Here under follows the transcription of chapter 5 of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the 19th Century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1912.
 
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The original text in German: Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BY LORD REDESDALE i v
AUTHOR‘S INTRODUCTION i lix

DIVISION I: THE LEGACY OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
INTRODUCTORY i 3
FIRST CHAPTER: HELLENIC ART AND PHILOSOPHY i 14
SECOND CHAPTER: ROMAN LAW i 93
THIRD CHAPTER: THE REVELATION OF CHRIST i 174

DIVISION II: THE HEIRS
INTRODUCTORY i 251
FOURTH CHAPTER: THE CHAOS i 258
FIFTH CHAPTER: THE ENTRANCE OF THE JEWS INTO WESTERN HISTORY i 329
SIXTH CHAPTER: THE ENTRANCE OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLE INTO HISTORY i 494

DIVISION III: THE STRUGGLE
INTRODUCTORY ii 3
SEVENTH CHAPTER: RELIGION ii 13
EIGHTH CHAPTER: STATE ii 139
NINTH CHAPTER: FROM THE YEAR 1200 TO THE YEAR 1800
A. The Teutons as Creators of a New Culture		 ii 187
B. Historical Survey ii 233
1. DISCOVERY ii 261
2. SCIENCE ii 293
3. INDUSTRY ii 329
4. POLITICAL ECONOMY ii 344
5. POLITICS AND CHURCH ii 365
6. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION ii 389
7. ART ii 495
INDEX ii 565

329

FIFTH CHAPTER

THE ENTRANCE OF THE JEWS INTO THE HISTORY OF THE WEST
“Let us forget whence we spring. No more talk of 'German,' or of 'Portuguese' Jews. Though scattered over the earth we are nevertheless a single people“ — RABBI SALOMON LIPMANN-CERFBERR in the opening speech delivered on July 26, 1806, at the meeting preparatory to the Synedrium of 1807 which Napoleon called together.

THE JEWISH QUESTION

HAD I been writing a hundred years ago, I should hardly have felt compelled at this point to devote a special chapter to the entrance of the Jews into Western history. Of course the share they had in the rise of Christianity, on account of the peculiar and absolutely un-Aryan spirit which they instilled into it, would have deserved our full attention, as well as also the economic part which they played in all Christian countries; but an occasional mention of these things would have sufficed; anything more would have been superfluous. Herder wrote at that time: “Jewish history takes up more room in our history and more attention than it probably deserves in itself.“ * In the meantime, however, a great change has taken place: the Jews play in Europe, and wherever European influence extends, a different part to-day from that which they played a hundred years ago; as Viktor Hehn expresses it, we live

    * Von den deutsch-orientalischen Dichtern, Div. 2.

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to-day in a “Jewish age“; * we may think what we like about the past history of the Jews, their present history actually takes up so much room in our own history that we cannot possibly refuse to notice them. Herder in spite of his outspoken humanism had expressed the opinion that “the Jewish people is and remains in Europe an Asiatic people alien to our part of the world, bound to that old law which it received in a distant climate, and which according to its own confession it cannot do away with.“ † Quite correct. But this alien people, everlastingly alien, because — as Herder well remarks — it is indissolubly bound to an alien law that is hostile to all other peoples — this alien people has become precisely in the course of the nineteenth century a disproportionately important and in many spheres actually dominant constituent of our life. Even a hundred years ago that same witness had sadly to confess that the “ruder nations of Europe“ were “willing slaves of Jewish usury“; to-day he could say the same of by far the greatest part of the civilised world. The possession of money in itself is, however, of least account; our governments, our law, our science, our commerce, our literature, our art... practically all branches of our life have become more or less willing slaves of the Jews, and drag the feudal fetter il not yet on two, at least on one leg. In the meantime the “alien“ element emphasised by Herder has become more and more prominent; a hundred years ago it was rather indistinctly and vaguely felt; now it has asserted and proved itself, and so forced itself on the attention of even the most inattentive. The Indo-European, moved by ideal motives, opened the gates in

    * Gedanken über Goethe, 3rd ed. p. 40. The passage as it stands reads, “From the day of Goethe's death, the 22nd March, 1832, Börne dated the freedom of Germany. In reality, however, one epoch was with that day closed and the Jewish age in which we live began.“
    † Bekehrung der Juden. Abschnitt 7 of the Untersuchungen des vergangenen Jahrhunderts zur Beförderung eines geistigen Reiches.

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friendship: the Jew rushed in like an enemy, stormed all positions and planted the flag of his, to us, alien nature — I will not say on the ruins, but on the breaches of our genuine individuality.
    Are we for that reason to revile the Jews? That would be as ignoble as it is unworthy and senseless. The Jews deserve admiration, for they have acted with absolute consistency according to the logic and truth of their own individuality, and never for a moment have they allowed themselves to forget the sacredness of physical laws because of foolish humanitarian day-dreams which they shared only when such a policy was to their advantage. Consider with what mastery they use the law of blood to extend their power: the principal stem remains spotless, not a drop of strange blood comes in; as it stands in the Thora, “A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord“ (Deuteronomy xxiii. 2); in the meantime, however, thousands of side branches are cut off and employed to infect the Indo-Europeans with Jewish blood. If that were to go on for a few centuries, there would be in Europe only one single people of pure race, that of the Jews, all the rest would be a herd of pseudo-Hebraic mestizos, a people beyond all doubt degenerate physically, mentally and morally. For even the great friend of the Jews, Ernest Renan, admits, “Je suis le premier à reconnaître que la race sémitique, comparée à la race indo-européenne, représente réellement une combinaison inférieure de la nature humaine.“ * And in one of his best but unfortunately little-known writings he says again, “L'épouvantable simplicité de l'esprit sémitique rétrécit le cerveau humain, le ferme à toute idée délicate, à tout sentiment fin, à toute

    * Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques, 5e éd. p. 4. It will make little difference to this view when I show, as I shall do immediately, that the Jews are not pure Semites but half Syrians.

