Black-Jewish civil war threatens Identity Politics. FT says Europe must
accept mass immigration
Newsletter published on March 11, 2020
(1) Black-Jewish civil war threatens Identity Politics - E. Michael Jones
(2) FT editorial Board says Europe must accept mass immigration
(3) Europe must Open its Borders to Asylum-seekers - Financial Times
editorial board
(4) Sanders lets AOC Trots run his campaign; he adopts their Open Border
policies
(5) Tulsi Gabbard is the only hope for opponents of Wall St, the Lobby,
and the Trots
(6) Critical questions about Jewish power
(7) Russian Jews & Gentiles From A Russian Point Of View, by Mme Z
Ragozin (1881)
(1) Black-Jewish civil war threatens Identity Politics - E. Michael Jones
Black Frankenstein Turns on Its Jewish Creators
E. Michael Jones
MARCH 3, 2020
{photo} Crown Heights Riot in New York City
Once again Michael Brown has held me responsible for attacks on Jews.
Last year it was Pittsburgh and Poway. This time it was Jersey City and
Monsey, New York. In order to make these accusations sound plausible
against me, a man who prefaced virtually every YouTube video he ever
posted on the Jewish Question with the statement "no one has the right
to harm the Jew,"[1] Brown had to confect an overarching principle known
as "Christian anti-Semitism," to condemn me for what I did not say.
"Christian anti-Semitism" turns out to be an oxymoron if we construe it
racially or a straight forward reading of the Scriptures if we change
the term to "anti-Jewish."
Brown's solution to the problem is banning hate speech as the ADL
defines that term. That means de-platforming people like me. One day
after Sasha Baron Cohen gave his speech calling for Internet censorship,
the ADL issued a list of ten people who needed to be de-platformed
immediately, and out of the literally billions of people on this planet
who make use of social media platforms like Youtube and Facebook I had
the distinction of being one of the ten people who were singled out by name.
ADL @ADL
Despite a June policy update aimed at eliminating extremism on the
platform, @YouTube continues to host 30+ channels that broadcast
anti-Semitic and white supremacist content. @YouTube must fulfill its
commitment to reject hate and extremism:
…
If the ADL were smart, they would have left me in the realm of "dynamic
silence," where I have been languishing for years. But—pace, Jared
Taylor—Jews aren't smart. Heinrich Graetz, the father of Jewish
historiography, laid that "canard" (one of the ADL's favorite terms) to
rest in Volume V of his history of the Jews when he wrote that the
morality of Polish Jews, who constituted the majority of that people on
this earth, had been corrupted by their "scholarship," because
scholarship meant the study of the Talmud, which taught them how to lie,
steal from, and cheat the goyim. "Love of twisting, distorting,
ingenious quibbling, and a foregone antipathy to what did not lie within
their field of vision," Graetz wrote, "constituted the character of the
Polish Jews. Pride in their knowledge of the Talmud and a spirit of
dogmatism attached even to the best rabbis, and undermined their moral
sense. The Polish Jews of course were extraordinarily pious but even
their piety rested on sophistry and boastfulness."[2]
Either way, this category of Brown's mind was too complicated to serve
as a plausible explanation, which is why the media ignored Brown and
came up with their own idea of the source of the problem in the wake of
the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. According to their
reading, the cause of anti-Semitism is white racism. White people are
the problem, and restricting their ability to speak and assemble is the
solution.
If we look into what has been happening in New York City lately, we
discover that the details reveal a completely different story, primarily
because all of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence so far have
been Black. The Jersey City attack which left four people dead was
perpetrated by a bizarre religious sect known as the Black Hebrew
Israelites.[3] The Hanukkah attack in Monsey was carried out by a
machete wielding Black psycho who had stopped taking his meds. Beyond
that there were the attacks which were too trivial to make the
heADLines. Surveillance camera footage captured the image of an
obviously Jewish Hasid, a group locally known as "Beards," having a
chair thrown at him by three Blacks while walking down a street in
Brooklyn. Incident after incident reveals a huge reservoir of
Black-Jewish animosity, but nothing even remotely resembling white racism.
Sensing the collapse of an important paradigm, Jewish pundits rushed in
to impose damage control so that they could regain control of the
narrative. Commentary magazine, a publication of the American Jewish
Committee, portrayed every attempt to explain what was happening by the
locals as an attempt to blame the victim, claiming that "anti-Orthodox
sentiments" in New York State "have been a bipartisan affair as
politicians blame Orthodox Jews for overdevelopment and gentrification,
and commentators even argue that the increasing size of Hasidic
communities will "foster prejudice" and anti-Semitism—in short, blaming
anti-Semitism on Jews themselves.[4]
The explanations from the locals, however, have more plausibility than
the claims of the ADL alleging uncaused anti-Semitism. Jersey City
council member Joan Terrell Page laid the blame for that city's attack
on overzealous "brutes of the Jewish community" who were so aggressive
in approaching "Black homeowners" who "were threatened, intimidated, and
harassed by Jews telling them I WANT TO BUY YOUR HOUSE" that the city
council had to pass a "no knock" ordinance to protect home owners from
harassment.[5] The Associated Press got accused, at least implicitly, of
promoting anti-Semitism for reporting that "Orthodox communities had
taken advantage of open space and cheaper housing to establish
modern-day versions of the European shtetls where their ancestors lived
for centuries before the Holocaust," leading to "flare-ups of rhetoric
seen by some as anti-Semitic." Joan Coaston, the author of an article in
Vox, finds it hard to believe that "anti-Semitic violence with rocks and
machetes logically stems from disputes over housing stock," but the idea
is hardly far-fetched.
One of the most famous articles ever published in Commentary was "My
Negro Problem, and Ours,"[6] written by Norman Podhoretz, its editor and
a man who would go on to become one of the founding fathers of
neoconservatism. Written in 1963 at the high water mark of the
Black-Jewish alliance that created the Civil Rights movement,
Podhoretz's article described Black violence against Jews in graphic
detail from personal experience beginning in grade school:
I think there was a day—first grade? second grade?—when my best friend
Carl hit me on the way home from school and announced that he wouldn't
play with me any more because I had killed Jesus. When I ran home to my
mother crying for an explanation, she told me not to pay any attention
to such foolishness, and then in Yiddish she cursed the goyim and the
Schwartzes, the Schwartzes and the goyim. Carl, it turned out, was a
schwartze, and so was added a third to the categories into which people
were mysteriously divided.[7]
Podhoretz writes as a deeply conflicted liberal, who defines himself as
white—"To the Negroes, my white skin was enough to define me as the
enemy, and in a war it is only the uniform that counts and not the
person."—but who hates Blacks primarily because he is a Jew:
The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old
feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most
overlarded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in
willing myself. It no longer has, as for me it once did, any cause or
justification (except, perhaps, that I am constantly being denied my
right to an honest expression of the things I earned the right as a
child to feel). How, then, do I know that this hatred has never entirely
disappeared? I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the
thought of Negro anti-Semitism.[8]
In framing the issue this way, Podhoretz differs from James Baldwin and
Fiorella LaGuardia, both of whom described the Harlem riots of 1937 as a
Black-white conflict, when in fact it was a Black-Jewish conflict,
brought about largely by the predatory behavior of Jewish merchants.
Baldwin's message, according to Podhoretz, is this: "Color is not a
human or personal reality; it is a political reality." This is certainly
true, but it is also beside the point. Behind categories of the mind lie
categories of reality like Jew. To attribute behavioral characteristics
to skin color is a fantasy, but to attribute behavioral characteristics
to the people who look to the Talmud for spiritual guidance is not a
fantasy projected on a blank slate; it is, as Heinrich Graetz pointed
out, a description which corresponds to the reality of who these people
are and why they act in a certain way.
Irving Horowitz, whose father's hardware store survived the Harlem riots
of 1937, described in his memoir how his family delighted in cheating
the shvartzes especially around Christmastime when they brought their
Christmas tree light bulbs into the store to be tested. In his book The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse exposed the Black vs. Jew
animosity that simmered just beneath the surface of the purported class
unity of the Communist Party in Harlem, where Jews used Black party
members to advance a Jewish agenda. When I met the late Rev. Hiram
Crawford, pastor of the Israel Methodist Church on the South Side of
Chicago, I knew of him as a defender of the unborn and expected to talk
to him about the impact of abortion on the Black community in Chicago,
but he wanted to talk about the Jews and how they had cheated him when
he bought the movie theater that then served as his church.
Fully aware of this animosity, Podhoretz ends his essay on a prophetic note:
Yet the tragic fact is that love is not the answer to hate—not in the
world of politics, at any rate. Color is indeed a political rather than
a human or a personal reality and if politics (which is to say power)
has made it into a human and a personal reality, then only politics
(which is to say power) can unmake it once again. But the way of
politics is slow and bitter, and as impatience on the one side is
matched by a setting of the jaw on the other, we move closer and closer
to an explosion and blood may yet run in the streets.[9]
Fifty-six years after the appearance of "My Negro Problem—and Ours,"
Norman Podhoretz's prophecy reached its uncanny yet literal fulfillment,
and Commentary is now commenting on Jewish blood running in the streets
of Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Monsey. In the wake of the Jersey City
attacks, politicians fell all over themselves to see who could denounce
anti-Semitism in the strongest terms. What they forgot to tell us is
that the main cause of anti-Semitism in the Black community is Jewish
behavior. The one thing that Commentary under the editorship of Norman
Podhoretz then and under the editorship of his son John now have in
common is the belief that anti-Semitism has nothing to do with Jewish
behavior.
The testimony of a veteran Catholic journalist who has lived his entire
life in New York disputes this claim. In his view, the root of the
current wave of "anti-Semitism" is Jewish behavior in racially mixed
communities like Brooklyn, where:
the Beards behave as if they are a law unto themselves. We can do
anything we want is their attitude and they have carved out large areas
which would otherwise cost the government hundreds of millions of tax
dollars to support Blacks on welfare.
The Jews believe that there is one rule for us and one rule for everyone
else. They treat the Blacks like animals, like inferior beings. One
manifestation of this is that they drive like crazy as if they are off
by themselves in the desert. As a result a Jew hit and killed a Black
Jamaican by the name of Gavin Cato, in an automobile accident. When the
Jew was allowed to leave the scene of the crime, four days of rioting
ensued from August 19 to 23, 1991. One Jew was killed during the
rioting, along with one Italian, who was dragged out of his car by a
Black mob after being mistaken for a Jew. The Jew was never put on trial
because he escaped to Israel, which does not honor extradition treaties.
Our Catholic correspondent then gets more specific about the recent
troubles in the New York area:
The cause of the most recent riots is the ADL, which doesn't like the
Beards. During the 1991 riots the ADL told the city to withhold police
protection from the Beards, to send them a message. Because the cops
stayed out of the area, a disturbance which could have been quelled in a
matter of hours raged on for five days. The current attacks on Jews in
Brooklyn have been orchestrated by the ADL because they are losing
control of the public mind and the sympathy which Jews traditionally
received from the Catholic ethnic population of New York. Even before
the Jersey City incident, the ADL was orchestrating street incidents by
provoking people with histories of mental disorders to attack people in
the streets who were clearly visible as Jews, ie., the Beards, or the
Orthodox. Attacking Jews became a street game which then gained momentum
on its own without any outside orchestration. The ADL then used the
attacks as a pretext for pushing hate crimes legislation, something they
have been promoting for at least 40 years. The attacks then took on a
life of their own. There is no need for outside agitation. There was
plenty of resentment because of Jewish behavior: the landlords who
quadruple rent to drive Blacks out of their apartments, the stores which
sell bad food. The Blacks know who they have to deal with every day, and
it's not Norwegians.
This corresponds to the rise of Yuppies in Black areas, who live off of
borrowed money and can outspend the Blacks when it comes to paying rent.
Yuppies are not afraid of living in crime-infested areas. They go
jogging in hot pants past the notorious Farragut housing project. The
Yuppies gentrify the Blacks out of their neighborhoods by outbidding
their current residents, but everyone knows that the Jews own the
buildings, collect the rent, and want Blacks replaced by tenants who
have more disposable income.
{photo} Black/Jewish conflict on display at the Crown Heights Riot in 1991
In addition to preferring yuppies as tenants, the Jews have pursued an
open door immigration policy bringing in immigrants who undercut wages
and drive Blacks from their apartments. They are then replaced by a
second wave of yuppies and homosexuals who live on debt and who are
defined by their credit ratings. These people are a banker's dream and
they get preferential treatment, which the Blacks resent. This creates
an explosive mixture. Black resentment results from getting pushed out
but also from the daily grind of dealing with Jews. All of a sudden one
guy goes crazy.
Because Black leaders are installed by the banks, there is no Black
leadership, and because there is no leadership Blacks take the law into
their own hands. The clearest manifestation of this lack of leadership
is the predictable attempt to portray the current Jewish-Black conflict
as an essentially racial conflict between Blacks and "whites." In this
regard, Al Sharpton has followed the example of James Baldwin, without
Baldwin's literary talent. Al Sharpton became famous for saying that
David Dinkins "wore too many yarmulkes,"[10] but now he's wearing one
himself. Shortly after the Monsey attack, Sharpton assembled a group of
Black ministers who issued a statement claiming that they were "terribly
disturbed by the attacks by people of the African American community"
without giving any indication that the Black community which these
ministers represented had legitimate grievances.
