
retain their Jewish identity, they will, despite denial and effort
to the contrary, remain the same. All right. Chapter twelve,
Solution and dissolution. Does the situation which I have described
constitute a problem? Or is it merely one of the
insoluble difficulties of life, which, being insoluble, should be understood
as such and suffered tacitly. Death is not a problem,
being inevitable, is this struggle between our two worlds as inevitable?
Shall we resign ourselves to the struggle and do what
we can to mitigate its worst effects? Or shall we
continue the search for a complete solution? The one solution
which is generally offered as complete and satisfactory, is quite
apart from its feasibility, not a solution at all, only
a dissolution. Does disappearance of the Jewish people by complete
submergence in the surrounding world would not in reality solve
the problem any more than one solves a chess problem
by burning chess board and figures, But it would seem
to do the next best thing. It would apparently destroy
the situation which grace the problem. The problem, with that
having been solved, would at any rate cease to exist,
And by the dissolution of the Jewish people can be
meant only one thing. The disappearance of Jewish identity individuals
in individuals or masses, the complete obliteration of Jewish self
consciousness down to the very name and recollection. When it
will be impossible for any man to say to himself,
I am a Jew, or my father or grandfather was
a Jew, this consummation will have been achieved. There is
only one instrument to this end, free and unrestrained intermarriage.
This is interesting considering Jonathan Greenblad from the ADL the
other day was to crying Jewish intermarriage. But we know
how he feels if a German said they only want
to marry another German. I mean, is the whole thing about,
you know how calling out hypocrisy and I mean it's
just a lot of that just comes from them. They
you know, what's good for them is not good. What
they advocate for themselves, they cry criminal for others. This
act or fact alone will count the mere changing of names,
the substitution of religious forms, the so called liberalization and
modernization of Judaism is ineffective. It is a matter of
common observation that there is no inverse ratio between the
westernization of the Jew and anti Semitism, and this very
fact will have to be considered again in its relations
to the feasibility of this proposal. If we talk of
the submergence of the Jew, we must not play with words.
Words alone cannot submerge the Jew. If there is anything
in what I have said, you cannot make a gentile
of a Jew by arguing with him any more than
by lynching him. He mentioned Leo Frank earlier, so I'm
assuming I don't know what that means. You can make
his children half gentile, his grandchildren only a quarter Jewish,
and so on till the balance is perfect. And this
truth seems to have worked out in the minds of
some Westernizing Jews. Reform Judaism or modernized Judaism is the
halfway house to baptism, or at least to inner marriage.
Its very purpose is such, despite the protestations of reform Jews,
it cannot be anything else. For if the desire is
to become like the world around us, then all barriers
must go down, And the real barrier, the conservator of
all distinctions, is our practice of endogamy. One thing is
quite certain. The Jew is never baptized for the purpose
of becoming a Christian. His purpose is to become a gentile.
That's an interesting take that's a sentence typed in anger,
certainly typed in anger. Yet, obviously you do not make
a gentile of a Jew by baptizing him, anymore than
you would make an arian of a Negro by painting
him with osher. The sole and sufficient value in this
direction of baptism is the removal of all conscious prohibition
against intermarriage. Of course, even baptism is not a necessary preparation.
Jews marry gentiles without this preliminary formality. The case is
somewhat different here. This is a natural wastage or attrition.
Individual passion, not policy, is to cause, though the effect
is the same, the disappearance of the Jew, and it
certainly connotes, even if indifferently, the renunciation first of Judaism
and then of Jewish affiliation. A Jew married to a
Gentile may remain a Jewish obstensibly as he is. In fact,
his children seldom, if ever, profess Judaism, or as see
it themselves. With the Jewish people, You know, you really,
you really just have to wonder, how do you First
of all, how would you ever have a conversation with
this person about the subject matter of this? Can you
imagine trying to interview him when he was alive about
this book, and it certainly connotes, even if indifferently, the
renunciation first of Judaism and then of Jewish affiliation. A
Jew married to a Gentile remain may remain a Jew
ostensibly as he is. In fact, his children seldom, if ever,
professed Judaism or as associate themselves with the Jewish people.