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recherche rationelle, pour le mettre en face d'une éternelle tautologie: Dieu est Dieu“; * and he demonstrates that culture could have no future unless Christian religion should move farther away from the spirit of Judaism and the “Indo-European genius“ assert itself more and more in every domain. That mixture then undoubtedly signifies a degeneration: degeneration of the Jew, whose character is much too alien, firm and strong to be quickened and ennobled by Teutonic blood, degeneration of the European who can naturally only lose by crossing with an “inferior type“ — or, as I should prefer to say, with so different a type. While the mixture is taking place, the great chief stem of the pure unmixed Jews remains unimpaired. When Napoleon, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, dissatisfied that the Jews, in spite of their emancipation, should remain in proud isolation, angry with them for continuing to devour with their shameful usury the whole of his Alsace, although every career was now open to them, sent an ultimatum to the council of their elders demanding the unreserved fusion of the Jews with the rest of the nation — the delegates of the French Jews adopted all the articles prescribed but one, namely, that which aimed at absolute freedom of marriage with Christians. Their daughters might marry outside the Israelite people, but not their sons; the dictator of Europe had to yield. † This is the admirable law by which real Judaism was founded. Indeed, the law in its strictest form forbids marriage altogether between Jews and non-Jews; in Deuteronomy vii. 3, we read, “Thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son“; but, as a rule, emphasis is laid only on the last clause; for example, in Exodus

    * De la Part des peuples sémitiques dans l'histoire de la civilisation, p. 39.
    † In the second book I shall find it necessary to give more details concerning this famous synedrium and its casuistic distinction between religious and civil law — a distinction which neither Talmud nor Thora recognises.

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xxxiv. 16, the sons alone are forbidden to take strange daughters, not the daughters to take strange sons, and in Nehemiah xiii., after both sides have been forbidden to marry outside the race, only the marriage of a son with a foreign wife is described as a “sin against God.“ That is also a perfectly correct view. By the marriage of a daughter with a Goy, the purity of the Jewish stem is in no way altered, while this stem thereby gets a footing in the strange camp; on the other hand, the marriage of a son with a Goya “makes the holy seed common“ as the book of Ezra ix. 2, drastically expresses it. * The possible conversion of the Goya to Judaism would not help matters: the idea of such a conversion was rightly quite strange to the older law — for the question is one of physical conditions of descent — but the newer law says, with enviable discernment: “Proselytes are as injurious to Judaism as ulcers to a sound body.“ † Thus was the Jewish race kept pure in the past and it is still kept so: daughters of the house of Rothschild have married barons, counts, dukes, princes, they submit to baptism without demur; no son has ever married a European; if he did so he would have to leave the house of his fathers and the community of his people. ‡

    * In the new literal translation of Professor Louis Segond the passage reads, “the sacred race defiled by mixture with strange peoples“; in the translation of De Wette it is, “they have mingled the holy seed with the peoples of the earth.“
    † From the Talmud, according to Döllinger, Vorträge i. 237. In another place the Talmud calls the proselytes a “burden.“ (See the Jew Philippson: Israelitische Religionslehre, 1861, ii. 189.)
    ‡ How pure the Jewish race still is, has been shown by Virchow's great anthropological examination of all the school children of Germany; Ranke gives details in his book, Der Mensch, 2nd ed. ii 293: “The purer the race, the smaller is the number of mixed forms. In this connection it is certainly a very important fact that the smallest number of mixed forms was found among the Jews, whereby their decided isolation as a race from the Teutonic peoples, among which they live, is shown most clearly.“ — Measurements in America have, according to the American Anthropologist, vol. iv., in the meantime led to the conviction that there too the Jewish race “has kept itself absolutely pure.“ (Quoted from the Politisch-anthropologische Revue, 1904, March, p. 1003.)