According to our Catholic source, the ADL has brought this calamity on
itself. The Jews' promotion of indiscriminate immigration, beginning
with the Javitts bill of 1965, eroded the large, largely Catholic Middle
Class of the 1950s which sympathized with Jewish plight during World War
II. Cardinal Spellman was in bed with the Zionists. It was his Midnight
Flight to South America which got the votes in the United Nations to
ratify the creation of the state of Israel. The once warm relations
which the Catholics had with the Jews have been replaced by the
indifference of low wage laborers from Central America who have never
heard of the Holocaust and have more important things to think about,
like making ends meet in low wage/high rent New York.
{photo} The Lynching of Leo Frank
The cry of anti-Semitism is the surest sign that the big Jews want to
divert our attention from the Jewish behavior which is its main cause.
Since the founding of the ADL, they have linked anti-Semitism with
racism. Beginning with the anti-lynching campaign in the south which
followed the murder of Leo Frank, the ADL has used Blacks as proxy
warriors to advance their agenda. The Black-Jewish alliance reached its
pinnacle of power with Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement,
but it collapsed almost immediately thereafter one year before King's
death when Harold Cruse's book came out in 1967.
Liddell Hart could have predicted what was going to happen after that
because irregular warfare always gets out of control, and every
successful revolution leads to a civil war. The Jewish attempt to turn
Blacks into revolutionaries succeeded. Together they conquered the South
in the name of de-segregation, but in doing this they created, as Tom
Watson predicted they would, their own version of Frankenstein's
monster, which is now turning on its creator. The Trotskys create the
revolution, but the Bronsteins pay for it. The Jews behind the scenes
make the revolution, but the Jews who are most visible because of their
Orthodox dress pay for it on the streets of Brooklyn.
{photo} Roberta Kaplan
As Roberta Kaplan's lawsuits following the rally in Charlottesville
showed, the Jews never abandoned their use of race to destroy their
enemies. A crucial part of this plan was getting clueless goyim and
secret Jew admirers to identify as white. This was a crucial element to
the trap laid for the white boys in Charlottesville and the subsequent
lawsuits because as soon as anyone admitted to being white he was
admitting to being a racist, which meant it was easy to deny him the
rights which the constitution guaranteed.
We are now seeing that strategy collapse before our eyes because the
main perpetrators of violence against Jews in New York, the Jewish
capital of America, are without exception Black. We now have a civil war
between two of the most privileged groups in identity politics. The
conflict between Blacks and Jews is real, but it has no symbolic or
moral value, which means that it must be ignored by the pundits who earn
a living by fomenting lynch mobs to do the oligarchs' bidding.
Politicians like Bill de Blasio, whose wife is Black, are in a bind
because Jewish groups like the ADL, which wants him to declare a state
of emergency in New York, are demanding what would be tantamount to
political suicide, which is what identifying the perpetrators of
violence would mean.
Phov @MugenSpoons They're all waking up now.
The Black/Jewish civil war means the end of Liberalism. The Left simply
cannot condemn Blacks as anti-Semitic because it would cut the heart out
of their program of identity politics. Similarly, Democratic politicians
are completely incapable of stopping the random violence which has
become a routine part of American life. This is why they support gun
control. This is also why they support hate speech laws. It calms their
most vocal critics, while at the same time doing nothing to solve the
problem, which is again, Jewish behavior of the sort which Blacks
complain about when their rent gets quadrupled by Jewish landlords.
But, the Black-Jewish civil war also means the end of conservatism
because it exposes the Jewish hand behind its funding. Charlie Kirk's
Turning Point USA has an annual budget of $24 million to promote
oligarchic, i.e., Jewish, i.e., Koch brother interests. First Things
engages in a more sophisticated form of the same thing, advancing the
agenda of what that magazine has now taken to calling "Catholic
Zionism."[11]
First Things editor R. R. (Rusty) Reno is married to a Jewish lawyer and
committed to a form of Catholic-Jewish syncretism. Reno agreed to "have
Jewish children, but they had to be raised with a Judaism that was more
than occasional, and full-hearted, not half."[12] Reno's decision to
raise his children as Jews preceded his conversion to Catholicism. Since
the Catholic Church proclaims as one of its dogmas that Baptism is
necessary for salvation, Reno's decision would lead to soul-searching
down the road, on his part and on the part of his daughter, who broke
down at her Bat Mitzvah, "sobbing because her father, as a Gentile,
cannot stand with her as she reads Torah." Or was it because she cannot
stand with the baptized on judgment day? "She was angry," Reno writes,
but "neither the rabbi, nor her mother, nor I could give her what she
wanted. In fact, I did not want to give her what she wanted, for her
desire was that obedience to God would not require the pain of
renunciation, would not require the visible marks on our bodies…." And
so as her brother was marked by his cut penis, she is marked by the
bitter tears of separation from her father. And so, in the pews, "I feel
the tears on my cheek, and the liquid fire of her voice [chanting Torah
and] touching the lips of my unclean heart. O, the depth of the riches
and the wisdom and knowledge of God!"
The reality of Baptism as necessary for salvation has even made it to
the editorial offices of America. "A more orthodox believer would say
that while there may be two ways of seeing God, ultimately only one way
can be correct." The Renos, for example, know that they will have to
reckon further with their theological differences, if not in this life
then in the next. This means at the end of life, one spouse goes to
heaven and the other to hell, or both go to hell along with their
children. Is Baptism necessary for salvation? If so, you contributed to
the damnation of your children. No wonder Reno's daughter is angry. At
his daughter's bat mitzvah, Reno tells us that he was consumed with:
self-doubt, a worry about the invisibility of my own faith." Jews were
marked by their faith, but was [Reno]? "Where had God's commandment set
me apart and marked me as Christ's own? Did we—no, did I—make the
commandments of God into empty ephemera, 'spiritual' and pious
commitments that the currents of culture eroded and obliterated the
moment I left the church?"
The short answer to that question is yes. First Things is proof of that.
First Things was born out of theft. Richard John Neuhaus connived with
Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz to steal a $250,000 Bradley Foundation
grant earmarked for the paleocon Rockford Institute. Now First Things
gets money from vulture capitalists like Paul Singer. The money flows
from the Paul E. Singer Foundation to the Philos Project and ends up in
Hertog Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation
(CJCUC), which also receives funding from the Hertog foundation which
contributes directly to First Things.[13] The CJCUC lists "Dr. Russell
Ronald Reno" as one member of a "team of contributors" which has
produced "academic works" like Covenant and Hope: Jewish and Christian
Reflections, Plowshares into Swords: Reflections on Violence and
Religion and Returning to Zion: Christian and Jewish Perspectives.[14]
First Things then uses this money to advance the cause of "Catholic
Zionism"[15] by conscripting Catholic human shields like John Waters and
Patrick Deneen to write articles on other topics.
The religious syncretism known as conservatism has been made obsolete by
the zeitgeist. Turning Point USA speaker Glenn Beck recently defended
pornography, probably at the behest of the oligarchs who fund him,
unaware of the fact that the demographic he is being paid to control now
understands the mechanism controlling them, as this recent e-mail to me
points out:
More than one year free of porn thanks to the encouragement of men like
E. Michael Jones. Within a week or two I stopped lying completely and
within the first two months I met a truly good, virtuous woman who I
will soon make my wife. The combination of these things is no
coincidence. Porn and lies make you blind to God and I'm so grateful to
men like you, Dr. Jones, for helping me see. Logos is rising!
(2) FT editorial Board says Europe must accept mass immigration
Is This How Europe Ends?
March 10, 2020
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Will these migrants and asylum seekers become good Europeans? Or will
they create in the great cities of Europe enclaves that replicate the
conditions in the African and Middle East countries whence they came?
"Fortress Europe is an illusion."
So declares the Financial Times in the closing line of its Saturday
editorial: "Europe Cannot Ignore Syrian Migrant Crisis."
The FT undertakes to instruct the Old Continent on what its duty is and
what its future holds: "The EU will face flows of migrants and asylum
seekers across the Mediterranean for decades to come."
Can Europe not repel this unwanted home invasion from the Global South?
It is "delusional" to think so, says the FT. Europe must be realistic
and set about "providing legal routes for migrants and asylum seekers."
What occasioned the editorial was Greece's rough resistance to Turkish
President Erdogan's funneling of thousands of Syrian refugees, who had
fled into Turkey, right up to the border with Greece.
Erdogan is threatening to inundate southeastern Europe with Syrian
refugees to extract more money from the EU in return for keeping the 3.5
million Syrians already in Turkey away from EU frontiers.
Another Erdogan objective is to coerce Europe into backing his military
intervention in Syria to prevent President Bashar Assad from capturing
all of Idlib province and emerging victorious in his civil war.
In the human rights hellhole that is Syria today, we may see the
dimensions of the disaster wrought when Wilsonian crusaders set out to
depose the dictator Assad and make Syria safe for democracy.
A brief history.
When the Arab Spring erupted and protesters arose to oust Assad, the
U.S., Turkey and the Gulf Arabs aided and equipped Syrian rebels willing
to take up arms. The "good rebels," however, were routed and elements of
al-Qaida soon assumed dominance of the resistance.
Facing defeat, Syria's president put out a call to his allies — Russia,
Iran, Hezbollah — to save his regime. They responded, and Assad, over
four years, recaptured all of Syria west of the Euphrates, save Idlib.
There, the latest fighting has pushed 900,000 more refugees to Turkey's
southern border.
The 21st-century interventions and wars of the West in the Islamic world
have not gone well.
George W. Bush was goaded into invading Iraq. Barack Obama was persuaded
to overthrow Colonel Moammar Gadhafi in Libya and the Assad regime in
Damascus. Obama ordered U.S. forces to assist Saudi Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman in his war to crush Houthi rebels who had ousted
Riyadh's resident puppet in Yemen.
And what has the West reaped from our Mideast wars?
In Syria and Yemen, we have helped to create two of the world's greatest
human rights disasters. In Libya, we have a new civil war. In Iraq, we
now battle Iran for influence inside a nation we "liberated" in 2003
In Afghanistan, we have concluded a deal with our enemy of two decades,
the Taliban, that will enable us to pull our 12,000 troops out of the
country in 14 months and let our Afghan allies work it out, or fight it
out, with the Taliban. America is washing its hands of its longest war.
In five wars over 20 years, we lost 7,000 soldiers with some 40,000
wounded. We plunged the wealth of an empire into these wars.
And what did these wars produce for the peoples we went to aid and
uplift, besides hundreds of thousands of dead Afghans and Arabs and
millions of people uprooted from their homes and driven into exile?
Now, Europe is being admonished by the FT that, having done its duty by
plunging into the Mideast, the continent has a new moral duty to take in
the refugees the wars created, for decades to come.
But if the EU opens its doors to an endless stream of Africans and
Arabs, where is the evidence that European nations will accept and
assimilate them?
Will these migrants and asylum seekers become good Europeans? Or will
they create in the great cities of Europe enclaves that replicate the
conditions in the African and Middle East countries whence they came?
The history of the last half millennium tells the story of the rise and
fall of a civilization.
In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, Spain, Britain, France and
Portugal, and then Belgium, Italy, Germany and America, all believing in
the superiority of their civilization, went out into the world to create
empires to uplift and rule what Rudyard Kipling derisively called "the
lesser breeds without the law."
After two world wars, the rulers of these empires embraced a liberalism
that now proclaimed the equality of all peoples, races, creeds, cultures
and civilizations. This egalitarian ideology mandated the dismantling of
empires and colonies as the reactionary relics of a benighted time.
Now the peoples of the new nations, dissatisfied with what their
liberated lands and rulers have produced, have decided to come to Europe
to enjoy in the West what they cannot replicate at home. And liberalism,
the ideology of Western suicide, dictates to Europe that it take them in
— for decades to come.
The colonizers of yesterday are becoming the colonized of tomorrow. Is
this how the West ends?
(3) Europe must Open its Borders to Asylum-seekers - Financial Times
editorial board
Turkey migrant clash exposes cracks in Fortress Europe
EU has a duty to engage with Ankara and ease refugee plight
The editorial board
MARCH 6, 2020
Turkey's attempt to funnel thousands of asylum seekers across the border
into Greece over the past seven days has been a stark reminder of the
EU's vulnerabilities and its failure to put in place a sustainable and
coherent asylum strategy since the migrant surge of 2015-16.
The deal EU leaders struck with Ankara four years ago to stop the flow
of Syrian refugees in return for cash was remarkably effective judging
by the drastic drop in numbers making it to Greek territory. It bought
them time to introduce a more equitable and politically acceptable
asylum policy. Regrettably they did not use it. As happened after the
eurozone debt storm, when the sun began to shine again, everyone forgot
about fixing the roof.
The EU needs an internal asylum policy that will stop it from being
politically ripped apart. The current rules — which require asylum
seekers to lodge a claim in the EU country they first arrive in — place
an intolerable burden on frontline states such as Greece, Italy and
Spain. But an attempt to share the load through mandatory quotas in the
wake of the 2015-16 crisis enraged governments in eastern Europe who
resented German Chancellor Angela Merkel's unilateral decision to take
in hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in 2015.
Resistance to immigration in ethnically homogenous eastern societies has
turned into a bigger fight about preserving national sovereignty in the
EU. But Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic benefit from the bloc's
Schengen passport-free travel zone and should show solidarity — through
financial contributions if not quota-sharing with other members.