In this case, the evasion is even more dishonest than
in the first. A man who professes to belong to
the Jewish faith, in the Jewish people, and who nevertheless
give his children to the Gentiles, is making the best
of both worlds. He evades the odious name of renegade,
which attaches to the baptized Jew also having his conscience,
and at the same time contributes effectively to the dissolution
of the Jewish people. It is well to note that
the westernized or reformed Jew maybe may deplore the practice,
but will not exclude such a man from the temple.
The Orthodox Jew consider such a man lost to Judaism.
The view, whatever its ethics, is clearer and healthier. Yeah,
you just can't help but read this, and you know,
just have a you know, have an Englishman or a
Welshman or an Irishman argue the same, and yeah, you know,
you know what it was. It's just I don't want
to be the magine if the role is a reverse person.
But it's so once you realize the hypocrisy of it,
it says more about that. It just it informs how
much more, how they will never because they care so
much about themselves, they will never be able to fit in.
And that's clearly what started this book out by saying,
but I want to consider it not the accidental, but
the deliberate or political accidental. Inner marriage being accidental and
therefore uncontrollable is not a policy. Baptism is a policy.
The weakening of Judaism, by the removal of its nationalist
implications and by its modernization, is also a policy, the
same policy, in fact, more circumspect and less self confessed.
The policy has as its objective the solution of the
Jewish problem by the dissolution of the Jewish people. I
will consider later later whether this policy can obtain the objective.
The question here concerns the objective, will the dissolution of
Jewish identity by free and prolonged marriage resolve the struggle
of the two types that I guess that's the question.
Or will the struggle continue in another form, less obvious
but equally uncomfortable. Will the struggle center around isolated individuals
recurrent types, or will the final product be homogeneous and
in relation to this particular struggle static. Both a negative
and affirmative answers to this question are unsatisfactory. Suppose, on
the one hand, the struggle continues. Suppose the Jewish character
persists in strains, breaks out in individual atavisms long after
the Jewish name is perished. The problem will be the same.
Your world will be confronted with recurrent instances of alien
and destructive types, all the more dangerous because they are
not isolated and a recognized repute at a group. Their
power of destruction will be the greater because they will
work from within. The Jewish problem will have disappeared, but
the Gentile problem would remain as bitter as ever. It's
an interesting tact he is taken here. You almost have
to admire the You almost have to admire the argument here.
Let us examine the negative answer. Suppose there are no
reversions to type. Suppose the Jewish so completely absorbed this
to be lost beyond possibility of detection in the surrounding world.
Such a consummation, if possible, calls for one inevitable condition,
that is, the proportionate judaization of your world. It is
unthinkable that so vivid an element as a Jewish people
should be absorbed into your world without producing an appreachable
alteration in its constitution. A world that has absorbed the
Jews will be, to the extent will to that extent
be a Jewish world. There's prophecy, and this is precisely
the condition which you refuse to admit. You want no
tampering with your identity. You want to remain what you are.
You have no intention of meeting us at the point
of balance. You do not want a world tinged with
Jewish blood. You want us to be absorbed in you
without leaving a trace, and with the best intentions in
the world. We cannot oblige. We can, in that sense
no more destroy ourselves than we destroy a single particle
of matter. But I shall show in the following pages
that all this talk of dissolution is academic. Even if
you should tolerate and prospect both of these alternatives, there
are insuperable of obstacles which make it highly improbable that
you will ever that you will ever be faced with either.
All Right, end it right there and come back and
make every effort to try to finish this up this week.
All right, take care everyone, and I hope you're getting
something out of this. All right, We've got two more
chapters and one page left, so this is you Gentiles
by Maury Samuel, Part eleven. You're going to finish it up.
Sorry about I meant to finish it up earlier. Had
a whole bunch of work done on my mouth, still
being done, waiting for certain bridges to come in and
everything like that, trying to fix a problem I've had
for a long time. There's gonna be mouth noises. I
know there's been mouth noises up until now. Part of
the new work is to get rid of those mouth
noises and everything because of partials that I've been suffering
with for years, not really suffering, but yeah, so forgive
anything that sounds terrible, but yeah, let's finish this up.
