A Real Case against Jews
by Marcus Eli Ravage [biographer of the Rothschilds]
from The Century Magazine, January 1928
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Of course, you do resent us. It is no good telling me you don’t.
Of course, you do resent us. It is no good telling me you don’t. So let us not waste any time on denials and alibis. You know you do, and I know it, and we understand each other.
(
If you really are serious when you talk of Jewish plots, may I not direct your attention to one worth talking about? What use is it wasting words on the alleged control of your public opinion by Jewish financiers, newspaper owners, and movie magnates, when you might as well justly accuse us of the proved control of your whole civilization by the Jewish Gospels? )
To be sure, some of your best friends are Jews, and all that. I have heard that before once or twice, I think. And I know too, that you do not include me personally - “me” being any particular individual Jew - when you fling out at us in your wholesale fashion, because I am, well, so different, don’t you know, almost as good as one of yourselves. That little exemption does not, somehow, move me to gratitude; but never mind that now. It is the aggressive, climbing, pushing, materialistic sort you dislike - those, in a world, who remind you so much of your own up-and-coming brethren. We understand each other perfectly. I don’t hold it against you.
Bless my soul, I do not blame anybody for disliking anybody. The thing that intrigues me about this anti-Jewish business, as you play at it, you make such fantastic and transparent excuses, you seem to be suffering from self-consciousness so horribly, that if the performance were not so grotesque it would be irritating.
It is not as if you were amateurs: you have been at it for over fifteen centuries. Yet watching you and hearing your childish pretexts, one might get the impression that you did not know yourselves what it is all about. You resent us, but you cannot clearly say why. You think up a new excuse - a “reason” is what you call it - every other day. You have been piling up justification for yourself these many hundreds of years and each new invention is more laughable than the last and each new excuse contradicts and annihilates the last.
Not so many years ago I used to hear that we were money-grubbers and commercial materialists; now the complaint is being whispered around that no art and no profession is safe against Jewish invasion.
We are, if you are to be believed, at once clannish and exclusive, and unassimilable because we won’t intermarry with you, and we are also climbers and pushers and a menace to your racial integrity.
Our standard of living is so low that we create your slums and sweat industries, and so high that we crowd you out of your best residential sections. We shirk our patriotic duty in wartime because we are pacifists by nature and tradition, and we are the arch-plotters of universal wars and the chief beneficiaries of those wars (see “The protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”.)
We are at once the founders and leading adherents of capitalism and the chief perpetrators of the rebellion against capitalism.
Surely, history has nothing like us for versatility! And oh! I almost forgot the reasons of reasons. We are the stiff-necked people who never accepted Christianity, and we are the criminal people who crucified its founder.
But I tell you, you are self-deceivers. You lack either the self-knowledge or the mettle to face the facts squarely and own up to the truth. You resent the Jew not because, as some of you seem to think, we crucified Jesus but because we gave him birth. Your real quarrel with us is not that we have rejected Christianity but that we have imposed it upon you!
Your loose, contradictory charges against us are not a patch on the blackness of our proved historic offence. You accuse us of stirring up revolution in Moscow. Suppose we admit the charge. What of it? Compared with what Paul the Jew of Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the Russian upheavals a mere street brawl.
You make much noise and fury about the undue Jewish influence in your theatres and movie palaces. Very good; granted your complaint is well-founded. But what is that compared to our staggering influence in your churches, your schools, your laws and your governments, and the very thoughts you think every day?
A clumsy Russian forges a set of papers and publishes them in a book called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” which shows that we plotted to bring on the late World War. You believe that book. All right. For the sake of argument, we will underwrite every word of it. It is genuine and authentic. But what is that besides the unquestionable historical conspiracy which we have carried out, which we never have denied because you never had the courage to charge us with it, and of which the full record is extant for anybody to read?
If you really are serious when you talk of Jewish plots, may I not direct your attention to one worth talking about? What use is it wasting words on the alleged control of your public opinion by Jewish financiers, newspaper owners, and movie magnates, when you might as well justly accuse us of the proved control of your whole civilization by the Jewish Gospels?
You have not begun to appreciate the real depth of our guilt. We are intruders. We are disturbers. We are subverters. We have taken your natural world, your ideals, your destiny, and played havoc with them. We have been at the bottom of not merely the latest Great War but of nearly all your wars, not only of the Russian but of nearly every other major revolution in your history. We have brought discord and confusion and frustration into your personal and public life. We are still doing it. No one can tell how long, we shall go on doing it.
Look back a little and see what has happened. Nineteen hundred years ago you were an innocent, care-free pagan race. You worshipped countless Gods and Goddesses, the spirits of the air, of the running streams and of the woodland. You took unblushing pride in the glory of your naked bodies. You carved images of your gods and of the tantalizing human figure. You delighted in the combats of the field, the arena and the battle-ground. Disporting yourselves on the hillsides and in the valleys of the great outdoors, you took to speculating on the wonder and mystery of life and laid the foundations of natural science and philosophy. Yours was a noble, sensual culture, unirked by the prickings of the social conscience or by any sentimental questionings about human equality. Who knows what great and glorious destiny might have been yours if we had left you alone.
But we did not leave you alone. We took you in hand and pulled down the beautiful and generous structure you had reared, and changed the whole course of your history. We conquered you as no empire of yours ever subjugated Africa or Asia. And we did it all without bullets, without blood or turmoil, without force of any kind. We did it solely by the irresistible might of our spirit, with ideas, with propaganda.
We made you the willing and unconscious bearers of our mission to the whole world, to the barbarous races of the world, to the countless unborn generations. Without fully understanding what we were doing to you, you became the agents at large of our racial tradition, carrying our gospel to unexplored ends of the earth.