The EU also neglected to fulfil its obligations to Turkey under the 2016
deal. It took far fewer Syrian refugees from Turkey than envisaged.
Ankara complains Brussels has also been slow to disburse money. That is
an unjust quibble: funds are understandably being channelled to specific
projects rather than the government's coffers. More importantly, the
money will run out by 2021 and the EU has shown little appetite to
strike a new deal.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan's decision to engage in refugee blackmail gives the
EU an excuse to refuse further help, at least in the short term. Some EU
members, particularly Greece and Cyprus, are also incensed by Turkey's
maritime claims in the eastern Mediterranean. But eventually the EU will
have to reach a new deal. Geography creates its own imperatives. Turkey
is Europe's buffer to the Middle East, a region destined for long-term
instability. It puts a huge responsibility on Ankara which the EU has an
obligation to help bear.
But hoping that Turkey's grudging co-operation and the militarisation of
the EU's external frontiers can shut out migrants and refugees
completely is delusional. The EU will face flows of migrants and asylum
seekers across the Mediterranean for decades to come. It has to work
closely with its neighbours — as Spain has with Morocco — to manage the
problem while protecting human rights. That means co-operation on border
enforcement while also providing legal routes for migrants and asylum
seekers.
The attitudes of policymakers across Europe have hardened towards
migrants since the crisis of five years ago. The rise of Eurosceptic
anti-immigrant movements has rocked the EU establishment. Europe is
stretching its humanitarian obligations to breaking point, as Greece has
by refusing all asylum applications for one month. The EU may have given
up any attempt to shape the course of the war in Syria, but it cannot
shield itself from the effects. Fortress Europe is an illusion.
(4) Sanders lets AOC Trots run his campaign; he adopts their Open Border
policies
This will cost him victory, as it did Corbyn (UK) & Bill Shorten (Oz) -
Peter M.
Green New Deal
Transform our energy system to 100 percent renewable energy and create
20 million jobs needed to solve the climate crisis.
Ensure a just transition for communities and workers, including fossil
fuel workers.
Ensure justice for frontline communities, especially under-resourced
groups, communities of color, Native Americans, people with
disabilities, children and the elderly.
Save American families money with investments in weatherization, public
transportation, modern infrastructure and high-speed broadband. Commit
to reducing emissions throughout the world, including providing $200
billion to the Green Climate Fund, rejoining the Paris Agreement, and
reasserting the United States’ leadership in the global fight against
climate change.
Invest in conservation and public lands to heal our soils, forests, and
prairie lands.
End the greed of the fossil fuel industry and hold them accountable.
A Welcoming and Safe America for All
Institute a moratorium on deportations until a thorough audit of past
practices and policies is complete.
Reinstate and expand DACA and develop a humane policy for those seeking
asylum.
Completely reshape and reform our immigration enforcement system,
including breaking up ICE and CBP and redistributing their functions to
their proper authorities.
Dismantle cruel and inhumane deportation programs and detention centers
and reunite families who have been separated.
Live up to our ideals as a nation and welcome refugees and those seeking
asylum, including those displaced by climate change.
(5) Tulsi Gabbard is the only hope for opponents of Wall St, the Lobby,
and the Trots
Why Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is continuing her bid for president
She is facing an uphill battle to get to the 1,991 delegates needed.
By Beatrice Peterson
8 March 2020
The Iraq war veteran is the first American Samoan and Hindu member of
Congress. The field for Democrats has significantly narrowed over the
past month, going from almost two dozen candidates in the beginning of
the race to just three: former Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Sen.
Bernie Sanders and a name that has, at times, been left out: Hawaii Rep.
Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard, despite failing to come in first place in any presidential
primary in the country, has stressed she’s staying in the race. She is
facing an uphill battle to get to the 1,991 delegates needed to secure a
nomination for the first Democratic convention ballot.
When asked by ABC News why she's continuing her bid, Gabbard said this
campaign is "an opportunity to speak to Americans every single day about
the sea change we need in our foreign policy."
On the campaign trail she has talked at length about the cost of war,
also noting the physical and financial toll of war.
"In Afghanistan right now, we're spending $4 billion of your taxpayer
dollars every month," Gabbard said. "This money could be used here."
The Hawaii lawmaker told ABC News that in order to have a successful
implementation of any of her competitors domestic policy proposals, they
would have to "depend upon an end to military interventionism and the
new cold war and nuclear arms race – all of which will waste trillions
of dollars."
She said at the core of her campaign is the message that "successful
domestic policy is inseparably linked to a successful foreign policy."
At the height of the 2020 Democratic Party primary, Gabbard was one of
six women vying to be the Democratic nominee for president. And with the
departure of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren from the race this
week, Gabbard is the last woman, person of color, veteran and millennial
in the race.
Oklahoma State University Professor Farida Jalalzai has written about
women presidents across the globe and notes Gabbard’s candidacy faced
several challenges.
"You could maybe say that there are certain issues that perhaps she
prioritizes more than others that haven't gained as much traction, for
example," she said. "And of course, you also point to the big things,
like she doesn't have. She doesn't have much in the way of fundraising." ...
According to ABC News analysis, the campaign has raised only $11.1
million since launching in January 2019. And by the end of the month,
her campaign had $2 million cash on hand.
"A lot of other candidates who have outraised and outspent us by
multiple times have not been able to stay in the race," Gabbard told ABC
News. "I have been very fiscally responsible with the dollars that
people are contributing to our campaign to maximize their effect and
being able to get our message out to voters in the early states and
across the country."
Her campaign is fueled by a small team of staffers, volunteers, friends
and family members. She flies commercial to cut down costs, renting at
times affordable hotel rooms and Airbnbs to save as much money as possible.
She told ABC News, "It is the power of our volunteers the power of
individuals who are recognizing the need to bring about this kind of
change in our leadership where we have a government of by and for the
people that makes it possible for us to continue this mission." ...
(6) Critical questions about Jewish power
From: "ZA.Ragozin" <ZA.Ragozin@protonmail.com>
Subject: Critical questions about Jewish power
Dear Mr. Myers,
First, thank you for providing an excellent and balanced site on the
Jewish and related issues. It has been very useful to me in my enquiries
- my inquiry is about the dangers posed by Jewish influence.
You have made me more keenly aware than I otherwise would have been of
the significance of certain key events such as the struggle between
Stalin and Trotsky, and the factional forces behind them, and how that
ultimately played out, including the assassination of them both.
You have also made me more aware of the Baruch Plan element to world
government that did not quite come together for them, at least as they
tried it then - their capacity for patiently inexorable pressure may yet
bring that monopolization of mass destruction with an international
legal agency to them in another way - or after they get a true world
bank & world money first.
I am writing now in the hope that you can again clarify matters for me
and also your readership in general.
Some points of remaining scrutiny appear to me to be:
The relative status of Jews compared to mainline gentile families such as
1) old aristocratic wealth (e.g. British and Dutch royalties, nobilities
of these countries as well as a smattering of remaining nobles from
other places where the monarchies were toppled)
2) old gentile merchant & banking wealth (e.g. Fugger, Baring).
3) new world aristocratic & mercantile wealth - e.g. the original
settlers of america in their dutch and british varieties,
4) the Church,
5) decrepit institutions like masonry
7) the new world new wealth - Astors, Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, etc.
For Rockefeller in particular strong arguments can be adduced to have a
dominant influence on America - without Rothschild and the like
necessarily even in that picture. Old Anglo-American ties, the Episcopal
apparatus, the CFR/RIIA/Pilgrims connection, The Milner Group, etc.
etc., show an additional Atlanticist aspect to these new gentile elites.
I am fully convinced, at this point, that the Jewish hand predominates.
Yet I would like for more evidence than I currently know of to more
fully convince others and to set aside these other explanations of the
elites so that the shoe that actually fits - the Jewish one - stands
more uncontested.
Circumstantially we can speculate that these Anglo-American ties had
already been profitably infiltrated by Jewish elements (indeed the
roster of the Pilgrims Society seems to show this). We can speculate
further that, for instance, that Jewish hands guided the rise of
Rockefeller.
Circumstantially we can show the Rothschilds being anxious to obfuscate
their actual role in American economic life, preferring to act behind
proxies, both Jewish and gentile. Morgan on at least several occasions
acted on their behalf. They may have bailed out Peabody before Peabody
became JS Morgan and later JP - it is uncertain, I think, at this point
in what's come to any kind of public light.
We can thus put together a good case to think that, in order to take
control of America's massive new oil resources - just as they moved to
take control of Europe's in Baku and Asia's in Persia and Malaysia and
Burma, etc. - that they had decided, in this instance, to act as they
had in the past and promote a gentile front.
Later we see Schiff referred to as Rockefeller's money manager. We see
further Kuhn Loeb partners managing Rockefeller's investments - trusts,
etc., including, presumably, Chase National, we see this into the 1970s;
we see Rockefeller then choose different banks - but Jewish ones still,
Lehman and Lazard.
We have records from a 1970s congressional committee investigation by
Wright Patman evidence that Rothschilds had a significant stake in the
same Cleveland bank which, a hundred years previously, financed
Rockefeller - tenuous but potentially meaningful.
Running against this line of thought is the demonstrable competition
between Rothschild-owned Baku trade & Royal Dutch Shell and the Standard
Oil concerns. We see some evidence that Rockefeller and Edward
Rothschild, from the French branch, hammered out some deal in the close
of the 1800s.
A further complication is that Rothschilds divested of their Baku oil
before the Bolsheviks dispossessed it - but they did dispossess it from
a Rothschild concern, Royal Dutch Shell.
When the Soviets subsequently issued foreign capitalists concessions, we
do not see so visibly among the foreign capitalists Jewish names, even
those connected with Warburg, etc. Instead we see more commonly Morgan
and Rockefeller connected names. Is this yet more subterfuge with a
gentile mask? How can we properly interpret this apparent lapse? How do
we rationally rank the power of the Rockefellers (and their allies and
satellites, e.g. the Stillmans) or them plus the Episcopalian elite vs.
that of the Jews?
There are other things that I do not think I have enough understanding
of yet:
The true relationship between Jews and capital investment in industry
during the industrial revolution (the modern salience of this is some
attempt to grapple with the true degree of Jewish ownership over
industry). We are told in general that investment & merchant banking did
not invest in the industrial revolution, and only belatedly came into
industrial finance, having ceded that function to commercial/joint-stock
banks. I suspect this narrative of being false and the actual truth
being relevant to assessing Jewish financial power today and validating
its historical development.
What does the "financial ecosystem" actually look like nowadays? Are
large banks actually at the top now? What about the large funds like
Blackrock & and its Aladdin? What about the asset management or private
equity firms like Blackstone, KKR, etc.? And where did private banking
and private bankers go, really? (Who is behind the curtain? How do we
know?) My suspicions run that private banks still control investment
banks which still control the commercial banks, just as merchant banks
controlled the joint stock banks a century and more ago. But how,
exactly? And how can this be demonstrated?
How can we demonstrate that in the past private merchant banks dominated
joint stock banking and that capital did not actually "democratize" as
has been claimed?
I hope that you or your readers can shed some light on these questions
or even know something of where reading might be found to cover some of
these.
(7) Russian Jews & Gentiles From A Russian Point Of View, by Mme Z
Ragozin (1881)
Russian Jews & Gentiles From A Russian Point Of View
By Mme Z Ragozin
Published in The Century Magazine,
Vol XXIII, November 1881, page 905.
4-9-8
Anti-Semitic feelings still runs high: to this the late most
unjustifiable demonstrations against Sarah Bernhardt in Galicia and
Odessa bear witness. That is especially strong in the eastern part of
Europe, where the Israelites are most numerous and most firmly sealed,
is another indubitable fact. It also may be safely asserted that never,
even in the quietest times, is this feeling wholly extinct. Were it
otherwise, the popular outbreaks could not be so violent, so frequent,
nor-to use a homely but expressive word-so "catching," nor so uniform in
character, as they have been within not very many years in Romania,
Galicia, eastern Prussia and, very lately in the south of Russia. When
the effects are identical, the causes must be at least similar, and
where the former recur with persistent iteration, the latter may be
supposed to be permanent and deeply rooted. Now, looking back along the
line of ages we find that no historical event recurs more surely, though
at irregular intervals, than popular outbreaks against the Jews.
Wherein lies the cause of this singularly tenacious phenomenon?
Historians are quick and ready with their answer: "In religious
intolerance, with its attendant spirits of fanaticism and persecution,
and in the antagonism of race." Such an explanation may pass muster for
the ages of mediæval darkness-but sweeping assertions seldom exhaust a
subject, and this can be proved to be no exception to the rule. When the
same phenomenon is reproduced periodically in our own time, under our
eyes, and we are still told that "its only cause lies in religious
intolerance and the spirit of persecution-more shame to our enlightened
nineteenth century," and when this is made the burden of a general hue
and cry from the so- called progressive and liberal press of most
countries, we become slightly skeptical, and desirous of looking into
the matter for ourselves and more closely. We hope better things of our
own time; we are familiar with it, being a part of it, and we know that
its ruling spirit is not that of religious intolerance.
We also know, from the teachings of the modern philosophical school of
history, that the popular mind and feeling, however abrupt and
unreasonable their outward manifestations may be, are strictly logical
in their development, and that the masses, when they appear to be swayed
by nothing but caprice, or a sudden gust of passion, or at best by a
blind and defective instinct, are in reality ruled by irresistible
hidden currents of historical life, not the less powerful because they
act at great depths below the surface.