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    These details are somewhat premature; they really belong to a later portion of the book; but my object has been at once and by the shortest way to meet the objection — which unfortunately is still to be expected from many sides — that there is no “Jewish question,“ from which would follow that the entrance of the Jews into our history had no significance. Others, again, talk of religion: it is a question, they say, of religious differences only. Whoever says this overlooks the fact that there would be no Jewish religion if there were no Jewish nation. But there is one. The Jewish nomocracy (that is, rule of the law) unites the Jews, no matter how scattered they may be over all the lands of the world, into a firm, uniform and absolutely political organism, in which community of blood testifies to a common past and gives a guarantee for a common future. Though it has many elements not purely Jewish in the narrower sense of the word, yet the power of this blood, united with the incomparable power of the Jewish idea, is so great that these alien elements have long ago been assimilated; for nearly two thousand years have passed since the time when the Jews gave up their temporary inclination to proselytising. Of course, I must, as I showed in the preceding chapter, distinguish between Jews of noble and of less noble birth; but what binds together the incompatible parts is (apart from gradual fusing) the tenacity of life which their national idea possesses. This national idea culminates in the unshakable confidence in the universal empire of the Jews, which Jehovah promised. “Simple people who have been born Christians“ (as Auerbach expresses it in his sketch of Spinoza's life) fancy that the Jews have given up that hope, but they are very wrong; for “the existence of Judaism depends upon the clinging to the Messianic hope,“ as one of the very moderate and liberal Jews lately wrote. * The whole Jewish religion is in fact founded on

    * Skreinka: Entwickelungsgeschichte der jüdischen Dogmen, p. 75.

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this hope. The Jewish faith in God, that which can and may be called “religion“ in their case, for it has become since the source of a fine morality, is a part of this national idea, not vice versa. To assert that there is a Jewish religion but no Jewish nation is simply nonsense. *
    The entry of the Jews into the history of the West signifies therefore beyond doubt the entrance of a definite element, quite different from and in a way opposed to all European races, an element which remained essentially the same, while the nations of Europe went through the most various phases; in the course of a hard and often cruel history it never had the weakness to entertain proposals of fraternity, but, possessed as it was of its national idea, its national past, and its national future, felt and still feels all contact with others as a pollution; thanks also to the certainty of its instinct, which springs from strict uniformity of national feeling, it has always been able to

    * At the Jewish congress held in Basle in 1898, Dr. Mandelstam, Professor in the University of Kiev, said in the chief speech of the sitting of August 29, “The Jews energetically reject the idea of fusion with the other nationalities and cling firmly to their historical hope, i.e., of world empire“ (from a report of one who took part in the congress in Le Temps, Sept. 2, 1898). The Vienna newspapers of July 30 and 31, 1901, report a speech on Zionism which the Vienna Rabbi, Dr. Leopold Kahn, delivered in a room of the orthodox Jewish school in Pressburg. In this speech Dr. Kahn made the following admission: “the Jew will never be able to assimilate himself; he will never adopt the customs and ways of other peoples. The Jew remains Jew under all circumstances. Every assimilation is purely exterior.“ Words well worth laying to heart! In the Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstage A. Berliner's, 1903, Dr. B. Felsenthal publishes a series of Jewish Theses in which he supports with all his energy the thesis that Jewry is a people, not a religion, “Judaism is a special stem, and every Jew is born into this stem.“ This stem is, according to him, “one of the ethnically purest peoples that exist.“ Felsenthal reckons that from Theodosius to the year 1800, “perhaps not quite 300 non Semites were adopted into the Jewish race,“ and it is characteristic that he denies proselytes the right of looking upon themselves as full-blooded Jews. “The Jewish people, the Jewish stem is the given fact, the constant thing, the necessary substratum, the substantial kernel. The Jewish religion is something attached to this kernel, a quality — an accident, as it is called in the language of the philosophical schools.“ I quote from the special impression, made by Itzkowski, Berlin.

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exercise a powerful influence upon others, while the Jews themselves have been influenced but skin-deep by our intellectual and cultural development. To characterise this most peculiar situation from the standpoint of the European, we must repeat the words of Herder: the Jewish people is and remains alien to our part of the world; from the standpoint of the Jew the same fact is formulated somewhat differently; we know from a former chapter how the great free-thinking philosopher Philo put it: “only the Israelites are men in the true sense of the word.“ * What the Jew here says in the intolerant tone of racial pride was more politely expressed by Goethe, when he disputed the community of descent of Jews and Indo-Europeans, no matter how far back the origin was put: “We will not dispute with the chosen people the honour of its descent from Adam. We others, however, have certainly had other ancestors as well.“ †

THE “ALIEN PEOPLE“

    These considerations make it our right and our duty to look upon the Jew in our midst as a peculiar and, in fact, alien element. Outwardly his inheritance was the same as ours; inwardly it was not so: he inherited quite a different spirit. One single trait is all that is necessary to reveal in an almost alarming manner to our consciousness the yawning gulf which here separates soul from soul: the revelation of Christ has no significance for the Jew! I do not here speak of pious orthodoxy at all. But read, for example, in Diderot, the notorious free-thinker, the wonderful words on the Crucified One, see how Diderot represents man in his greatest sorrow turning to the

    * See p. 217.
    † Conversations with Eckermann, October 7, 1828. Giordano Bruno made a similar assertion, viz., that only the Jews were descended from Adam and Eve, the rest of mankind were of much older origin. (See Lo spaccio della bestia trionfante.)

