A real case against the Jews

'A real case against the Jews' by the Romanian-American Jew and Rothschild biographer, Marcus Eli Ravage (Revici), was first published in the January 1928 edition of The Century Magazine. (Vol. 115, pp. 346-350)

"The thing that intrigues me about this anti-Jewish business, as you play at it, is your total lack of grit. You are so indirect and roundabout with it, you make such transparent excuses, you seem to be suffering from self-consciousness so horribly, that if the performance were not grotesque, it would be irritating.

It is not as if you were amateurs: you have been at it for over fifteen centuries. Yet watching you and hearing your childish pretexts, one might get the impression that you did not know yourselves what it is all about. You resent us, but you cannot clearly say why. You think up a new excuse, a 'reason' is what you call it, every other day. You have been piling up justifications for yourselves these many hundreds of years and each new invention is more laughable than the last and each new excuse contradicts and annihilates the last.

Not so many years ago I used to hear that we were money-grubbers and commercial materialists; now the complaint is being whispered around that no art and no profession is safe against Jewish invasion.

We are, if you are to be believed, at once clannish and exclusive and unassimilable because we won’t intermarry with you, and we are also climbers and pushers and a menace to your racial integrity. Our standard of living is so low that we create your slums and sweated industries, and so high that we crowd you out of your best residential sections.

We shirk our patriotic duty in wartime because we are pacifists by nature and tradition, and we are the arch-plotters of universal wars and the chief beneficiaries of those wars (see the late 'Dearborn Independent,' passim, and 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'). We are at once the founders and leading adherents of capitalism and the chief perpetrators of the rebellion against capitalism. Surely, history has nothing like us for versatility!

And, oh! I almost forgot the reason of reasons. We are the stiff-necked people who never accepted Christianity, and we are the criminal people who crucified its founder.

But I can tell you, you are self-deceivers. You lack either the self-knowledge or the mettle to face the facts squarely and own up to the truth. You resent the Jew not because, as some of you seem to think, he crucified Jesus but because he gave him birth. Your real quarrel with us is not that we have rejected Christianity but that we have imposed it upon you!

Your loose, contradictory charges against us are not a patch on the blackness of OUR PROVED HISTORIC OFFENSE. You accuse us of stirring up revolution in Moscow. Suppose WE ADMIT THE CHARGE. What of it? Compared with what Paul the Jew of Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the Russian upheaval is a mere street brawl.

You make much noise and fury about the undue Jewish influence in your theaters and movie palaces. Very good; granted YOUR COMPLAINT IS WELL-FOUNDED. OUR STAGGERING INFLUENCE IN YOUR CHURCHES, YOUR SCHOOLS, YOUR LAWS AND YOUR GOVERNMENTS, AND THE VERY THOUGHTS YOU THINK EVERY DAY?

A clumsy Russian forges a set of papers and publishes them in a book called 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' which shows that WE PLOTTED TO BRING ON THE LATE WORLD WAR. You believe that book. All right. For the sake of argument WE WILL UNDERWRITE EVERY WORD OF IT. IT IS GENUINE AND AUTHENTIC. But what is that beside THE UNQUESTIONABLE HISTORICAL CONSPIRACY WHICH WE HAVE CARRIED OUT, which we have never denied because you never had the courage to charge us with it, and of which the full record is extant for anybody to read?...

YOU HAVE NOT BEGUN TO APPRECIATE THE REAL DEPTH OF OUR GUILT. WE ARE INTRUDERS. WE ARE DISTURBERS. WE ARE SUBVERTERS. WE HAVE TAKEN YOUR NATURAL WORLD, YOUR IDEALS, YOUR DESTINY, AND PLAYED HAVOC WITH THEM. WE HAVE BEEN AT THE BOTTOM NOT MERELY OF THE LATEST GREAT WAR BUT OF NEARLY ALL YOUR WARS, NOT ONLY OF THE RUSSIAN BUT OF EVERY OTHER MAJOR REVOLUTION IN YOUR HISTORY. WE HAVE BROUGHT DISCORD AND CONFUSION AND FRUSTRATION INTO YOUR PERSONAL AND PUBLIC LIFE. WE ARE STILL DOING IT. No one can tell how long we shall go on doing it...

Nineteen hundred years ago you were an innocent, care-free, pagan race. You worshipped countless gods and goddesses, the spirits of the air, of the running streams and of the woodland. You took unblushing pride in the glory of your naked bodies. You carved images of your gods and of the tantalizing human figure. You delighted in the combats of the field, the arena and the battle-ground. War and slavery were fixed institutions in your systems. Disporting yourselves on the hillsides and in the valleys of the great outdoors, you took to speculating on the wonder and mystery of life and laid the foundations of natural science and philosophy.

Yours was a noble, sensual culture, unirked by the prickings of a social conscience or by any sentimental questionings about human equality. WHO KNOWS WHAT GREAT AND GLORIOUS DESTINY MIGHT HAVE BEEN YOURS IF WE HAD LEFT YOU ALONE?