To dive into those depths, to reach those currents, to ascertain their
direction and force, is the task of the inquirer. Sometimes chance steps
in, and by the discovery of some unexpected clew lightens the task. It
so happens that such a clew, in this particular case, has been offered
by a rather peculiar combination of circumstances in Russia several
years ago, and as the interest in the subject has been strongly and
somewhat painfully revived by the widespread tumultuous occurrences of
the last twelvemonth or so, it is surely worthy of a few moments'
serious attention, under the guidance of these revelations, which,
though they concern specially the condition, power, and acts of the
Russian Jews, will be found to possess more than strictly local
importance. A convenient introduction is afforded us by the general
rising against the Jews which took place last spring throughout the
south-west of Russia, and of winch scarcely more than a bare mention was
transmitted at the time to this country.
I
The disturbances began at Ielizavetgrad, in the middle of the Easter
week. How did they begin? On what provocation? The immediate occasion
was too trifling to have been more than a pretense, a signal for
something long impending. The first three holidays had passed over
quietly, when, on the afternoon of Easter Wednesday, a quarrel took
place at a much-frequented public-house on account of a broken
drinking-glass, for which the offender refused to pay. The tavern-
keeper, who was a Jew, from angry remonstrances passed to blows. A voice
from the crowd around the bar was heard to shout: "They assault our
people!" The uproar quickly spread along the street, and, in a few
minutes, there was a mob of not less than a thousand men, which carried
the news and the excitement from end to end of the city. The work of
destruction began immediately, and raged all through the night and
through the following day and evening, as late as midnight, when it
stopped-not so much from fear of the troops who had been telegraphed for
and only then had arrived, as because scarcely anything was left to
destroy. To realize the extent of the ravages done, it must be kept in
mind that Ielizavetgrad, situated on the highway between Poltava and
Odessa, is a great commercial thoroughfare and a very wealthy city, with
a population of forty-five thousand, of which fully one-third are Jews.
The authorities were wholly unprepared. The ordinary police force was
far too small to be of any use, and of the military only four squadrons,
of cavalry were on hand-a force particularly ill-suited for action in
narrow, crowded streets-not quite five hundred men in all against a mob
of many thousands, half of them women and children. It was a
good-natured mob, too, which did not provoke violence by resistance, but
dispersed at the first collision; but the broken groups would join again
some streets further off, and carry their devastations to other quarters
where the field was still clear. As for the citizens of the better
classes, they, of course, took no part in the proceedings,-but they did
nothing to oppose them. Numbers followed the different mobs out of
curiosity, as mere lookers-on. A certain secret sympathy with the
rioters could even be detected, which the latter were not slow in
perceiving, and acknowledged by sundry marks of friendly attention.
Thus, on the "bazaar," or market-place, the ground being very wet and
muddy, they spread it with carpets and woolen materials dragged out of
the shops, at the same time politely inviting the spectators "to
approach, as they need not lie afraid of soiling their nice shoes."
The citizens would probably not have preserved this passive attitude had
the rioters shown themselves at all cruelly inclined, and threatened the
persons of the Jews instead of venting their rage only on their
property. But, as it was, the worst instincts of a mob were not called
into play, in great part owing to the prudence of the Jews themselves,
who mostly kept out of sight. Had they "shown fight" at all, matters
might have taken a more tragical turn, for the rioters gave signs of
manifest irritation in the rare instances when revolvers were fired,
very harmlessly, from windows. Crowds of women and children, and
townspeople of the poorer sort, followed in their wake, picking up and
carrying away all they could of the valuable property which covered the
ground, or lay piled in mud-bespattered heaps, and literally could be
had, not for the asking, but for the taking. A noteworthy feature, and
one that shows how entirely the actors were mastered by one feeling,
that of animosity toward the Jews, is that the rioters-mostly workmen,
handicraftsmen, and peasants from the environs-did not take anything for
themselves; they merely destroyed. Some shop-keepers and householders
tried to ransom their goods with sums of money. One gave a thousand
rubles, another two thousand; many gave a hundred and fifty or two
hundred. The rioters took the money, but only to fling the coin away and
tear the paper to shreds, and then went on with their work. The only
temptation which they could not resist was whiskey (vodka). In the
cellars of wholesale spirit-warehouses, every barrel was staved in or
the faucets were taken out, till the whiskey stood several feet deep and
the barrels actually swam. Three men were saved from drowning only by
the timely assistance of the soldiers. Many lay senseless about the
streets, and were picked up in that condition hours afterward. [1]
Yet, on the whole, the mob behaved-for a mob-with remarkable coolness
and discrimination. Not a single Russian house or shop was touched, even
by mistake, although protected only by crosses in white chalk on the
doors and shutters, and occasionally by some saints' images (ikonas) and
Easter loaves placed in the windows-a device which was found so
efficient that the Jews did not fail to adopt it in other towns, where
many saved their houses by it. Jews living in Christian houses were not
molested; neither were Hebrew physicians and lawyers, they being
considered useful members of society. Exceptions were made in favor of
well-recommended individuals. Thus, at the door of one house belonging
to a Jew, the mob is confronted by the porter: "Boys" says he, "leave
him alone! He is a good man, and often gives you work. I have been ten
years in his service." "All right!" say the rioters, and pass on.
When the outrages were stopped at last, and the excitement had worn
itself out, the city presented the strangest, wildest aspect. The
streets were as white as after a fall of snow; for one of the mob's
chief amusements had been to rip up every feather-bed and pillow they
came across, and fling out the contents. The wooden houses were
shattered, the furniture broken to pieces and left in heaps, mingled
with kitchen utensils and household goods of every kind. Here might be
seen the hulk of a grand piano, with lid and legs wrenched off and
strings hanging out; further on, fine mahogany reduced almost to chips,
with velvet rags still clinging to them, and close to that the débris of
painted furniture of the commonest description. Not a pane of glass, not
a window frame, not a door was left whole. Inside the houses the same
ravages had been committed everywhere, with methodical regularity; every
object, even the smallest, was broken or spoiled for use; the very
stoves were demolished; nothing escaped destruction.
The pawnbrokers' offices were the first to suffer; then came the
public-houses, the wholesale wine and spirit shops, then the other
shops, and lastly whatever the mob set eyes on that belonged to Jews.
The marketplace or bazaar was one motley chaos of dry-goods, broken
crockery, ready-made clothes, iron-ware, leather goods, spilt flour and
grain. Of course, a vast amount of property was secured and carried off
by marauders of the poorer classes, especially women and children, who
followed the rioters for the purpose; but when a bill was posted all
over the city, explaining that such conduct would be considered as
robbery or secretion of stolen goods, and requiring all such unlawful
prizes to be delivered at the different police stations within three
days, whole wagon-loads began to arrive, not only from different parts
of the city, but even from the surrounding villages.
These simpletons actually did not know that they were committing a
blamable act and incurring a severe responsibility. When questioned or
rebuked, they answered with the greatest candor: "Why, we did not steal
these things; they were lying around, so we picked them up. We meant no
harm." Of course there were exceptions, and in several instances,
especially in other cities, great quantities, of valuable goods, as
jewelry, watches, silks, and the like, where found in the possession of
people whose social position put the plea of ignorance out of the
question. Nay, well dressed women-ladies they could not be called-had
been seen to drive to the scene of destruction and to fill their
carriages with plunder. Many a private grudge, too, may have been
indulged under cover of the confusion, as in the case of a certain,
tradesman in Kiev, who rushed into the house of a wealthy Hebrew
merchant at the head of a band of rioters, gave the signal of
destruction by shattering with his own hands the piano and largest
mirror, and under whose bed many valuables belonging to the same
merchant were afterward found.
In Kiev and Odessa the riots broke out a few weeks earlier, in May and
June, and took, a rather more malignant character; more personal
outrages were committed; the troops and police were resisted, so that
several people were killed and about two hundred wounded; passers-by,
who were accidentally met by infuriated bands, were in imminent danger,
and escaped it only by crossing themselves ostentatiously, after two men
had already been struck down by mistake; two or three times the mob
viciously had recourse to fire, poured kerosene on pieces of dry-goods,
or set fire to barrels of oil, petroleum, tar, and pitch, and only the
greatest vigilance prevented a general conflagration.
While all this was going on in the large cities, the small towns
naturally followed suit. Great agitation prevailed in the villages also,
but with comparatively trifling results,-on the one hand, because
numbers of the peasantry had joined the rioters in the great centers; on
the other because, immediately after the occurrences in Ielizavetgrad,
Government officials had been dispatched all over the country, to talk
to the people, exhort them to keep quiet, and explain to them to what
consequences they would expose themselves unless they did. This was a
most necessary measure, for the country people had somehow got possessed
of an idea that a rising against the Jews would be connived at. There
were even vague rumors abroad that it was desired, nay that a certain
mysterious "paper" had come from head-quarters, formally authorizing it,
which paper was withheld from the public only because the local
officials had been bribed by the Jews to conceal it.
Where and how such nonsense could have originated and been circulated
has never been found out. The fact, at all events, points to some hidden
machinations, some underhand leadership, and there can be little doubt
that the Nihilists-or socialists-were concerned in the movement, and
secretly fomented it. Proclamations were found in the streets of
Poltáva, and along the most frequented post-roads, exhorting the people
to massacre the Jews and the property-holding classes. In another place
a woman, disguised as a policeman, was caught distributing small printed
sheets of the same description. Odessa being a university city, the
working of the socialistic propaganda was especially apparent there,
and, strange to say, of the students arrested for openly inciting the
mob to the plundering and destruction of Jewish property, and to riotous
proceedings generally, one was himself an Israelite. Yet, in the great
amount of lawlessness committed in those wild weeks, these are isolated
cases which do not warrant the assumption generally set up in official
circles, that the Jewish riots of last spring were entirely the work of
"the party." It was not to be supposed that the revolutionary agents
should miss so good a chance of working on inflammable material-offered
them, so to speak, ready for use. But their efforts must be looked upon
as one of many sparks falling on a train of gunpowder.
The above is a very condensed, but faithful and not incomplete, account.
Anecdotes might be multiplied, but as it is, no characteristic feature
has been omitted. And now, after attentively perusing it, who will
venture to affirm that religious animosity or the spirit of intolerance
had anything whatever to do with the deplorable outrages committed on
one-third of the population by the other two-thirds? On the contrary, do
we not see that every motive except that one was at work more or less
openly? Popular revenge, political propaganda, common greed, commercial
rivalry,-as in the case of the small Russian tradesmen, who would not be
sorry to get rid of Hebrew competition, nor averse to getting the same
exorbitant interest themselves,-in short, most human passions are in
play except religious intolerance. If more is needed to complete the
evidence, here are a few miscellaneous scraps to the point.
"When I reached the corn-bazaar," writes a special correspondent of the
"Golos," from Kiev, "the Jewish shops were already demolished and
plundered; the mob was just attacking the public- houses. Having broken
in doors and windows, they rolled the barrels out on the street and
broke them to pieces. Whiskey flowed in streams. The rioters waded-they
bathed-in whiskey. The marauding women carried it away by pail-fuls.
Through the uproar I could clearly distinguish the shouts coming from
all sides. 'The Jews have lorded it over us long enough!' 'It is our
turn now!' 'They have got everything into their own hands!' 'Life is too
dear!' 'They grind us to death!' etc. Some well-intentional persons went
about amongst groups of idlers, who were evidently anxious to begin
operations., and were forming into a sufficiently numerous mob, and
tried to dissuade them, 'How can you be so foolish?' they would say,
'Don't you know that you will be punished?' The reply in almost every
case amounted to this. 'No matter; we will take our punishment-it will
be once. The Jews torture us all our lives.'"
It is a fact so well known in Russia as to need no repetition or
argument, that it is in part the merciless and systematic
"exploitation," or, as the people so graphically describe it, the
sucking out of the country's blood by the Jews which has brought the
peasantry of the West to the depths of destitution. As a consequence,
never, in the whole course of our history, has the rage for emigration
been so much of an epidemic as it is growing to be since the Government
has opened the wide fields of eastern Siberia and the Amoor country to
settlers, offering them assistance, encouragement and advantages. The
Little-Russian peasant, like every tiller of the soil, is deeply
attached to the land that nourishes him and his family. Such a land,
too!-one of the healthiest, wealthiest, most fertile regions in the
world. Yet this fruitful land-the very "land of milk and honey"-they
will abandon in gangs, half- villages at a time, their wives and
children and some few wretched household goods piled on their wooden
wagons, drawn by small, emaciated horses, sometimes a cow tied in the
rear, but more frequently of late despoiled even of this last friend and
chief support of the little ones, and start on their dreary tramp across
half of one continent and the whole of another,-to them an incalculable
number of miles,-for a distant, absolutely strange, nay, unimaginable
goal, which half of them never reach,-all this with a recklessness which
can come of nothing but despair. [2]
Russia has millions of Mohammedan subjects. I do not mean our new
subjects of Central Asia, but the Tatars along the Volga and in the
Crimea, and the inhabitants of the highlands of the Caucasus. They are
received, in the public schools and colleges, where they are taught the
principles of their religious law by doctors (mollahs) of their own.