So I want to start on something new as soon
as I get the choppers. The last chapter that we
did was called Solution and Dissolution. This one is called
the Mechanism of Dissolution, Chapter thirteen. This would be an
ideal condition, presumably, the merging together of Jew and Gentile,
for the production of a world neither holy gentile, nor
yet duel with Jew and gentile, but composed of both
in certain proportions fixed by our numbers and the laws
of heredity. That is, at least the best solution within view,
and if we are to be reasonable on paper, at
least it would be the only one to be considered.
But we must remember that this ideal cannot be realized
in one generation, or in two, or in five. If
we were to assume the assumption is an absurd one
that within this generation the Jewish world could be won
over to this point of view, it would still need
four or five generations, probably more, to obliterate our identity.
At that it would call for forcible interm marriage, for
even when we cease to believe in endogamy, we will
practice it because our affections so incline us. It would
have to become a sort of principle that, in the
name of the great ideal of a solution of the
Jewish problem, the Jew shall be forbidden morally, at least
to marry among his own but it is clear that
even if intensive propaganda were to break down, it could
not for reasons I shall return to our prohibitions the
int intermarriage. It would have to work progressively. It would
take many generations to carry the change successfully through all
the strong strongholds of Jewish life. And when we add
to that the time thus needed, the time needed for
actual absorption by intermarriage, we are faced with a task
of centuries. But I deal with ideal conditions. I will
deal with a single, large group of Jews determined to
abandon their identity and to lose themselves and their children
in the surrounding gentile world. Cald we know well that
their children will not yet be assimilated in the full
sense of the word. Children of mixed Jewish gentile percentage
still carry the Jewish stigma. The child of a half
Jew and complete gentile is in better plight, and a
Jewish great grandfather is hardly any handicap at all. The
third generation, as the saying is, produces the gentleman it
needs at least these three generations of intermediary stage, probably more.
It would be absurd to expect absorption in a single generation.
It never happens there's needed a transition period, and is
this transition period which you gentiles will not tolerate, even
if you believe, as most of you do, that the
best thing that could happen to the Jew would be
his complete absorption by inner marriage. You oppose tacitly, but
not the less obstinately his steps in this direction. You
want us to intermarry. You don't want to intermarry. You
want us to produce gentile offspring without having taken your
sons and daughters as mates. In other words, you want
an end without permitting the means. The prospect of a
jewless world is charming, indeed, But who will enjoy the
actuality your grandchildren and great grandchildren, and who will have
to pay the price of the first embarrassing contact, the
first difficult intimacy Jewish sons and daughters in laws, Jewish
fathers and mother in laws, you yourselves. The prospect is
too distant, too hypothetical to exert any influence. It is
much too much like the promise of heaven and the
threat of Hell. I just love that there's no consideration
for separation, and just go to your own land. As
a matter of fact, I think he died in nineteen
seventy four in New York. I don't think he ever
wants to live in Israel. Curious. I've alluded more than
once to the fact that westernization of the Jew is
nowhere a guarantee against anti Semitism, indeed conscious modern antisemitism.
The formulated fear of the Jew is the racial bearer
of alien and dangerous ideas, is to result of Westernization.
Far from encouraging or tolerating our intermarriage with you, you do
not even relish the results of our westernization or gentileization.
It is an amazing and terrifying paradox. You would like
us to be absorbed, but you shrink from the process.
The inoculation is painful, even revolting. You are uneasy and
unhappy when we swarm into your universities, your professions. The
nearer we come to you, the more you dislike us. Wow.
You dislike us because we are different. And when we
make efforts to overcome the difference, we are forced into
a proximity which rouses your inmost resentment. The ku Klux Klan,
the Awakening Magyars, the consul no longer warn you against
the religious and secluded Jew. The ghetto and the Talmud.
They warn you against the baptizing Jew, against the assimilating Jew,
against the intermarrying Jew. They warn you, indeed, against that
part of the Jewish people which is apparently in the
process of realization of that ultimate ideal. The disappearance of
the Jewish people. Another aspect of the mechanics of dissolution
makes clear difficulties somewhat more subtle, but even more effective.