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Divine One, and makes us feel that the Christian religion is the only religion in the world. „Quelle profonde sagesse il y a dans ce que l'aveugle philosophie appelle la folie de la croix! Dans l'état où j'étais, de quoi m'aurait servi l'image d'un législateur heureux et comblé de gloire? Je voyais l'innocent, le flanc percé, le front couronné d'épines, les mains et les pieds percés de clous, et expirant dans les souffrances; et je me disais: Voilà mon Dieu, et j'ose me plaindre!“ I have searched through a whole library of Jewish books in the expectation of finding similar words — naturally not belief in the divinity of Christ, nor the idea of redemption, but the purely human feeling for the greatness of a suffering saviour — but in vain. A Jew who feels that is in fact no longer a Jew, but a denier of Judaism. And while we find even in Mohammed's Koran at least a vague conception of the importance of Christ and profound reverence for His personality, a cultured, leading Jew of the nineteenth century calls Christ “the new birth with the deathmask,“ which inflicted new and painful wounds upon the Jewish people; he cannot see anything else in Him. * In view of the cross he assures us that “the Jews do not require this convulsive emotion for their spiritual improvement,“ and adds, “particularly not among the middle classes of the inhabitants of the cities.“ His comprehension goes no further. In a book, republished in 1880 (!)‚ by a Spanish Jew (Mose de Leon) Jesus Christ is called a “dead dog“ that lies “buried in a dunghill.“ Besides, the Jews have taken care to issue in the latter part of the nineteenth century several editions (naturally in Hebrew) of the so-called “censured passages“ from the Talmud, those passages usually omitted in which Christ is exposed to our scorn and hatred as a “fool,“ “sorcerer,“ “profane person,“ “idolater,“ “dog,“ “bastard,“ “child of lust,“ &c.; so, too, his sublime

    * Graetz: Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden, i, 591.

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mother. * We certainly do the Jews no injustice when we say that the revelation of Christ is simply something incomprehensible and hateful to them. Although he apparently sprang from their midst, he embodies nevertheless the negation of their whole nature — a matter in which the Jews are far more sensitive than we. This clear demonstration of the deep cleft that separates us Europeans from the Jew is by no means given in order to let religious prejudice with its dangerous bias settle the matter, but because I think that the perception of two so fundamentally different natures reveals a real gulf; it is well to look once into this gulf, so that on other occasions, where the two sides seem likely to unite each other, we may not be blind to the deep abyss which separates them.
    When we understand what a chasm there is between us we are forced to a further conclusion. The Jew does not understand us, that is certain; can we hope to understand him, to do him justice? Perhaps, if we are really intellectually and morally superior to him, as Renan insisted in the passage quoted above, and as other perhaps more reliable scholars have likewise said. † But we should

    * See Laible: Jesus Christus im Talmud, p. 2 ff. (Schriften des Institutum Judaicum in Berlin, No. 10; in the supplement the original Hebrew texts are given.) This absolutely impartial scholar, who is, moreover, a friend of the Jews, says: “The hatred and scorn of the Jews was always directed in the first place against the person of Jesus“ (p. 25). “The Jesus-hatred of the Jews is a firmly established fact, but they want to show it as little as possible“ (p. 3). Hatred of Christ is described by the same scholar as the “most national trait of Judaism“ (p. 86); he says, “at the approach of Christianity the Jews were seized ever and again with a fury and hatred that were akin to madness“ (p. 72). Even to-day no orthodox Jew may use the name of Christ either in speech or in writing (pp. 3 and 32); the most common cryptonyms are “the bastard,“ “the hanged,“ often, too, “Bileam.“
    † See especially the famous passage in Lassen's Indische Altertumskunde, where the great Orientalist proves in detail his view that the Indo-European race is “more highly and more fully gifted,“ that in it alone there is “perfect symmetry of all mental powers.“ (See i. 414, of the 1847 edition.)

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then have to judge him from the lofty heights of our superiority, not from the low depths of hatred and superstition, and still less from the swampy shallows of misunderstanding in which our religious teachers have been wading for the last two thousand years. It is surely an evident injustice to ascribe to the Jew thoughts which he never had, to glorify him as the possessor of the most sublime religious intuitions, which were perhaps more alien to him than to any one else in the world, and at best are to be found only in the hearts of a few scattered individuals as a cry of revolt against the special hardness of heart of this people — and then to condemn him for being to-day quite different from what he should be according to such fictitious conceptions. It is not only unfair, but as regards public feeling, regrettably misleading; for through his connection with our religious life — a connection which is entirely fictitious — his head seems enveloped in a kind of nimbus, and then we are greatly incensed when we find no holy person under this sham halo. We expect more of the Jews than of ourselves, who are merely the children of the heathen. But the Jewish testimony is very different and more correct; it leads us to expect so little that every noble trait discovered later and every explanation found for Jewish failings gives us genuine pleasure. Jehovah, for instance, is never tired of explaining, “I have seen this people and behold it is a stiff-necked people,“ * and Jeremiah gives such a characterisation of the moral constitution of the Jews that Monsieur Edouard Drumont could not wish it to be more richly coloured, “And they will deceive every one his neighbour, and will not speak the truth: they have taught their tongue to speak lies, and weary themselves to commit iniquity.“ † Little wonder, after this description, that Jeremiah calls the Jews “an

    * Exodus xxxii. 9, xxxiv. 9; Deuteronomy ix. 13, &c.
    † ix. 5.