They furnish good soldiers and distinguished officers to our army. They
ply various crafts in the midst of our native population, especially
those of peddlers, of cab-drivers, and hotel- waiters. They are thrifty
and peaceable. Who ever heard of hostile outbreaks against them? A
little good-humored raillery is all they ever have to encounter at the
hands, of our people, who will call them "Pig-ear" in fun, or sometimes
in derision, when angry or quarreling, in allusion to their horror of
pork. "Shaved-pate" is also a current appellation, which they are so far
from taking in bad part that a Tatar peddler, if so hailed by some
housewife from the other side of the street, will immediately walk over,
and, of course, drive the best bargain he can. But the people would no
more think of attacking the Tatar quarter in St. Petersburg, or
demolishing and plundering a Tatar village on the Volga, than of so
dealing with a Russian bazaar or homestead. Where, then, is the
difference? Why this imperturbable good understanding with
fellow-subjects of one race and religion, and this ineradicable
animosity against those of another?
II
If we were told that a certain great state, embracing under its rule
populations belonging to several distinct races, had in the number
several millions of subjects who, outwardly peaceable and harmless, nay,
timid to cowardice and submissive to servility, were yet unceasingly and
systematically undermining the well-being of the country they inhabit;
who, while enjoying the fullest religious toleration and liberty of
public worship, scrupulously perform every year a public religious
ceremony which offers a loop-hole of release from the obligation of
keeping any oath or promise made to the Government or to individuals
belonging to the state religion; who, while sheltered by the laws
equally with all their fellow-subjects, and, like them, entitled to sit
in local courts of justice, are bound, under the direst penalties of
excommunication, to decide cases brought before them only according to
instructions received from a secret tribunal of their own; who are
authorized and taught by their law to consider the persons and property
of their fellow-subjects, if belonging to a different race and religion
from theirs, as their natural patrimony, lawful for them to secure by
any means; lastly, who contrive to feed whole districts in part on the
refuse of the meat slaughtered for themselves,-if such a state of things
were described to us as existing actually, in a great country, under a
strong and well-established government, would not such a statement
awaken in us a feeling of incredulity amounting to total disbelief?
Surely no government can for a single moment tolerate so monstrous an
anomaly! Certainly not-i.e., not with its eyes open. But there are many
ways of blinding the most wakeful eyes. Argus had a hundred of them, yet
Hermes could charm them all. That the above is no wild fiction, but a
statement of facts, an account of the condition in which the entire west
and south-west of Russia has been for centuries, and is now, is the
startling discovery which we owe to the remarkable collection of
authentic documents, edited in 1869 by Jacob Brafmann, under official
patronage, and with means of a semi-official source. But before
examining and quoting the work, something must be said of the man, whose
marked individuality invites attention.
There have of old been Jews of two descriptions, so different as to be
like two distinct races. There were the Jews who saw God and proclaimed
His law, and those who worshiped the golden calf and yearned for the
flesh-pots of Egypt; there were the Jews who followed Jesus, and those
who crucified Him; there were the thinkers and the sticklers; the men of
the spirit and the men of the letter; Spinoza and his persecutors. To
borrow, for a moment, Renan's noble and striking language, "in the
course of its long history Israel has always had an admirable minority
which protested against the errors of the majority of the nation. A vast
dualism is the very essence of this singular people's life. It has been
divided, so to speak, into two opposing families, of which the one
represented the narrow, malevolent, hair-splitting, materialistic side
of the genius of Israel, the other its liberal, benevolent, idealistic
side. The contrast has always been striking." [3]
Jacob Brafmann is distinctively a Jew, but distinctively belongs to the
"admirable minority." Of humble parentage, and in no way favored by
fortune, he was raised out of his sordid surroundings and the narrow
groove of his early training by nothing but the predominance of "the
liberal, benevolent, idealistic" element in his nature. His boyhood was
the same unenviable round of useless, unintelligent school learning,
mischievous idleness, and precocious familiarity with sharp practice of
every kind, which makes the Hebrew youth of the poorer class so
unattractive a specimen. "Education" for the Hebrew boy of small means
begins, indeed, at the age of five or six, but consists entirely in
learning to read and memorizing the "Prayer-book"; then chapters from
the Pentateuch, with scraps of Talmudistic commentary, and it may be, at
the last stage, fragments from the Talmud itself. Then, at seventeen or
eighteen, comes marriage with all its cares and burdens,-and Hebrew
wedlock is proverbially prolific,-but too often without its solace and
companionship, for the matter is usually arranged by the respective
families, without reference to the young people's wishes or sympathies.
Poor Brafmann fared but ill at this pass; the mate assigned him was
exceptionally uncongenial to him. Doggedly he worked for his family,
plying alternately sundry small trades and various crafts-that of
cab-driver, of photographer, etc., with the versatility peculiar to his
race, and to which they are partly driven by the necessities of an
overcrowded, overstocked market in those centers of dense and abjectly
poor Jewish population. But, unlike his brethren, he did not sink and
harden in degradation.
Through all those years of loveless, thankless toil, he never ceased to
think, to observe, to learn-nay, to study, in the real and higher sense
of the word, robbing many of his nights of their necessary rest, and
bitterly upbraided by his young wife on account, not of his health,
which suffered under the excessive strain, but of the candle which "he
wasted." He became a Hebrew scholar, he learned Russian and German-the
literary German, not the mongrel jargon which Jews all talk in those
parts-at the age of thirty-four; he even taught himself to read and
understand French and Latin. He read the New Testament, and studied
deeply in Christian theology. At length, and from sincere conviction, he
became an open convert to Christianity, and received baptism. Life among
his own people had now become impossible, but the education which he had
given himself with almost superhuman persistence and intuition had
fitted him for better things, and when he was appointed teacher of the
Hebrew language at the seminary [4] of Minsk, in 1860, he found himself
in an honorable and, comparatively speaking, comfortable position.
Even before that, Brafmann had attracted the Emperor's attention by
addressing to him a memoir concerning the anomalous position and
conditions of life of his Hebrew subjects. The consequence was that,
together with his appointment, he received an imperial order to study
and propose ways and means for removing the tremendous obstacles which
Jewish converts encounter when they declare their intention of becoming
Christians. To aid him in his researches, access was opened to the
greatest variety of sources bearing on the question,-on the one hand by
the support of the bishop, on the other by that-less official, but
perhaps even more effective-of many a Hebrew well- wisher. "It was
thus," says Brafmann, in his preface, "that a rich collection of
materials accumulated in my portfolio, valuable not only for my special
object, but as illustrating the condition of the Hebrew population
generally.
*** The most prominent feature of my collection is a package of more
than one thousand authentic, documents, never published until this
time-ordinances, resolutions, and acts of divers Jewish Kahals
[administrative councils] and Beth-dins [courts of justice], which are
of great importance as representing that practical side of modern Jewish
life which can never be discerned by outsiders-by those who have not, so
to speak, been reared within the synagogue walls.
*** "These documents," it is said, further on, "afford convincing
evidence that the Kahal and Beth-din rule the private and social life of
the Jewish population in a great measure independent of the Talmud, and
that their own private ordinances, supported by the penalty of the
kherem [excommunication] are of far greater moment to the modern Jew
than the Talmud.
*** They show as clearly as possible in what way and by what means the
Jews, notwithstanding their limited rights, have always succeeded in
driving alien elements from the towns and boroughs where they have
settled, to get into their hands the capital and immovable property in
those places, and to get rid of all competition in commerce and trades,
as has been the case in the western provinces of Russia, in Poland,
Galicia, Romania; by what miracle it could come to pass that whole
departments of France were found to be mortgaged to the Jews in 1806, as
Napoleon tells Champagny in his letter of November 9th of that year,
although they formed only an insignificant minority in the empire, in
all sixty thousand. Finally, what is most important to us, these
documents contain the plain answer to the question why the labor and
money expended by our Government, in the course of the present century,
on the reformation of the Jews have brought no result." Of these
thousand documents, ranging from 1794 to 1833, Brafmann published in his
book, "The Kahal," a selection of two hundred and eighty-five, mostly
dated from Minsk, in the government of the same name. Their authenticity
is proved
by their very ancient look;
by the uniform notarial handwriting;
by the signatures of many persons which can be identified from other
existing sources;
by the water-mark in the paper on which they are written.
Before we examine their contents and the conditions of life which they
illustrate, it may be well to define the exact meaning of some words
which incessantly recur in them, and, first of all, that of the term
kahal itself.
The Kahal, abbreviated from kheder~ha~kahal, is the town-council or
administrative council of a Jewish community. Officially it purports to
discharge only a few modest duties, distributing the taxes among their
people, for the punctual payment of which they assume the responsibility
before the Government, taking care of the sick, superintending the
synagogue and all that pertains to Hebrew worship, ceremonial, and
religious observances. On these grounds the institution is not only
tolerated, but sanctioned and actively supported by the Government. In
reality, it wields supreme, absolute, and unquestioned power over every
phase of Hebrew life, both private and social, and manages to use the
local Christian authorities as its unwitting tools, not only against its
Gentile fellow-subjects, but against any of its own people who might
feel inclined to demur at the heavy yoke imposed on them. To show that
this is so, and what are the means employed, is the object of Brafmann's
book, and will be that of our next chapter.
The Beth-din is the Talmudic court of justice, which exists in every
Jewish community without exception, under the high protection of the
Kahal, and under whose jurisdiction are placed all transgressions and
litigations arising between private Jews, or between such and the Kahal.
It answers to all the needs of Jewish mercantile life, and takes the
place of the ancient Sanhedrin. It is a sacred institution, and its
attributes are, even now, very extensive. It pretends to be simply a
court of amicable arbitration, and is tolerated, but not officially
recognized, by the Government.
The Kherem, or great excommunication, is the last resort and most
terrible weapon which the Kahal and Beth-din always keep in reserve to
quell incipient rebellion or punish actual disobedience. Brafmann gives
the entire form, which, besides being very monotonous, is too long for
reproduction here. There is something appalling in the virulence and
malignancy of the curses launched upon the offender's head, and it is
not astonishing that even liberal-minded Jews should often have faltered
and been daunted before its tremendous vehemence. A general malediction
is first pronounced in the name of God and all the celestial powers;
then a special one for every month of the year, in this form: "If he is
born in the month of Nisan, which is ruled by the Archangel Uriel, may
he be accursed of that archangel and his angels," and so forth through
the remaining eleven months; also the days of the week and the four
seasons; then comes the final imprecation, to which great poetic force
cannot be denied:
"May the Lord's calamity hasten to overtake him; God, the Creator! Break
him! Bend him! May fiends encounter him! Be he accursed wherever he
stands! May his spirit depart suddenly, may an unclean death seize him,
and may he not end the month! May the Lord visit him with consumption,
brain-fever, inflammation, insanity, ulcers, and jaundice! May he pierce
his breast with his own sword, and may his arrows be broken! May he be
as chaff which the wind drives before it, and may the Angel of God
pursue him! *** May his path be beset with dangers, covered with
darkness! *** May he encounter direst despair, and may he fall into the
net spread for his feet by God! May he be driven out of the realm of
light into the realm of darkness, and cast out of the world! Misfortunes
and sorrows shall fright him. He shall behold with his eyes the blows
that shall fall on him. He shall be sated with the wrath of the
Almighty. He shall be clothed with curses as with a garment. And God
shall give no forgiveness to this man, but pour curses shall enter into
him that are written in the Law. *** "
And as though this were not yet explicit enough, the denunciation is
further completed in the circular addressed to "the wise men and elders
of the nation," to notify them that a son of Israel has been cast into
the outer darkness. After the introductory greeting and the enumeration
of the offenses of the accused person, the kahal continues:
"Therefore, we have laid the kherem on him. Do you so likewise, daily.
Proclaim publicly that his bread is the bread of a Gentile; that his
wine is the wine of idolatry; that his vegetables are impure, and his
books even as the books of magicians. *** Ye shall not eat with him, nor
drink with him; ye shall not perform the rite of circumcision on his
son, and ye shall not teach his children the law, nor bury his dead, nor
receive him into any corporations; the cup that he has drunk from ye
shall wash, and in every respect ye shall treat him as a Gentile."
And now, after these necessary explanations, we can at last turn to that
part of our subject to which the foregoing pages have been in reality
only an introduction.
III
"Die Juden bilden einen Staat im Staate." (The Jews form a State within
the State.)
These words of Schiller, Brafmann takes as his motto. Referring to them
in the course of his book, he remarks that as a state without a
territory is not admissible, so these words are usually taken by
unsuspecting outsiders for a poetic figure rather than a historical
truth. They little imagine that the fiction is turned into a momentous
reality by a short item in the Talmud, which lays down as a fundamental
axiom that "the property of Gentiles is even as a waste, free unto all"
[5] (i.e., all Jews). Now, as the Kahal has the supreme direction of the
affairs of every community, it follows that the Kahal of each district
considers itself the only rightful owner and legal disposer of the
territory within its jurisdiction, no matter who may hold it or any part
of it in actual possession, Jew or Gentile, and that not arbitrarily,
but on the ground of the khezkat- ishoub, a right well defined in the
Talmudic code called Khoshen- Hamishpat, and the works of its learned
expounders. One of the highest authorities among the latter, Rabbi
Joseph Kouloun, in his highly respected work, "Questions and Answers,"
compares the property of Gentiles (section 132) to "a lake free to all,"
in which, however, no one may spread his nets but a Jew duly authorized
by the Kahal. We continue in Brafmann's own words:
"Considering, then, the Gentile population of its district as 'its lake'
to fish in, the Kahal proceeds to sell portions of this strange property
to individuals on principles as strange. To one uninitiated in Kahal
mysteries, such a sale must be unintelligible. Let us take an instance.