The death of a people or of a type can
be natural only race suicide is an idea as an
ideal is contradiction for an ideal, as a manifestation of
life deliberately to set before ourselves, the objective of self
elimination would be as absurd as a man, as absurd
as a man insisting on watching himself fall asleep. It
can be done tacitly. Only it can happen, but it
cannot be propagated. We might drift out of consciousness, but
every effort to accelerate the pace would retard the process.
To appeal to Jews to cease to be Jews because
they are Jews is to accentuate their Jewishness. Of course,
the effort has been made. But with those grotesque and
unnatural results, which are in part responsible for your aversions
of the process. There is nothing more ludicrous and pitiful
than the Jew who has made his gentilization a deliberate ideal.
His anxious self repression, his self disclaimers, his demand to
be considered a gentile, His uneasy sense of inferiority, his
impoinite resentment of all that reminds him of his origin,
make him an object of scorn. Alike to you and
to us, there are assimilated Jews who hate with an
ignoble and consuming hatred the unassimilated part of the Jewish people.
Jews who, rousing your secret contempt as renegades, in your
resentment as intruders, attribute their discomfort falsely to those Jews
who are most obviously Jewish. For the gentilization Jew is
reluctant to admit that his very gentilization accentuates his Jewishness
to you, his only recourse, to say the last remnant
of his self respect is to blame the unassimilating Jew.
In eager self vindification, he points out the object lesson
of the sufferings of Orthodox and National Jewies and associates
his own severer sufferings with the same cause. He deliberately
ignores the fact that the cradle of the newer anti
Semitism is to country which witnessed the first efforts of
the jew to make a high ideal of assimilation. Germany,
which in the nineteenth century offered the classic example of
Jewish assimilation, both internal in adaptation of our own life
and external in baptism and intermarriage, also became the country
of classic anti Semitism. Terrified at the infiltration of Jewish blood,
the German gentile recasts formulae of Jewish hatred and such
wise as to arrest the process. I'm all I'm hearing
is is that people are different and they should separate.
But that's really the issue, isn't it. They don't want
that much like many people make the claim that black
people feel like they have a right to access to
white people. Same thing here, same thing I mean, well,
I mean you could just go to your you know,
you have your own country, now, you could just go Well,
that's anti Semitism. Maybe it's just logic. Wh examine the
mechanism of dissolution in detail and come down to an
examination of its working on the individual. We understand better
the revolting character, at least of at least as first effects.
It is one thing to say that a people in
the first stages of dissolution is as horrible a spectacle
as a body in the first stages of putrification puture faction.
But this sounds somewhat academic, perhaps even metaphysical. Even so,
there is little conveyed in the statement that a country
is starving. We realize the import of the statement only
when we speak of hungry men and women. When we
examine the personal reactions of the deliberately assimilating Jew, we
see more clearly why he is not a pleasant spectacle,
either to Jew or to gentile. A Jew who has
made the repression of his Jewishness an ideal must be
prepared to suffer and to seem to ignore every slight,
every rebuff which he encounters. He must not permit an
open sneer to sting him into Jewish self consciousness. Such
a weakness would undo his purpose. He must seem to
be unaware of the caiseal coolness which follows the accidental
revelation of his origin. He must bear silently with those
countless unspoken snubs, half snubs, un uttered queries, faint ah yes,
astonishments which will be his lot until the day of
his death. He must not feel himself implicated in a
general slander of the Jews. He may only protest in
a generous disinterest. This sort of way as a fair
minded gentile. An angry retort or repudiation might be the
ruin of him. He would suddenly realize the intolerable nature
of his position. It is not an easy thing to
kill one's self by degrees. Such a Jew has the
whole way to go. He is not entering a world
already made it easier for him by an admixture of
Jewish blood. He does not move forward to a partly
prepared position. All is alien around him. His claims have
no precedent. There is something pitifully impotent in his demand.
But I am an Englishman like you, an American like you.
I have no affiliations outside of it this country, except
those general human affiliations which I share with you. I
feel for my co religiono iss abroad, nothing more nor
less than you feel for your fellow Christians among the Turks.