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assembly of treacherous men,“ and knows only one desire, “Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging-place of wayfaring men; that I might leave my people and go from them.“ For our incredible ignorance of the Jewish nature we are ourselves solely to blame; never did a people give so comprehensive and honest a picture of its own personality as the Hebrew has done in his Bible, a picture which (so far as I can judge from fragments) is made more complete by the Talmud, though in faded colours. Without, therefore, denying that it must be very difficult for us who are “descended from other ancestors“ to form a correct judgment of the “alien Asiatic people,“ we must clearly see that the Jews from time immemorial have done their best to inform the unprejudiced about themselves, a circumstance which entitles us to hope that we may gain a thorough knowledge of their nature. As a matter of fact, the events which take place before our eyes should be sufficient for that. Is it possible to read the daily papers without becoming acquainted with Jewish ways of thinking, Jewish taste, Jewish morals, Jewish aims? A few annual volumes of the Archives israélites teach us in fact more than a whole anti-Semitic library, and indeed not only about the less admirable, but also about the excellent qualities of the Jewish character. But here, in this chapter, I shall leave the present out of account. If we are to form a practical and true judgment concerning the significance of the Jew as joint-heir and fellow-worker in the nineteenth century, we must above all become clear as to what he is. From what a man is by nature follows of strict necessity what he will do under certain conditions; the philosopher says: operari sequitur esse; an old German proverb expresses the same thing in a more homely way, “Only what a man is, can one get out of him.“

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HISTORICAL BIRD'S-EYE VIEW

    Pure history in this case does not bring us either quickly or surely to our goal, and besides it is not my task to furnish a history of the Jews. As in other chapters, so here too I have a horror of copying what has been written before. Every one, of course, knows how and when the Jews entered into Western history: first by the Diaspora, then by being scattered. Their changing fortunes in various lands and times are likewise no secret to us, although, indeed, much that we know is absolutely untrue, and of much that we ought to know we are entirely ignorant. But I do not need to tell any one that throughout the Christian centuries the Jews played an important though at times circumscribed rôle. Even in the earliest Western Gothic times they understood how to acquire influence and power as slave-dealers and financial agents. Though they were not everywhere, as they were among the Spanish Moors, powerful Ministers of State, who, following the example of Mardochai, filled the most lucrative posts with “their many brothers,“ though they did not attain everywhere, as they did in Catholic Spain, to the rank of Bishop and Archbishop, * yet their influence was always and everywhere great. The Babenberg princes as early as the thirteenth century set their successors the example of letting Jews manage the finances of their States and honouring these administrators with titles of distinction; † the great Pope Innocent III. gave important posts at his Court to Jews; ‡ the knights of France had to pledge their

    * See the book of the Jew, David Mocatta, The Jews in Spain and Portugal, where a detailed account is given of how there were in Spain “generations and generations of secret Jews who mingled with all classes of society and were in possession of every post in the State and especially in the Church!“
    † Graetz, ii. 503.
    ‡ Israel Abrahams: Jewish Life in the Middle Ages.

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goods with the Jews, in order to be able to take part in the Crusades; * Rudolf von Habsburg favoured the Jews in every way; he vindicated them “as servants of his imperial exchequer,“ and by freeing them from being subject to ordinary justice he made it very difficult indeed for any action brought against them to be carried through; † in short, what I call the entrance of the Jews into Western history has never ceased to make itself felt at all times and places. If any one were qualified to study history for the sole purpose of disentangling the question of Jewish influence, he would, I think, bring to light some unexpected facts. Without this detailed study the fact of this influence can only be established clearly and beyond doubt where the Jews were in considerable numbers. In the second century, for example, the Jews on the island of Cyprus are more numerous than the other inhabitants; they resolve to found a national State and with this intent follow the procedure known from the Old Testament: they slay in one day all the other inhabitants, 240,000 in number; and in order that this island State may not be without support on the mainland, they at the same time slay the 220,000 non-Jewish inhabitants of Cyrene. ‡ In Spain they pursue the same policy with greater caution and astonishing perseverance. Under the rule of that thoroughly Western Gothic king, who had showered benefits on them, they invite their kinsmen, the Arabs, to come over from Africa, and, not out of any ill-feeling, but simply because they hope to profit thereby, they betray their noble protector; under the Kalifs they then acquire gradually an even larger share in the government; “they concentrated,“ their great supporter the historian Heman writes, “the intellectual and the material powers al-

    * André Réville: Les payans au Moyen-Age, 1896, p. 3.
    † See among others Realis: Die Juden und die Judenstadt in Wien, 1846, p. 18, &c.
    ‡ Mommsen: Römische Geschichte, v, 543.