The Kahal, in accordance with its own rights, sells to the Jew N. a
house, which, according to the state laws of the country, is the
inalienable property of the Gentile M., without the latter's knowledge
or consent. Of what use, it will be asked, is such a transaction to the
purchaser? The deed of sale delivered to him by the Kahal cannot invest
him with the position which every owner assumes toward his property. M.
will not give up his house on account of its having been sold by the
Kahal, and the latter has not the power to make him give it up. What,
then, has the purchaser N. acquired for the money paid by him to the
Kahal? Simply this: he has acquired khazaka-i.e., right of ownership
over the house of the Gentile M., in force whereof he is given the
exclusive right, guaranteed from interference or competition from other
Jews, to get possession of the said house, as expressly said in the deed
of sale, 'by any means whatever.' Until he has finally succeeded in
transferring it to his official possession, he alone is entitled to rent
that house from its present owner, to trade in it, to lend money to the
owner and other Gentiles who may dwell in it-to make profits out of them
in any way his ingenuity may suggest. This is what is meant by khazaka.
Sometimes the Kahal sells to a Jew even the person of some particular
Gentile, without any immovable property attached. This is how the law
defines this extraordinary right, which is called meropiè: 'If a man
[meaning a Jew] holds in his power a Gentile, it is in some places
forbidden to other Jews to enter into relations with that person to the
prejudice of the first; but in other places it is free to every Jew to
have business relations with that person, for it is said that the
property of a Gentile is hefker [free to all], and whoever first gets
possession of it, to him it shall belong.'" [6]
It will be noticed what stress is laid on money-lending as a means to
effect the desired transfer of property. Indeed, it is the mainspring of
the operation, and a case of failure is very rare. The proposed victim
is tempted into borrowing, and enticed on and on by proffered facilities
so long as it is supposed he still has a chance of rescue. When he has
become entangled in the meshes of renewed bills and compound interest
wholly beyond the range of his resources, the blow descends, and the
fortunate purchaser enters into open possession of his secretly
long-cherished property. Perhaps he sells it then to a Christian, so
that it may revert back to the Kahal as hefker, and the process begin
over again, to the advantage of some new "fisher." And the beauty of the
thing is, there is no risk attached to it. It is all done snugly within
the law. If people will borrow, they have to pay, and there are courts
of justice in the land to see that they do. No matter what artifices
have been used to inveigle them, what amount of fine psychology has been
put in play to find out their weak sides and attack them-the law has
nothing to do with that. In the rural districts, the process is still
easier and the result still sadder. Jews do not live in villages; there
is nothing for them to do there. They prefer more populous and, above
all, wealthier centers, where the artificial demands of city life give
scope to the display and bartering of tempting wares of all kinds.
Of these wares, there is one which the overworked, underfed, ever
careworn peasant cannot resist-vodka. It is warmth in the inhuman winter
cold; mirth in his rare hours of rest; strength-fictitious, it is true,
yet upholding him for the time-when he sinks under the day's task;
medicine in sickness; above all, it is forgetfulness. And if poets, with
everything to make life a dream of beauty, have cried out in weariness
of heart, "The best of life is but intoxication," surely the poor
plodder may be excused for feeling the same in the only sense accessible
to his limited experience. And truly, in moderation, whiskey is a
necessity to our peasant, imposed by the climate and the conditions of
his life. But how easy the slip into excess! And where the line? Well do
the Jews know all this, and so the public-houses in the villages are all
kept by Jews-a plenteous and never-failing source of replenishment to
the exchequer of the kahal. In every village are one or two
public-houses, or more, according to its size and the number of its
inhabitants; for there must not be more fishers than the lake can
support, nor must it be fished out all at once. How complete the success
let any village of our western provinces witness, with its wretched,
weather-beaten cabins, hingeless doors and shutters, crooked and
thatchless roofs, and rotting door-steps; its tottering, yawning barns,
scantily propped by poles; empty stables, solitary plows and wagons
under ruinous sheds; finally, the long trains of Amoor emigrants
mentioned in our first chapter. And if figures are wanted, let this
suffice: in 1869, seventy-three per cent of all the immovable property
of the western provinces had passed into the hands of the Jews.
If we turn to the documents themselves, our amazement increases, for
there, indeed, the assertion which we were half inclined to doubt
assumes a body and becomes a living reality. Here are three,-Nos. 22,
23, and 26, dated Minsk, 1796,-which relate to a dispute between the
Kahal and a certain Eliazar, "about the possession of a house and lot of
ground belonging to the un-circumcised hatter, Zvansky." Eliazar claims
it on the ground that it was sold to his dead father, but there is a
flaw in the title. In disputes of this kind the Kahal generally wins the
day. So this case ends by the Beth-din adjudging the property to the
Kahal, "who may sell it to whomever it pleases." No, 77- dated
1799-records the sale to the "wealthy and illustrious Jochiel-Michael"
of a stone building, containing two shops, with their cellars and upper
stories, belonging to the Russian Baikoff; while No. 205-dated 1802-
gives half of the same property to another person in payment of an old
debt, "seeing that Jochiel- Michael has not yet paid in full the sum due
for those shops." The house of the uncircumcised blacksmith, Zeleza, and
that of the German carpenter, Johann, are disposed of in Nos. 115 and
195, and we may be sure these buildings did not in the end escape their
destination, even though hatter, shopkeeper, blacksmith, and carpenter
continued for a while to follow their several pursuits, each within his
own premises, in the security of ignorance. Nor does the Kahal limit its
operations to private property.
It is rather startling to find it disposing (No. 105) of "a convent,
formerly possessed by Carmelite monks, but now occupied by Franciscans,"
with all its buildings and outbuildings, in wood or stone, the
distillery belonging to it, as well as the convent meadows and vegetable
gardens, with the usual remark that "the purchase money has been paid to
a farthing"; of a hospital, with the piece of ground thereto pertaining,
held in actual possession by a certain Catholic charitable brotherhood
(No. 261); and, finally, appointing arbiters to decide a litigation
between itself, the Kahal, and a private individual, concerning the
right of possession to several shops, stone buildings, owned by the
Bishop of Minsk (No. 177). We pass over a long array of documents of
exactly the same nature, only observing that in the statute of the Kahal
and Beth-din of the city of Vilna, composed on the approved and general
model, the obligation to see that Jews do not interfere with each
other's khazakas and meropiès is especially mentioned as one of their
functions and attributions. Moreover, the interesting "angling" process
can be followed step by step in Gustav Freytag's powerful novel, Soll
und Haben (Debit and Credit), in which we see the wealthy usurer Hirsch
Ehrenthal systematically going to work on the property of the easy-
going and imprudent Baron Roth-sattel, until the wished-for consummation
is happily achieved.
It is well known how punctilious orthodox Jews are about their food, and
how particular about having their meat butchered and cooked according to
certain very strict regulations laid down in the Talmud; also how great
and enduring is their repugnance to share the food of Gentiles, even
though they will occasionally welcome a Christian guest to their own
table. But what is less generally known is that this peculiarity of
theirs, respected everywhere as a feature of their religious
observances, very greatly affects, both directly and indirectly, the
well-being of the populations among whom they are settled. So little is
this suspected that no sort of objection is raised against their
building slaughter-houses, and getting the entire butcher's trade into
their own hands; indeed, the fact is mentioned with perfect innocence in
the Russian Code of Laws: [7] "In most of the towns of the western
provinces there are no butchers but Jews, and only that meat is sold to
Christians which is not found kòsher."
It is supposed that the whole difference between kòsher and trèf (lawful
and forbidden, clean and unclean meat) lies in the observance of or
departure from certain ridiculously trivial and minute Talmudic
ordinances concerning the knife to be used for slaughtering, its shape,
sharpness, smoothness, the exact spot on the animal's throat across
which it is to be drawn, and the like. If this were all, there would be
no harm in handing over to the Christians meat pronounced unfit for the
use of their fastidious Jewish brethren. But this is not all. When the
animal has been successfully dispatched, according to all the
refinements of Talmudic law, [8] its internal parts- brain, heart,
lungs, liver, bowels, etc.-are submitted to the closest examination from
a hygienic point of view, and if a taint or symptom of disease is
discovered in any of them, the whole carcass is pronounced trèf, and put
into the market for sale to the Christian population. "We cannot
wonder," remarks Brafmann, "at the profound loathing with which Jews
regard the food of Christians, knowing as they do that much of the meat
which is sold them is actually no better than carrion." Nor does their
conscience sting them in the feast for so unjustifiable a proceeding,
since they have for it the authority of the Mosaic law, which expressly
says (Deuteronomy xiv. 21): "Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of
itself: thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is in thy gates, that
he may eat it; or thou mayest sell it unto an alien; for thou art a holy
people unto the Lord thy God."
Indirectly, the condition of the entire country (that part of it where
the Jews are allowed to dwell) is influenced by this separatism, because
it furnishes the Kahal with its principal and most unfailing
revenue,-universally known under the curious name of "box-duty,"-and
thus always keeps it provided with large sums of ready money, which it
uses at its own discretion to further the interests of the community, or
avert any obnoxious interference on the part of the Christian
authorities-principally by means of bribes to police officials and
employees. The regulations about this tax and its collection form quite
a complicated organization, too important in its effects to be dismissed
with only a passing notice. It necessitates a considerable staff of
officials, who hold their functions on oath and under dread of the
kherem. First there are the professional slaughterers, trained in the
business of killing according to Talmudic rules, and appointed by the
Kahal. All cattle or fowls, without exception, that are to be consumed
in the town- either for the market or for private use-must be slain by
them, on pain of being considered "even as carrion"; the owner of a
chicken may not kill it to make soup for his sick wife, but must take it
to the sworn slaughterer. A certain duty has to be paid to the agents of
the Kahal, always present on the premises, on every head of cattle,- ox,
calf, sheep, or goat,-and on every fowl, varying according to their
kind. It is to be paid, not in paper or copper coin, but in silver, and
the slaughterer is forbidden "to unsheathe his knife before it has been
so paid." This is only part of the box-duty.
By far the greater part of it is levied on the retail sale of kòsher
meat. This part falls on the purchasers, who pay three groats in silver
(about one cent) on every pound they buy. Meat brought in from the
surrounding country pays the same duty-i.e., the owner can neither use
it nor sell it unless he pays his three groats per pound to the
collectors of the Kahal. Even fat is not exempt from the duty, and
anyone who purchases either from a private person (i.e., not from a
butcher in the meat-market) must be shown the receipt of the collectors,
or he may find himself devouring "carrion," "food unclean as pork," and
come under the canonical kherem in consequence. There is in the market a
special room, in which the collectors sit all day long to receive the
money, while two superintendents continually "walk the floor" of the
market, to see that every purchaser, after having received his piece of
meat from the butcher, takes it straightway into the collectors' office,
to be reweighed and to pay the duty.
It is amusing to note the precautions that are taken to secure the money
from fraud or foul play of any kind. "The collectors, to avoid abuses,"
it is stated in the regulation (Document No. 88), "are forbidden, under
penalty of the most terrible kherem to put it in their pockets, but must
slip it into a locked box, with a slit in the top." (Hence the name
"box-duty.") Every evening they are to count the money, enter it into
the book, then transfer it, at least twice a week, into a strongbox,
deposited under the care of one of the rich men of the city, who,
however, is not entrusted with the key -or rather keys, for the box has
two locks. One of the keys remains with the collectors, while the other
is in the charge of a third person, appointed every month by election.
The contents of the strong- box are verified once a month, by persons
specially appointed. When the Kahal makes a demand for money from the
box-sums, "it must be signed by five members at least" (there are
nineteen in all), and the money is taken out and delivered by both
collectors jointly, not otherwise. Butchers, in consideration of their
having paid box-duty for the slaughtering of' the animals, are allowed
to sell kòsher meat two groats per pound higher than trèf, so that the
Jewish purchaser really pays a double duty on his meat.
A number of documents show that a great part of this box-money is
regularly expended in bribes, either on given occasions, for an object,
or in a generally propitiating manner, as gratuitous gifts on the two
great holidays of the year-New Year's Day and Easter. These latter
offerings being a very ordinary occurrence, in accordance with an old
custom of the country, are registered quite openly as "holiday presents
to the authorities" (No. 4); or, "to be taken from the box-money a
hundred zlotys [a little over ten dollars] to buy coffee and sugar for
presents to the authorities at Easter" (No. 114); or, "ordained by the
'chiefs of the city' to go the usual round at Easter, the necessary sums
to be taken from the box- money" (No. 73); or, "bought four loaves of
sugar, best quality, eighty-two pounds in all," for New Year's presents
(No. 244). Actual bribes, given for a purpose, being of not so harmless
a nature, are neither given nor expressed so openly. The documents which
record the expense are worded covertly, as: "A hundred rubles to be
employed in the purchase of rye and other grain for a certain purpose,
and fifty rubles to be given to the secretary of the governor in
acknowledgment of a certain service" (No. 33).