Between me and my fellow Jews in this country, there
is nothing more than between Protestant and Protestant, Catholic and Catholic,
or if he is baptized, this incriminating confession may presumably
be omitted. Quote. I am part and parcel of your country.
Our forefathers came later, but our posterity will stay as long.
There is no difference between you and me, except a
very slight difference of faith, nothing really worth mentioning. In
all else we are utterly alike. Do not let yourself
be misled by the apparent contrast between me and my
unassimilated co religionists. It is merely a matter of externals.
In a little while, in a generation or two, they
will be like me, indistinguishable from you. They will be Americans,
or Englishmen or Frenchmen. In every respect, your destiny in ours,
your outlook, and ours, your hopes and hours are identical.
End quote. But his plea falls on skeptical ears that
there is that in the very name of Jew which
invalidates his protestations. And the more vehemently he urges his case,
the more suspicious and uneasy you become. For he is
urging as an accomplished fact, that which is nothing but
a hopeless personal aspiration. Your demand is not connected with
behavior or with reviews. Neither of these makes the American
or the Englishman. It is a question of identity. You
want us to be Anglo Saxons, or two sons if
you are, if you are to call us Englishmen or Germans,
and we cannot be that. At best. Our great grandchildren
can be as nearly that as matters, But we cannot
remarry our great grandparents. We cannot but exasperate you by
such important, importunate assumptions. That strangers, aliens to your blood
should come to dwell in your midst is one thing
that they should claim, after a sojourn of a generation
or two, complete identity with you, as absurd as it
is insolent. And even if they should dwell in your
mysts a thousand years, yet should keep apart, neither giving
nor taking in marriage. They are not identical with you.
In those words our ancestry, our forefathers, there are implied
the dearest and tenderest of human associations. The love of
his forbearers and of his posterity is all that man
has of earthly immortality. The pride and affection, which are
the natural counterparts of these concepts, are as narrow and
as broad, as potent for good and evil, as sexual
love as life itself. Shall we come to you and
share your ancestry? Shall we intrude on these exalted recollections
with a we two? You cannot help resenting these claims
They savor at once of ingratiating humility and arrogant blasphemy.
Try you will, you cannot make the concession. You are
trapped it by a vital paradox. You may ask, what
difference is there between a Jew claiming to be an
American and an Italian claiming to be one? Is it
more humiliating for one than the other? Is the Italian
of our ancestry more than you? There is some similarity
in the plight of all foreigners, and we Jews suffer
all that foreigners suffer. But our case is unique, because
we are unique. If there is anything in what I
have said, the cleft between you Americans and Italians, Frenchmen
and Germans is but a wide jump as compared with
the chasm between us and any of you. What is
true of the gentile foreigner in this regard is ten
times true of us. For our very record testifies against us.
The older, the past from which we attempt to flee
the closer it pursues us. To you, who share with
us the human attribute of pride of ancestry, it seems
incredible that, having retained our identity for one hundred generations,
we should abandon it in one suspicious and odious for
you suspect rightly that in this tenacity of identity, which
has outlived so many nations and civilizations, there is implied
a kernel of individuality which is as which is as
singular in its nature as it is in its history
Among yourselves. Assimilation is problem enough. The birth and death
of nations is attended by war, wars, pains, humiliations. But
what you have done a thousand times, a dozen times
over in the last four thousand years, we have not
done once. We cannot assimilate. It is so humiliating to
us that we become contemptible in submitting to the process.
It is so exasperating to you that even if we
were willing to submit, it would avail us nothing. Which
brings us to the official last chapter. Is there any hope?
Considering everything he's been saying, what do you think chapter fourteen?
Is there any hope? There is little more to be said.
I would only like to sit down before concluding a
few considerations might which might help to clarify the issue
between us. For I cannot believe that the contest between
our two ways of life will come to an end
within measurable time. And I cannot believe that while the
contest continues, it will ever be lifted to purely spiritual levels.
That's I mean. I mean, it's a great prediction. Don't
you know you don't have to play the lottery. I
don't think you're gonna win. I mean, I will not
confound eschatology with daily experience. If ever the dream of
the prophet should come true, If ever men should live
at peace with each other, expressing their antagonisms with that enmity,
why they will no longer be men but another species,
and talk of jew and gentile will be as irrelevant
then as it might have been twenty thousand years ago.