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together in their own hands“; the prosperous Moorish State was, it is true, thereby intellectually and materially ruined: but this was a matter of indifference to the Jews, as they had already obtained as firm a footing in the Christian State of the Spaniards which was destined to take the place of the Moorish one. “The movable wealth of the land was here absolutely in their power; the heritable property they made gradually theirs by usury and the purchase of mortgaged estates of nobles. From the offices of Secretary of State and Minister of Finance downwards all the offices which had to do with taxes and money were in Jewish hands. Through usury almost all Aragon was mortgaged to them. In the cities they formed the majority of the wealthy population.“ * But here, as elsewhere, they were not always shrewd; they had employed their power to obtain all kinds of privileges; for example, the oath of a single Jew sufficed to prove debt claims against Christians (the same was the case in the Archduchy of Austria and in many places), while the testimony of a Christian against a Jew had no weight before a tribunal, and so on; these privileges they abused so outrageously that the people finally revolted. The same would probably have happened in Germany if the Church and intelligent statesmen had not put a stop to the evil in time. Charlemagne had written to Italy for Jews to manage his finances; soon, as farmers of taxes, they secured for themselves wealth and influence in every direction, and used these to get important concessions for their people, such as commercial privileges, less severe punishment for crime and the like; the whole population was even forced to make Sunday their market day, as Saturday, the customary market day, did not suit the Jews because it was

    * Heman: Die historische Weltstellung der Juden, 1882, p. 24 ff. For a somewhat differently tinged account which, however, in actual facts is entirely at one with this, see Graetz Volksth. Gesch. d. Juden, ii. 344 ff.

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their Sabbath; it was at that time fashionable for courtiers to visit the synagogues! But the reaction set in soon and strongly, and not only, as the historians are wont to represent it, as the result of priestly agitation — such things belong to the shell, not to the kernel of history — but in the first place because the Teuton is in fact just as much a born merchant and industrialist as he is a born warrior, and because, as soon as the growth of cities awakened these instincts in him, he saw the game of his unfair rival, and, full of violent indignation, demanded his removal. And so, if such were the purpose of this chapter, we could trace the ebb and flow of Jewish influence to the present day, when all the wars of the nineteenth century are so peculiarly connected with Jewish financial operations, from Napoleon's Russian campaign and Nathan Rothschild's rôle of spectator at the Battle of Waterloo to the consulting of the Bleichröders on the German side and of Alphonse Rothschild on the French side at the peace transactions of the year 1871, and to the “Commune,“ which from the beginning was looked upon by all intelligent people as a Jewish-Napoleonic machination.

CONSENSUS INGENIORUM

    Now this political and social influence of the Jews has been very variously judged, but the greatest politicians of all times have regarded it as pernicious. Cicero, for example (no great politician but an experienced statesman), displays a genuine fear of the Jews; where a legal transaction encroaches on their interest, he speaks so low that only the judges hear him, for he is well aware, as he says, that all the Jews hold together and that they know how to ruin the one who opposes them; while he thunders the most vehement charges against Greeks, against Romans, against the most powerful men of his time, he advises caution in dealing with the Jews; they are to him an

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uncanny power and he passes with tlie greatest haste over that city of “suspicion and slander,“ Jerusalem: such was the opinion of a Cicero during the consulate of a Julius Caesar! * Even before the destruction of Jerusalem the Emperor Tiberius, who was, according to many historians, the best ruler that the Roman Imperium ever possessed, recognised a national danger in the immigration of the Jews. Even Frederick the Second, the Hohenstauffen, certainly one of the most brilliant men that ever wore a crown or carried a sword, a more freethinking man than any monarch of the nineteenth century, an enthusiastic admirer of the East and a generous supporter of Hebrew scholars, nevertheless held it to be his duty, contrary to the custom of his contemporaries, to debar the Jews from all public offices, and pointed warningly to the fact that wherever the Jews are admitted to power, they abuse it; the very same doctrine was taught by the other great Frederick the Second, the Hohenzollern, who gave universal freedom, but not to the Jews; similar were the words of Bismarck, while he still could speak openly, in the Landtag (1847) and the great historian Mommsen speaks of Judaism as of a “State inside the State.“ — As regards the social influence in particular, I will only quote two wise and fair authorities, whose judgment cannot be suspected even by the Jews, namely, Herder and Goethe. The former says, “A ministry, in which the Jew is supreme, a household, in which a Jew has the key of the wardrobe and the management of the finances, a department or commissariat, in which Jews do the principal business ... are Pontine marshes that cannot be drained“; and he expresses the opinion that the presence of an indefinite number of Jews is so pernicious to the welfare of a European State, that we “dare not be influenced by general humane principles“; it is a national question,

    * See the Defence of Lucius Flaccus, xxviii.

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and it is the duty of every State to decide “how many of this alien people can be tolerated without injury to the true citizens?“ * Goethe goes still deeper: “How should we let the Jews share in our highest culture, when they deny its origin and source?“ And he became “violently enraged“ when the law of 1823 permitted marriage between Jews and Germans, prophesying the “worst and most frightful consequences,“ particularly the “undermining of all moral feelings“ and declaring that the bribery of the “all-powerful Rothschild“ must be the cause of this “folly.“ † Goethe and Herder have exactly the same opinion as the great Hohenstauffen, the great Hohenzollern, and all great men before and after them: without superstitiously reproaching the Jews with their peculiar individuality, they consider them an actual danger to our civilisation and our culture; they would not give them an active part in our life. We cannot proceed with our discussion and simply pass over such a consensus ingeniorum. For to these well-weighed, serious judgments derived from the fulness of experience and the insight of the greatest intellects we have nothing to oppose but the empty phrases of the droits de l'homme — a parliamentary clap-trap. ‡