The agents employed in such cases are instructed to do their best to
secure proofs of the transaction, so that the Kahal may always hereafter
have it in its power to exercise control over the official who has
yielded to temptation, by threatening to divulge his offense. When
affairs in the issue of which the Jewish community is interested -or a
corporation, or even private individuals-are being transacted in one of
the local courts, clever and trusty agents are directed to watch the
case, and, if necessary, to give it a gentle push in the right direction
by trying various blandishments on the members of the court,-such, for
instance, as providing a luncheon, with choice wines, for the judges
(No. 37). Now all this materially, if indirectly, affects the condition
of the country at large, for every unlawful favor shown to the Jews is
sure to react in a prejudicial manner on the Christian population. And
were it not for the right to levy box-money on kòsher meat, the Kahal
would not have always ready to its hand extensive means to dispose of in
this way. Therefore it has taken care to secure to itself this
never-failing source of revenue, by enlisting the Government on its side.
It was easy for it to do this by assuming the responsibility for the
payment of the taxes by the Jewish communities, and by undertaking to
supply the required number of recruits or the corresponding
"exemption-money" (under the old military system), and by representing
the box-duty as the easiest and surest means to this end, as a
supplementary reserve income, from which the taxes should be paid for
the poor or insolvent members of the community. The consequence is that
this duty, together with all the regulations about kòsher meat, without
which it could not be levied, are under the sanction and protection of
the Russian law, and actively supported by the local authorities, whose
aid and assistance the Kahal may claim at any moment. The following are
the express terms of the law:
"Subject to the box-duty are:
The slaughtering of cattle (per head of cattle); of fowls (per each
fowl); the sale of kosher meat (per pound); another item of the
box-money is the fines imposed for the non- observance of the
regulations on this subject." [9]
"The police, both urban and rural, and all other local authorities, are
bound to render their aid and assistance, when such is required in legal
form, to see that the box-duty be paid by the Jews without opposition or
fraud." [10]
How far the official object of the institution is achieved may be seen
from the fact that, in 1867, there was a balance against the Jews in the
government of Vilno of 293,868 rubles, 3612 kopecks arrear on taxes, and
341,097 rubles, 15 kopecks against those of Minsk. (A ruble is one
hundred kopecks, and worth about seventy-five cents United States money.)
This exposition of the attitude which the Russian Jews [11] have
invariably held and still hold toward their Gentile fellow-subjects
would be incomplete without a brief statement of the line of conduct
which they follow with regard to the jurisdiction of the Gentile courts
of justice, and to their own obligations as represented by oaths and
promises made to Gentiles.
The first of these points is settled most unequivocally by the following
extract from the "Khoshen-Hamishpat" (chapter 26, paragraph 1):
"Jews are forbidden to go to law before a Gentile court of justice, or
Gentile institution of any sort. This prohibition does not lose its
force even in cases where the Gentile laws coincide with the Hebrew
laws, nor even should both sides wish to submit their case to a Gentile
court. He who violates this prohibition is a villain. Such an act is
considered equal to blasphemy and rebellion against the entire Mosaic law."
The offender of course incurs the kherem in its entire rigor, and cannot
be freed from it until he releases his antagonist from the power of the
Gentiles. How consistently this principle is carried out is shown by two
very remarkable documents, Nos. 165 and 166. Two Jewish members are to
be elected to sit in one of the mixed minor local courts, called "oral
courts," because cases of a very trivial nature are examined and decided
by them orally, according to "custom" more than written law. Thirty
electors have been chosen by a general assembly, and the names of the
candidates have been proclaimed. Thereupon, and before the official
election by ballot takes place, the candidates are summoned before the
Beth-din, and there made to engage, under oath, "that, through all the
time of their exercising the function of judges in the oral court, they
will be guided by the directions and instructions of the Beth-din and
Kahal; also that they will unconditionally obey all their commands with
respect to the cases which will be submitted to the court." After this a
committee of four persons-two members of the Kahal and two of the
Beth-din-is appointed to make out a code of rules for the guidance of
the two judges.
"And all the resolutions signed by the committee shall be by said judges
carried out punctually during a whole year. All this has been done with
the common consent, in accordance with the laws and ordinances. At each
sitting of the committee one of said two judges must of necessity be
present, in order to consult together concerning the cases to be decided
in said court."
It naturally follows from these premises that all oaths whatever taken
by Jews, or testimony given by them under oath before Gentile courts or
magistrates, may or may not be valid. Further opportunities for evading
obligations to Christians are offered by the annual religious solemnity
called kol-nidreh, the opening act of the great festival of Yom-Kippur,
the day of national purification, of absolution and reconciliation with
heaven, when all private chapels as well as the synagogues of the
various corporations are closed, by special order and under pain of the
kherem, so that Israel may pray to the Lord of their fathers jointly in
the great synagogue, as one united family. It is the tenth day after the
Hebrew New Year's day, its great holiness marked by a severe fast-total
abstinence from food during twenty-four hours for all adults, and even
children over twelve years old; like the solemnity of New Year's day it
closes with the significant patriotic signal, the blowing of the sacred
horns, which is answered by the entire congregation with the traditional
ejaculation: "Next year in Jerusalem!" The fast and common prayer begin
the night before, two hours before sunset, and are ushered in by the
ceremony of kol-nidreh, which we will describe in Brafmann's own words:
"When the men and the women, in holiday attire, have taken their
separate stations in the synagogue, which is lighted by the wax tapers
held by each person, and the leader of the choir (cantor) has taken his
place, then the most notable members of the assistance open the ark,
reverently take out the thora, while the choir thrice repeat the
celebrated kol-nidreh to an ancient traditional chant; the congregation
repeat it aloud with them. Judging from the pomp and reverence with
which the Jews prepare for this act, an outsider would naturally
conclude that it is the very center-piece of the whole yearly cycle of
spiritual exercises. But, if he knew the language, he would find that
the words pronounced with such awe-inspiring ceremonial, such religious
concentration and profound reverence, are not words of prayer at all,
but an act by which the entire nation renounces all promises, oaths, and
obligations given by each of its members in the preceding, and all such
as will be given in the coming, year. With this public renunciation of a
nation's plighted word, the whole moral base of social life does indeed
fall to pieces. It is a fact so utterly revolting, that the greatest
authorities of the Talmudic world itself have risen in protest against
it. But not even they could prevail against the force of custom, and the
kol-nidreh renunciation maintains its place among the most honored
Hebrew rites."
This chapter cannot be more aptly concluded than by another extract from
Brafmann's remarks, so pithy and forcible in their simple earnestness:
"To students of law we venture to think that these documents will offer
not a little interest; but we especially recommend them to the study of
those who are curious to find out the real causes of the universal
murmur of reprobation which has always been heard against the Jews from
the surrounding world, and of the persecutions to which they have been
subjected through eighteen centuries-i.e., ever since the kahal has
ruled this unhappy people."
IV
Was Brafmann right in making these revelations-or, at least, in giving
them the publicity of the press? Should not a certain merciful feeling
have restrained him from thus exposing the short-comings of those who
still were his brethren in blood and race? Should he not have been
content to cut himself adrift from the vessel which held them? Scarcely.
You cannot let your neighbor's house be broken into because you have
friends in the gang, even though you have withdrawn yourself from them
when you discovered their evil ways. Yet, Brafmann is emphatically and
enthusiastically a Jew. He is deeply, passionately devoted to his
people, and he possibly-who knows?- might have hesitated and temporized
with his duty to his new brethren from tenderness to the old, had it not
been his entire conviction that the Jews suffer quite as much under the
system whose secret workings he divulges as the Christians themselves.
For each power, each right, of the Kahal and Beth-din is a stick with
two ends, of which the one descends on the Christian population and the
other impartially belabors the Jewish community,-of course falling
heaviest on the poorer mass, [12]-with equal violence and equally fatal
results.
If the Gentile trader or artificer can never be sure that his house has
not been sold over his head to a Hebrew fellow-citizen, on the other
hand, the Jew who has bought a piece of ground or a house, from the
Russian Government or a Christian owner, is made to pay an additional
sum for the same property to the Kahal. Thus No. 87 records the sale "to
Rabbi Khaim, son of Rabbi Isaac, Levite," of the right of ownership to a
stone building, constructed by him on the market-place of Minsk, and
only from the day that this second deed of sale is delivered to him is
it said that the building belongs to him and his heirs forever, "from
the center of the earth to the summit of the heavens." Further, as a
rule, a Jew from one district is not permitted to trade or settle in
another, and if he is, by special favor of the Kahal, he is made to pay
handsomely for the privilege. For it is said in the law: [13]
"At the present time, when we live under the rule of alien nations and
too great an accumulation of Hebrew population may lead to collision
with them, every Jew who comes to a city and wishes to settle in it, is
a foe to those who already dwell there. Therefore the local kahal is
given the right to close the door before the new- comers, to attain
which object it is lawful for it to employ any means whatsoever, even to
the power of the goïm [the local administration]."
"Even to the power of the goïm." That means the local Christian police,
which is to the kahal what the secular arm was to the Inquisition. It is
literally at its beck and call, owing to the sanction awarded by our
laws to the box-duty. This same active sanction also enables it to
exercise a most irksome supervision and an intolerable coercion over the
private life of every Jewish family. A few instances will best
illustrate the practical working of this simple and ingenious machinery.
However miserable a Jewish family, there are two occasions-a wedding and
the circumcision of a son-on which a certain amount of festive
expenditure is inevitable. Guests are invited, a meal is served, and
musicians are hired. In none of these points, however, is the giver of
the feast allowed to follow his own discretion or inclination, but must
submit to a code of regulations, which would be amusing from their
absurdity were they not so galling to all feeling of independence and
human dignity. Here are a few items: "No one shall dare to serve at
circumcision feasts refreshments consisting only of cakes and whiskey."
There must be a meal of butcher's meat; if the feast-giver be a poor
man, he must have meat for at least ten persons, and only in case of
absolute destitution can an exemption be obtained from the Kahal.
Visitors who come to offer congratulations on the birth of a son or
daughter are forbidden, as well as the parents themselves, to taste
refreshments in the shape of cakes, preserved fruits, or sweets of any
kind, on pain of the canonical kherem. At weddings it is forbidden to
serve a large cake with filling made of preserved fruit. "Before and
after a wedding each of the families is allowed to give only one feast."
"There must not be more than three musicians at a wedding, and they are
not allowed to eat more than three times." To a circumcision may be
invited "only relatives to the third degree, the two next-door neighbors
on each side of the house and three from across the street, *** the
teacher of the host's children," and a few more persons strictly
determined. The invitations are to be sent through the messengers of the
Beth-din-not otherwise. The feast-giver is entitled to a certain
quantity of meat duty-free, which, however, the collectors deliver only
on being presented with the list of guests, sanctioned by the Kahal and
signed by the city-notary.
Now, if the kahal had not contrived to secure the active cooperation of
the state laws in levying the box-duty, it would not have the means of
reminding every Jew, even on such occasions as household festivals, of
its dread and resistless power. As things stand, its vengeance can fall
on the rebel at any moment. To punish disobedience to its slightest
regulations or even a temporary ordinance, it has only to summon the
police and denounce the culprit as having infringed the laws concerning
kòsher and box-duty. Who is to rescue the unhappy man from the hands of
the authorities, who demand from him the legal fine for that offense?
That he never committed it is no safeguard to him, for false accusation,
even supported by perjury and recourse to the goïm, are among the
authorized means to break rebellion. Two documents-Nos. 148 and
149-contain the exposition of the measures to be taken "in order to
preserve the Talmudic court [Beth-din] from the disrespect which, in
punishment for our sins, has of late made itself felt,-to prevent our
foes from sitting as judges over us, which Heaven forbid!-and to bend
audacious apostates and rebels, so that every Jew may be submissive to
the Talmudic law and court." The measures contained in No. 149 are much
the most terrible, to be used only against hardened rebels, and when the
case has been put in the hands of the "secret prosecutor"-a functionary
who is elected every month by ballot from among the officers of the
Beth-din, and who swears the most solemn oath to spare no person in
carrying out the instructions of the Talmudic court, and never to reveal
that he ever has been invested with the function of "secret prosecutor."
[14] Here are the nine paragraphs (some of them condensed) into which
this remarkable document is divided:
The rebel is deprived of the offices which he may have held in the Kahal
or corporations. He is excluded from the community and any corporation
to which he may belong. He is excluded from general assemblies and
corporation meetings. He is excluded from all functions or honors in the
synagogue. *** He is not to be invited to any festival, public or
private. He who invites him falls under the kherem. No one is to rent
from him his house or his shop, nor to let his own to him. *** If he is
an artisan, it is forbidden to give him work, on pain of the heaviest
kherem. If a betrothal contract has been entered into with him, the
other party is freed from it, without incurring the fine usually imposed
in such cases, and reimbursement of expenses. It is lawful to proclaim
in the synagogue that the rebel has eaten trèf food or infringed a fast,
etc., to confirm the accusation by false testimony, and to have him
punished as if he had done this thing.
This document is approved and signed by fourteen members of the Kahal
and Beth-din, and by the chief rabbi of the city of Minsk.
Nor are the Christian courts of justice less efficient tools than the
local police in the hands of the Jewish rulers. One of the most common
proceedings to punish disobedience or disrespect is to sue the offender
in a Christian court for debt, real or imaginary. Thus, when litigation
is to be decided by the Beth-din, it is customary, in order to secure
the submission of the parties to the suit, to make them both sign blank
bills before the case is tried. Then, should the losing party be
dissatisfied with the decision and refer the case to the Christian
court, which is his right under the state laws, the Beth-din fills the
blank at its pleasure, and directs the nominal holder to present this
perfectly legal document for payment through the local authorities.