The world is getting better, no doubt, but the improvement
is not to be measured in generations or centuries, and
what will come to pass ten thousand years from now
does not concern me in connection with this problem. Certainly,
I have no patience with those who bid us weight
to bid us wait dumbly for the apotheosis of mankind,
as though the millennium were right around the corner, as
though every year registered a perceptible and even considerable improvement.
If ever, within the span of one generation mankind could
suffer visible improvement, it should have been now within the
generation which witnessed the war. But only the fool and
the professional optimists will assert that our way of life today,
our utterances, our emotions, our ambitions are at all cleaner
than they were ten years ago when the war started,
the same handful of sensitive men and women struggle hopelessly
against the passions of humanity, the same ugliness and meanness,
the same selfishness in lying, the same lust for bloody adventure,
the same delight physical triumph, the same wilful self deception
and abuse of lovely phrases have us in thrall. The
race is still to the swift, and the battle to
the strong, and the goal and the prize are what
they were ten years ago. What I say then is
not prompted by the hope that words of mind or
of anyone else can give a new complexion to the
general struggle between jew and gentile, But only by the
desire to clarify, for the encouragement of a few, the
nature of this struggle, convincing them perhaps that behind the
sordid stupidity which seems to govern our Jew Gensaur relationship,
there may be found a compensating grain of eternal principle.
And my concluding words or address less to practical expectations
than to the desire for completeness. So you get to
the end of the war, there's some World War one, No,
Germany is basically decimated, taken over visibly by people of
Jewish persuasion. Austria is actively being starved. People are noticing
that the only people running the black markets in say
Vienna or yeah, in Vienna are Jews. Where do they
get the food from? They're noticing that the Communists who
are coming over and destroying farms are a certain group.
And you want to talk about how, oh, because of
the war, people should just say there's losers in war,
especially that war. And then the Germans find out that
basically Jews were bribed, there was bribery going on, or
there was persuasion going on that if Jews got were
able to persuade the United States to get into the
war on the side of the Allies, that they would
Jews would get the vow for declaration. They found out
about that almost immediately. You didn't think that that was
going to cause a problem. You thought people were just
gonna be like, Oh, the horrors of war, war of
which your people won. Really, yeah, Why are we Jews
prepared to give you, which, in my opinion, you should
consider sufficient obedience to the laws of the state and
readiness to defend it, even if against our inmost belief
in time of danger. This constitutes a full payment for
the privilege of citizenship and the protection of the laws.
But this offer on the part of the Jew becomes
inadequate when the state begins to assume functions which seemed
to me totally beyond its capacity. What was intended only
for the regulation of the external actions of a given
group in becoming a growing tyranny against the inmost values
at man, an attempted violation of our most inaccessible privileges.
And this despite the professions of your statesmen and political thinkers.
It is acknowledged in principle that a man's religion is
beyond the reach of law, and his God need neither
pay taxes, nor take out citizenship papers. But the acknowledgment
of this principle is gradually becoming meaningless. Perhaps it never
had any meaning in light of the growing spiritual tyranny
of the state. Perhaps nothing that you can ever that
you have ever feared from the economic tyranny of socialism
approaches the oppressive spiritual tyranny of your great democracies. These
seek to control not only the acts, but the emotions
of the individuals. They would compel us to love and hate,
to admire and despise as part of our civic duty,
and not content with that part of us which alone
affects the well being of government. Would also conquer and
control that part of us which belongs to no one
but each man and God. They would control our culture,
as though culture were controllable except for the purposes of destruction. Well,
that's a mouthful tell us in which language to create,
as though they could fructify us and direct our ecstasies,
as though these were run along wires and commanded by switches.
Our obedience, our tribute, our bodies will not do. They
will have the very secrets of the heart of their
of the heart torn out of us and delivered to
Washington or Berlin or London, and the terror of socialism.