    * Adrastea: Bekehrung der Juden.
    † Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre, iii. 11, and the conversation with von Müller on September 23, 1823.
    ‡ I have intentionally limited my quotations. But I cannot refrain from defending in a note the great Voltaire against the almost established myth that he was altogether favourable and as superficial in his humanitarian judgment of the influence of the Jews upon our culture, as is the modern fashion. Even Jews of such broad culture as James Darmesteter (Peuple Juif, 2e éd. p. 17) print the name Voltaire in thick type and represent him as one of the intellectual originators of their emancipation. The opposite is true; more than once Voltaire advises that the Jews be sent back to Palestine. Voltaire is one of the authors whom I know best, because I prefer interesting books to wearisome ones, and I think I could easily collect a hundred quotations of a most aggressive nature against the Jews. In the essay of the Dictionnaire Philosophique (end of Section 1) he says: “Vous ne trouverez dans les Juifs qu'un peuple ignorant et barbare, qui joint depuis longtemps la plus sordide avarice à la plus détestable superstition et à la plus invincible haine pour

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PRINCES AND NOBILITY

    On the other hand, it is certain and must be carefully observed that, if the Jews are responsible for many a shocking historical development, for the fall of many heroic, powerful peoples, still greater is the responsibility of those Europeans who have always from the most base motives encouraged, protected and fostered the disintegrating activity of the Jews, and these are primarily the Princes and the nobility — and that too from the first century of our era to the present day. Open the history of any European nation you like wherever the Jews are numerous and begin to realise their strength, you will always hear bitter complaints against them from the people, from the commercial classes, from the circles of the learned and the poets; everywhere and at all times it is the Princes and the nobility that protect them: the Princes because they need money for their wars, the nobility because they live extravagantly.

tous les peuples qui les tolèrent et qui les enrichissent.“ In Dieu et les hommes (chap. x.) he calls the Jews “La plus haïssable et la plus honteuse des petites nations.“ Enough has surely been said to make his attitude clear! But this opinion should have all the more force, since Voltaire himself in many long treatises has made a thorough study of Jewish history and the Jewish character (so thorough that he who has been decried as a “superficial dilettante“ is occasionally quoted to-day by a scholar of the first rank like Wellhausen). And so it is noteworthy when he writes (Essai sur les Moeurs, chap. xlii.): “La nation juive ose étaler une haine irréconciliable contre toutes les nations, elle se révolte contre tous ses maîtres; toujours superstitieuse, toujours avide du bien d'autrui, toujours barbare — rampante dans le malheur, et insolente dans la prospérité.“ His judgment of their mental qualities is brief and apodeictic, “Les Juifs n'ont jamais rien inventé“ (La défense de mon oncle, chap. vii.), and in the Essai sur les Moeurs he shows in several chapters that the Jews had always learned from other nations but had never taught others anything; even their music, which is generally praised, Voltaire cannot endure: “Retournez en Judée le plus tôt que vous pourrez ... vous y exécuteriez à plaisir dans votre détestable jargon votre détestable musique“ (6me lettre du Dictionnaire). He explains elsewhere this remarkable mental sterility of the Jews by their inordinate lust for money; “L'argent fut l'objet de leur conduite dans tous

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Edmund Burke * tells us, for example, of William the Conqueror that, as the income from “talliage“ and all kinds of other oppressive taxes did not satisfy him, he from time to time either confiscated the notes of hand of the Jews or forced them to hand them over for next to nothing, and, as almost the whole Anglo-Norman nobility of the eleventh century was under the thumb of Jewish usury, the King himself became the pitiless creditor of his most illustrious subjects. In the meantime he protected the Jews and gave them privileges of various kinds. This one example may stand for thousands and thousands. † If then

les temps“ (Dieu et les hommes, xxix.). Voltaire scoffs at the Jews in a hundred places; for instance, in Zadig (chap. x.), where the Jew utters a solemn prayer of thankfulness to God for a successful piece of fraud; the most biting satire against the Jews that exists is beyond doubt the treatise Un Chrétien contre six Juifs. And yet in all these utterances there was a certain reserve, as they were destined for publication; on the other hand, in a letter to the Chevalier de Lisle on December 15, 1773 (that is, at the end of his life, not in the heat of youth), he could speak his opinion freely: “Que ces déprépucé d'Israël se disent de la tribu de Naphthali ou d'Issachar, cela est fort peu important; ils n'en sont pas moins les plus grand gueux qui aient jamais souillé la face du globe.“ Evidently this fiery Frenchman had just the same to say of the Jews as any fanatical Bishop; he differs at most in the addition which he occasionally makes to his bitterest attacks, “Il ne faut pourtant pas les brûler.“ There is a further difference in the fact that it is a humane, tolerant and learned man that utters this very sharp judgment. But how, in a man of such open mind, can we explain the existence of a view so pitilessly one-sided and so ruthlessly intolerant, a view which in its utter lack of moderation compares very unfavourably with the words of the German sages quoted above? Our age could learn much here, if it wished to! For we see that the Gallic love of equality and freedom is not based upon love of justice nor respect for the individual; and we may draw the further conclusion; understanding is not got from principles, and universal humanity does not ensure the possibility of living together in dignified peace, it is only the frank recognition of what separates our own kind and our own interests from those of others that can make us just towards an alien nature and alien interests.
    * An Abridgment of English History, iii. 2.
    † The famous economist Dr. W. Cunningham, in his book The Growth of English Industry and Commerce during the Early and Middle Ages (3rd ed., 1896, p. 201), compares the activity of the Jews in England from the tenth century onward to a sponge, which sucks up all the wealth of the land and thereby hinders all economic development. Interesting,