"This," says Brafmann, "accounts for the great number of litigations
always on hand in Christian courts. They are generally nothing more than
legal fictions used by the Beth-din or Kahal to compel the obedience of
refractory members of their communities." If offenders return to the
path of duty within a certain time, the claim is withdrawn. Sometimes
the Russian courts receive genuine complaints, but they are usually
powerless for redress, and bitterly are the plaintiffs made to rue their
audacity.
In 1866, a Hebrew widow complained to the mayor and town-council of
Vilna that she had been charged fifteen hundred rubles for the burial of
her husband, and compelled not only to pay this sum but to sign a
declaration that she had done so voluntarily for charitable purposes,
the corporation of undertakers having been directed to refuse burial to
the body until she had submitted, which she had done at the expiration
of five days. It is further seen, from the progress of the case, that
the Kahal fined her five hundred rubles more, and compelled the police
to recover this sum from her by representing it as an arrear on her
share of the contribution for ransoming poor and insolvent Jews from
military service. The impudence of the pretense was patent, yet the
local authorities could do nothing, for the Kahal, in all that regards
the collection and payment of taxes for the Jewish population, is a
state institution.
The meaning of the little phrase, so frequently repeated, that it is
lawful to the Kahal to compel obedience "by any means whatsoever, even
through the power of the goïm," will now be sufficiently clear not to
need further illustration, though such might be produced to any extent
from Brafmann's book, to which indeed full justice could be done only by
translating it.
Brafmann is, we repeat, a Jewish patriot in the fullest and widest
sense. He admires his race; he takes pride in belonging to it, and loves
his people with a passionate pity and tenderness which make his voice
break and his eyes fill when he speaks of their sufferings and moral
degradation under the oppressive system which holds them in iron bands.
His dreams are of their regeneration, of their future power and
greatness-not as a political nation, but as a highly gifted race, living
on equal terms among other races, all artificial barriers being removed,
and the field opened without let or hindrance of any kind to the free
development of the many noble faculties of mind and soul so
characteristic of what Renan calls "the admirable minority of Israel."
If, therefore, he incurred by his revelations the utmost wrath of the
rulers whom he exposed, and of the ignorantly fanatical mass, to such a
degree that his life at one time was not considered safe even in St.
Petersburg, where he dwelt after his book appeared; on the other hand,
he is comforted and secretly supported by the sympathy of many of the
more enlightened Jews who, like him, sigh for release from a bondage
worse than foreign captivity. But for such support he could not have
obtained possession of the precious pile of papers which were abstracted
for him, not without danger, by a friend from the Jewish archive of Minsk.
The above exposition of a state of things which might be pronounced
wildly unreal but for the irrefragable documentary evidence adduced,
though far from exhausting the material collected by Brafmann, [15]
will, it is to be hoped, have clearly established one fact: that,
whatever historical causes may underlie the oft-recurring popular
outbreaks against the Jews, race animosity, and religious intolerance
have never been alone at work, and, in our days, are no longer so at
all. The only case of systematic persecution of them from fanatical
motives is that of the Spanish Inquisition, though the motives were far
from unmixed, even there. At all events, if the fathers of St. Dominic
and their secular supporters did not object to enriching themselves with
the spoils of the wealthy Jews they burned, we must do them the justice
to acknowledge that they burned the poor ones quite as piously and
scrupulously. In all other instances "Jewish riots" begin spontaneously;
something-sometimes a mere trifle- happens to infuriate the mob, and
they begin to kill and plunder.
The massacres spread, rage for a few days, then stop, and everything
goes the old round again-for a while. Ignorant fanaticism is only an
accessory-true, a terrible one-which comes into play with the greater
violence the further the occurrence is removed from us, in the "dark
ages." But a significant feature is that the notorious usurers are
always the first to suffer, and the bills and securities which hold
whole provinces in bondage are the first property sought after and
destroyed. This was the case even in the more than usually severe
outbreak at the beginning of Richard I.'s reign, which ended in the
horrible catastrophe of York, and the monkish chronicler who records it
in terms of unseemly exultation, amid much revolting fanatical twaddle
drops a word which strangely reminds us of the burden of popular
complaint which recurred all through the riots of last spring.
He calls the Jews "blood-suckers." [16] Another curious coincidence is
that then, in England, as nine hundred years later in Russia, "the rumor
was spread that the King had issued orders to massacre the Jews." [17]
The facility with which the ignorant masses lend their ears to such
absurdities betrays, at all events, a latent though monstrously
distorted consciousness of having received at the hands of the race such
wrongs and injuries as claim redress from their natural protector, the
governing power.
The difference between then and now, apart from the comparatively mild
form of the recent paroxysms consequent on the general softening of
men's natures, is chiefly this: then, religious feeling was actively
mixed up with economical grievances and hideous reprisals, while now it
is totally absent. And never could this mediæval specter be dragged
forth to the light of our sober, unfanatical age, to account for
phenomena of which the real causes must be obvious to every unbiased
observer, were it not that by far the greater part of the so-called
"liberal press" in Europe is in the hands of Hebrew editors and Hebrew
writers-many of them men of great culture and talent, of great and
well-merited authority in the world of letters and science, but whom it
suits, from mistaken national zeal, to shed a false light on certain
events and sides of modern life, to blind the eyes of superficial and
docile readers with the dust of those cheap and plausible phrases of
which the shallow orators of 1789-93 have left us so ample a store, and
which can be as easily shuffled to prove anything or nothing as the
cards whose combinations furnished forth the effective and patriotic
speeches of Pieborgne, the lawyer- minister in Laboulaye's "Prince Caniche."
It is time to drop the sentimental liberal slang, through whose loose,
wide meshes the biggest humbug can slip unchallenged, When a question of
vital import is presented to us, the thing to do is to drive it into a
corner and grapple with it, not muffle it up in commonplaces long ago
worn threadbare. The Jewish question, in Eastern Europe and Western
Russia, is such a question: let us then, for once, look it square in the
face. The Jews are disliked, nay, hated in those parts, not because they
believe and pray differently, but because they are a parasitical race
who, producing nothing, fasten on the produce of land and labor, and
live on it, choking the breath of life out of commerce and industry as
sure as the creeper throttles the tree that upholds it.
They are despised, not because they are of different blood, because they
dress differently, eat peculiar food; not even because, herding together
in unutterable filth and squalor, they are a loathsome and really
dangerous element-a standing institution for the propagation of all
kinds of horrible diseases and contagions; but because their ways are
crooked, their manner abject,-because they will not stand up for
themselves and manfully resent an insult or oppose vexation, but will
take any amount of it if they can thereby turn a penny, will smirk and
cringe, and go off with a deadly grudge at heart, which they will vent
cruelly, ruthlessly, but in an underhand manner, and not always on the
offender, but on any or all belonging to the offender's race. It is an
essentially oriental feature, this making light of servile forms, so the
feeling of pride be secretly treasured and revenge taken at some time
and in some way-a feature which our Jews could not have retained so
unimpaired had they not always been forcibly kept aloof, by their own
rulers, from the ennobling influence of that compound of Grecian
refinement and Teutonic manliness which we call modern culture, and
which instills more than it teaches that the forms of servitude are as
degrading as the fact.
The readiness with which they appeal to foreign sympathy and
interference, and which in any set of people holding the position of
citizens would be looked upon and punished as state treason of the worst
kind, is but another phase of their oriental nature-the inability to
grasp the first principles of state-life, or perhaps rather their
determination not to acknowledge themselves as belonging to any Gentile
state. They are not "persecuted." Only, from time to time, the popular
patience-that dike built up of ignorance, apathy, and habitual
endurance-breaks; then there is an outpouring of angry waters. True,
some things have become impossible. No invading conqueror, for instance,
would dream nowadays of farming to the Jews the churches of a conquered
people, as did the Poles when they held Galicia in the sixteenth century
and later, thus authorizing them to tax the people arbitrarily for
having divine service performed in their own temples. No government
would now lend itself to such iniquity. Still we have just seen that,
even without such open support, enough can be achieved to exasperate the
most long- suffering people and goad them into momentary frenzy.
The question naturally arises: What is to be done? It is a momentous
one, and might partly be answered by showing what ought not to be
done-i.e., by a review of the legislative measures, hostile or
propitiating, which have been tried in different countries and at
various times, and have utterly failed, as well as of the causes why
they failed. Brafmann's "Kahal" and his other book, "Hebrew
Corporations, Local and Universal," contain valuable material toward
working out the problem; but it is not at the end of an already long
paper that this feature of the subject can be considered-a paper, too,
of which the special object is only to vindicate the age in which we
live from the odious imputation of "intolerance and religious
persecution," unthinkingly and indiscriminately brought against it. Yet
the impression conveyed would be incomplete, nay, the entire tenor and
drift of the paper might be misconstrued, without at least a hint at the
solution which is desired and openly advocated by all enlightened
Russians as represented by our liberal press. Briefly stated, it reads
as follows:
The legal emancipation of the Jews, begun years ago by granting them the
right of buying and holding land, of entering the universities, and
various smaller concessions, must be completed. They must share both the
rights and the duties of their Christian and Mohammedan fellow-subjects,
without restraints or privileges. As the first step toward such a
consummation, the Kahal must necessarily be abolished, or at all events
shorn of its power-a thing very easily achieved by simply depriving it
of the right of levying box-duty on the slaughtering and sale of kòsher
meat, and forbidding the sale of trèf to Christians. This would at once
release the Jewish population from an intolerable pressure by delivering
them from an irksome duty, and by depriving the town-councils of the
means of enforcing their arbitrary separatistical ordinances by recourse
to "the power of the goïm." The taxes would then be collected from the
Jews directly by Government officials, in the same manner as they are
from all other subjects; they would be brought under the census, which
they have always been able to elude until now,-and all this would place
them in a direct and normal relation to the rulers of the land, without
in the least interfering with the full exercise of their religious
worship and national customs. Left to themselves and freed from all
restraint with regard to their place of residence, the process of
assimilation would soon begin, and the number of Jews who discard the
Talmud and keep to the simple Mosaic law in its wider and more liberal
application would annually increase. But if the Government, at this
critical moment, recoils from this radical change, and contents itself
with half-measures, denying its Hebrew subjects their full share of
civil rights and at the same time upholding the artificial separatism so
baleful in its effects, the same state of things will be still further
perpetuated,-consequently, the causes being unchanged, the effects will
be identical, and the same deplorable scenes will be enacted from time
to time,-scenes which every other European country has witnessed, and
would see now, had not a wiser legislation made their recurrence impossible.
[1] The account reads something like the famous episode of the Gordon
riots in "Barnaby Rudge," minus the horrible accessory of the fire.
[2] There is another current of emigration from the Government on the
Volga; and that, of course, has nothing to do with the Jews.
[3] "Les Évangiles et la Seconde Generation Chretienne," page 12.
[4] The word "seminary" is always applied to ecclesiastical schools or
colleges, placed under the jurisdiction of the local ecclesiastical
authorities, and, as supreme resort, of the Holy Synod.
[5] Talmud, Treatise "Baba-Batra" page 55.
[6] "Khoshen-Hamishpat" section 156, paragraph 17, and Treatise
"Baba-Batra," chapter 8.
[7] Vol. V. Note to section 280, paragraph 42.
[8] The Talmudic law devotes eighty-six chapters, divided into six
hundred and forty-two paragraphs, to the regulations concerning
slaughtering, kòsher and trèf.
[9] Statute on Taxes; supplement to section 281, paragraph 8.
[10] Ibid, paragraph 57.
[11] To these may safely be added the Jews of the eastern provinces of
Prussia and Austria, Galicia, Bukovina, etc., and also Roumania, for in
all these countries the state of things is exactly similar.
[12] So on one occasion, when the superintendents of the box-duty
demanded an addition to their salary, the Kahal, instead of granting it
from its own exchequer, imposed an additional duty on the sale of meat,
and when the collectors in their turn applied the very next day for the
same favor, the duty was still further increased-by one groat per
pound-to satisfy them. (Nos. 173 and 176.)
[13] "Khoshen-Hamishpat" section 156, paragraph 7.
[14] This strongly reminds us of the mediaeval vehm-gericht.
[15] Thus, no mention has been made of the so-called "candle- money,"
nor of the extraordinary contributions, mostly in the shape of a
percentage on capital, personal property and wares, levied by the kahal
arbitrarily on special occasions, to avert some danger threatening the
entire community. Such an occasion occurred in 1802, when the poet
Derjàvin, a staunch Russian patriot, was in the ministry, and strove to
carry through a law forbidding the Jews to keep taverns and
public-houses in the villages. There was a great panic among them; the
Kahals raised one million rubles for bribes and presents at
head-quarters, ordered public prayers and days of fasting. Derjàvin was
offered one, even two hundred thousand rubles, to withdraw the project.
He told the Emperor (Alexander I.), and did not take the money; but
others did, and the Jews won the day. Russian writers have celebrated
the event as a triumph of humane and liberal policy, and it has been
rather the fashion to abuse Derjàvin as a narrow-minded retrògrade.
[16] Charles Knight's "History of England," chapter 21.
[17] Hume's "History of England," chapter 10.
Original scans of this article can be found at the Cornell University
Library.
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