They depict the intolerable misery of the man who can
claim nothing for himself, but must yield up the fruit
of his labor down to the last husk, to the
disposition of the state. But they have instituted a spiritual
socialism infinitely more hideous. And for economic equality, they have
substituted a spiritual hejemanith illgeneity, sorry, which the communists can
never hope to parallel in the physical field. And woe
to him who dares to practice private initiative in the
spiritual socialist state. His punishment is not only spiritual, but
physical too. And we choose the most obstinate and most
enduring centers in this respect are the best measure of
vindictive fury with which this tyranny is armed. If then
the struggle between us is ever to be lifted beyond
this physical your democracies will have to alter their demands
for racial, spiritual, and cultural homogeneity within the state. Yeah,
but it would be foolish to regard this as a possibility,
for the tendency of the civilization is in the opposite direction.
That's why you need a world war, and that's why
you need a devil, and that's why you need the
worst event that ever happened in history. Remember what Daryl
Cooper and I said. What Daryl Cooper said, Well, there
are Jewish question episode. He said, well, it turns out
that the way you integrate the Jews, which was JQ
Jewish question after Marx's initial one, was you basically had
to make Christian nations not Christian anymore. There was a
steady approach toward the identification of state with race instead
of with the political state. And since this is largely
beyond your conscious control, it is perhaps as foolish as
it is futile to expect to change. I mean, I
haven't gone forward to look and see later in his
life if he was a Zionist. I am assuming he's
a raging Zionist. But look what he's saying here, saying,
you know, you expect to have a state based on race? Ugh. Uh.
The best fighting unit is a nation which is homogeneous
in blood and emotions, no less than in political allegiance.
And since the chief function of the state is to fight, witnessed,
a proportion of your taxes spent in payment and preparation
for wars. You will inevitably demand the subordination of all
human functions to that end. But this is really crying
out in pain as he gets struck, especially with what's
to come, or crying crying out in pain as you strike. Sorry.
The demand for racial homogeneity, racial homogeneity within the state
has led in America, still the most unexploited country in
the whole world, to the exclusion of the immigrant, and
particularly of the immigrant who will not lend himself to
the type of assimilation orself instructure with you' de meant.
He's writing this right around the time of the nineteen
twenty four Immigration Act, so you can also see an
impetus for writing this, the anger behind that. There was
a lot of Jewish anger behind that act because they
saw it as keeping them out, without for a moment
admitting that any kind of exclusion is justifiable in a
world which God created before the nations appeared to disfigure it.
I submit the case of the Jew is an exception.
The Jew has no homeland of his own. When the
Jew migrates from one country to another, it is almost
invariably under the pressure of persecution. Why why would you
be persecuted over and over again. Oh that's right, you
explained it in this book. Thank you. To close the
gate against the Jew is not the same then closing
it against the Italian or the Pole. In the latter cases,
you insist as certain racist state in their own homes,
whether or not the land will support them. But the
Jew is not being forced to stay at home while
one part of the gentile world persecutes him, the other
part refuses him a chance to escape for very shame.
If you were capable of it, you should give the
Jew free immigration everywhere. The irony of it is, of course,
that it is chiefly against the Jew that anti immigration
laws are passed here in America, as in England and Germany,
and the liberal countries which could make room for the
hunted Jew, cooperate despite a few gallant and unsustained gestures,
with the most illiberal in the persecution of their common victim.
He that refuses asylum to a victim fleeing from a
murderer is before God a free and will income accomplice
in the crime. He said over and over. He's an atheist.
It's just it's so. This book is so perfect, and
to me it is infinitely strange that even from your
point of view, the sporting point of view, you should
be able to reconcile your morality with your acts. If
there is anything at all in your professions, you should
be filled with admiration and astonishment at the incredible pluckiness
of a small people, which, in the face of infinite discouragement,
has clung with such tenacity to its identity and cult.
Oh man, this is so good. I love the way Jansas,
without understanding us at all, you might have paid the
homage of warriors to the courage of our unconquerable enemy.
That you watch us with vicious irritation rather than with respect,
that you load us with comely, You load us with contumely,
when so much in your own instinct should have given
us a peculiar place in your regard. Makes me feel
that nothing which can be urged upon your conscience will
avail to lighten the burden of our destiny. They have
a destiny we allowed to have a destiny. We have
just witnessed in America the repetition and the peculiar form
adapted to this country, the evil farce to which experience
of many centuries has not yet quite accustomed us. If
America had any meaning at all, it lay in the
peculiar attempt to rise above the trend of our present civilization,
the identification of race with state. In the old world,
the evil had taken root in the course of centuries.