But we did not leave you alone. WE TOOK YOU IN HAND AND PULLED DOWN THE BEAUTIFUL AND GENEROUS STRUCTURE YOU HAD REARED, AND CHANGED THE WHOLE COURSE OF YOUR HISTORY. WE CONQUERED YOU as no empire of yours ever subjugated Africa or Asia. And we did it all without armies, without bullets, without blood or turmoil, without force of any kind. We did it solely by the irresistible might of our spirit, with ideas, WITH PROPAGANDA.

We made you the willing and unconscious bearers of our mission to the whole world, to the barbarous races of the earth, to the countless unborn generations. Without fully understanding what we were doing to you, you became the agents at large of our racial tradition, carrying our gospel to the unexplored ends of the earth.

Our tribal customs have become the core of your moral code. Our tribal laws have furnished the basic groundwork of all your august constitutions and legal systems. Our legends and our folk tales are the sacred lore which you croon to your infants. Our poets have filled your hymnals and your prayer books. Our national history has become an indispensable part of your pastors and priests and scholars.

Our kings, our statesmen, our prophets, our warriors are your heroes. Our ancient little country is your Holy Land. Our national literature is your Holy Bible. What our people thought and taught has become inextricably woven into your very speech and tradition, until no one among you can be called educated who is not familiar with our racial heritage.

Jewish artisans and Jewish fishermen are your teachers and your saints, with countless statues carved in their image and innumerable cathedrals raised to their memories. A Jewish maiden is your ideal of womanhood. A Jewish rebel-prophet is the central figure in your religious worship. We have pulled down your idols, CAST ASIDE YOUR RACIAL INHERITANCE, AND SUBSTITUTED FOR THEM OUR GOD AND OUR TRADITIONS. NO CONQUEST IN HISTORY CAN EVEN REMOTELY COMPARE WITH THIS CLEAN SWEEP OF OUR CONQUEST OVER YOU...

Two thousand years ago nearly, in far-off Palestine, our religion had fallen into decay and materialism. Money-changers were in possession of the temple. Degenerate, selfish priests mulcted our people and grew fat. Then a young patriot-idealist arose and went about the land calling for a revival of faith. He had no thought of setting up a new church. Like all the prophets before him, his only aim was to purify and revitalize the old creed. He attacked the priests and drove the money-changers from the temple.

This brought him into conflict with the established order and its supporting pillars. The Roman authorities, who were in occupation of the country, fearing his revolutionary agitation as a political effort to oust them, arrested him, tried him and condemned him to death by crucifixion, a common form of execution at that time.

The followers of Jesus of Nazareth, mainly slaves and poor workmen, in their bereavement and disappointment, turned away from the world and formed themselves into a brotherhood of pacifist non-resisters, sharing the memory of their crucified leader and living together communistically. They were merely a new sect in Judea, without power or consequence, neither the first nor the last.

Only after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans did the new creed come into prominence. Then a patriotic Jew named Paul or Saul conceived the idea of humbling the Roman power by destroying the morale or its soldiery with the doctrines of love and non-resistance preached by the little sect of Jewish Christians. He became the Apostle to the Gentiles, he who hitherto had been one of the most active persecutors of the band.

And so well did Paul do his work that within four centuries the great empire which had subjugated Palestine along with half of the world, was a heap of ruins. And the law which went forth from Zion became the official religion of Rome.

This was the beginning of our dominance in your world. But it was only a beginning. From this time forth your history is little more than a struggle for mastery between your own old pagan spirit and our Jewish spirit. HALF YOUR WARS, GREAT AND LITTLE, ARE RELIGIOUS WARS, FOUGHT OVER THE INTERPRETATION OF ONE THING OR ANOTHER IN OUR TEACHINGS.

You no sooner broke free from your primitive religious simplicity and attempted the practice of the pagan Roman learning than Luther armed with our gospels arose to down you and enthrone our heritage. Take the three principal revolutions in modern times—the French, the American and the Russian. What are they but the triumph of the Jewish idea of social, political and economic justice?

AND THE END IS STILL A LONG WAY OFF. WE STILL DOMINATE YOU...

Is it any wonder you resent us? WE HAVE PUT A CLOG UPON YOUR PROGRESS. We have imposed upon you an alien book and an alien faith which you cannot swallow or digest, which is at cross-purposes with your native spirit, which keeps you everlastingly ill-at-ease, and which you lack the spirit either to reject or to accept in full...

WE HAVE MERELY DIVIDED YOUR SOUL, CONFUSED YOUR IMPULSES, PARALYZED YOUR DESIRES...

You Christians have never become Christianized. To that extent we have failed with you. But we have forever spoiled the fun of paganism for you."

Wikipedia suggests the above is 'satirical.'

Satirical it may be but satire doesn't necessarily make the piece any the less on the mark or instructive. Of course, if the discordant and subversive 'propaganda' keeps on working as well as it has, all the instruction in the world isn't going to make much difference to the propagandised.

So, I doubt the Ravages of the modern era have much to worry about.