Its hideous fruits was therefore inevitable. He knows. He's just
telling you.
Speaker 2: If you're if it's not a homogo, if it's a
homogeneous state, we stand out like a sore thumb. You
gotta let a bunch of other people in. You gotta
let a bunch of people who don't look like you.
You can't, don't be cohesive. Then we can come in,
be cohesive and take over.
Speaker 1: Did that happen? But America seemed to offer the hope
of a change. Whatever other evils America had inherited, at
least this one she had avoided. America, therefore, was the
New World in this vital respect, that the state was
purely an ideal, and nationality was identical only with acceptance
of the ideal. But it seems now that the entire
point of view was a mistaken one. That America was
incapable of rising above her origins and the semblance of
an ideal nationalism was only a stage in the proper
development of the universal gentile spirit. The ideal, which for
a time constituted American nationality, disappears now and in its
place emerges again with atavistic certainty, the race. It is
true that even while the ideal flourished triumphant over race,
the seeds of our enmity lay securely embedded in our natures.
But the passing generosity keeps the seeds in slumber. It
is not the first time that gentile nations, forgetting themselves
for a brief period, have offered us friendship and even affection,
But the strange and unnatural exultation, pasted and bitter sobriety succeeded.
Why today, with race triumphant over ideal, anti Semitism uncovers
its fangs into the heartless refusal as of the most
elementary human right, the right of asylum, is added cowardly insult.
The most elementary human right is the right of asylum.
If you don't let us into subvert your culture, you're
evil and cowardly. We are not only excluded, but we
are told, in the unmistakable language of the immigration laws,
that we are an inferior people without the moral courage
to stand up squarely to its evil instincts. The country
prepared itself, through its journalists by a long drought of
vilification of the Jew, and when sufficiently inspired by the
popular and scientific portions, committed the act. How then, shall
I delude myself into the belief that the considerations covered
in this chapter will produce any effect? Have we Jews
not known this evil long enough? Should we not have
known better by this time than to repose hope in
any of the nations. Perhaps we were foolish in our overconfidence.
But our credulousness does us less dishonor than your cruelty
does you. And if it savors again a foolish simplicity
to make this plea to you, I am willing to
take the risk. This last part is called a last word.
It would have been a happier task for me if
I had been able to write this book with sincerity.
In another tone, if I had been able to record
a struggle of two ideals and types which was never
compromised and obscured by physical lusts and cruelties. But rather
than utter the old, untruthful courtesies, tempering resentment with caution. Intact,
it would have been better not to write at all,
and I was driven to write. I believe that though
I may have aired here and there, I have been
mainly right. And I console myself with the thought that
this book offends by its assertiveness. God knows that the
infinite tactfulness of thousands of other Jews seems to have offended.
No less. Whatever we do, we are damned. And I'd
rather be damned standing up than lying down. That's it.
That's the book. I mean, how much do I have?
What am I supposed to say? What commentary am I
supposed to have? It's like Camp of the Saints. When
I read through Camp of the Saints, there was so
little for me to comment on because it was so obvious.
What am I going to explain to you? I just
comment for my own sake so that I feel better
about what I'm reading. But I mean, this, come on, really,
all right? I hope you like it. I am going
to get off this subject, and the next thing I
read for you all will be something different, something enjoyable,
I promise you, maybe something I haven't read and we'll
read it for the first time together. That would be fun.
But yeah, I hope you got a lot out of this.
I hope you learned a lot. And yeah, I really
don't have much more to say. Take care of everyone,
Thank you, I really, I'm this is only being released
to supporters. I can't tell you how much I I
appreciate y'all, and I might release it publicly one day.
But I want to do something. You know, if you're
willing to take money out of your pocket and send
it to me every month, I want to do something
that you can. You know, this just us, just us talking,
So thank you and see you in a week hopefully,
and get this while tayking care of later