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the Jews have exercised a great and historically baneful influence, it is to no small degree due to the complicity of these Princes and nobles who so shamefully persecuted and at the same time utilised the Jews. And in fact this lasts until the nineteenth century: Count Mirabeau was in closest touch with the Jews even before the Revolution, * Count Talleyrand, in opposition to the delegates from the middle classes, supported in the Constituante their unconditional emancipation; Napoleon protected them, when after such a short time bitter complaints and entreaties for protection against them were sent in to the Government from all France, and he did so although he himself had exclaimed in the Council of State, “These Jews are locusts and caterpillars, they devour my France!“ — he needed their money. Prince Dalberg sold to the Frankfort Jews, in defiance of the united citizens, the full civic rights for half a million Gulden (1811), the Hardenbergs and Metternichs at the Vienna Congress fell into the snare of the Rothschild bank, and, in opposition to the votes of all the representatives of the Bund, they supported the interests of the Jews to the disadvantage of the Germans and finally gained their point, in fact, the two most conservative States which they represented were the first to raise to hereditary nobility — an honour which was never conferred on honest and deserving Jews — those members of the

too, is the proof that even at this early period the Government did everything in its power to make the Jews take up decent trades and honest work and thereby at the same time amalgamate with the rest of the population, but all to no purpose.
    * With regard to Mirabeau's being influenced by “the shrewd women of the Jews“ (as Gentz says) and his connection with essentially Jewish secret societies, see besides Graetz, Volks. Geschichte der Juden (iii. 600, 610 ff.), particularly L'Abbé Lémann, L'entrée des Israélites dans la société française, iii. chap. 7; as converted Jew this author understands what others do not, and at the same time he tells what Jewish authors keep secret. The important thing in Mirabeau's case was probably that from youth he was deeply in debt to the Jews (Carlyle: Essay on Mirabeau).

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“alien Asiatic people“ who, in the years of general suffering and misery, had by the vilest means acquired immense wealth. * If then the Jews were for us pernicious neighbours, justice requires us to admit that they acted according to the nature of their instincts and gifts, and showed at the same time a really admirable example of loyalty to self, to their own nation and to the faith of their fathers; the tempters and the traitors were not the Jews but we ourselves. We were the criminal abettors of the Jews, and it is so to-day, as it was in the past; and we were false to that which the lowest inhabitant of the Ghetto considered sacred, the purity of inherited blood; that, too, was formerly the case, and to-day it is more so than ever. The Christian Church alone of all the great powers seems to have acted on the whole justly and wisely (of course we must discount the Bishops who were really secular Princes, as well as some of the Popes). The Church has kept the Jews in check, treated them as aliens, but at the same time protected them from persecution. Every seemingly “ecclesiastical“ persecution has its source really in economic conditions that have become unbearable; we see that nowhere more clearly than in Spain. To-day, when public opinion is so fearfully misled by the active, irreconcilable antagonism of the Jews, especially to every manifestation of the Christian faith, it may be well to remind the reader that the last act of the preparatory meeting to the first Synedrium summoned in our times, that of 1807, was a spontaneous utterance of thanks to the ministers of the various Christian Churches for the protection extended to them throughout the centuries. †

    * This is, of course, an old custom of Princes, by which not only the Jews but others also profit; Martin Luther even had to write: “The Princes have thieves hanged, who have stolen a Gulden or half a one, and yet make transactions with those who rob everybody and steal more than all others“ (Von Kaufhandlung und Wucher).
    † Diogène Tama: Collection des actes de l'Assemblée des Israélites de France et du royaume d'ltalie (Paris, 1807, pp. 327, 328; the author is a

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INNER CONTACT

    Here we must end these hastily sketched historical fragments. They show that “the entrance of the Jews“ has exercised a large, and in many ways an undoubtedly fatal, influence upon the course of European history since the first century. But that tells us little about the Jew himself; the fact that the North American Indian dies out from contact with the Indo-European does not prove that the latter is evil and pernicious; that the Jew injures or benefits us is a judgment which is conditional in too many ways to permit of our forming a true estimate of his nature. In fact, for nineteen centuries the Jew has had not merely an outer relationship with our culture as a more or less welcome guest, but also an inner contact. As Kant rightly says, the preservation of Judaism is primarily the work of Christianity. * From its midst — if not from its stem and its spirit — Jesus Christ and the earliest members of the Christian Church arose. Jewish history, Jewish conceptions, Jewish thought and poetry became important elements in our mental life. It cannot be right to separate the outward friction entirely from the inner penetration. If we had not ceremoniously adopted the Jew into our family circle, he would no more have found a home

Jew and was Secretary of the Jewish deputy of Bouches-du-Rhône, M. Constantini). After a detailed proof the document closes with the following: “Les députés israélites arrêtent: Que l'expression de ces sentiments sera consignée dans le procès-verbal de ce jour pour qu'elle demeure à jamais comme un témoignage authentique de la gratitude des Israélites de cette Assemblée pour les bienfaits que les générations qui les ont précédés ont reçus des ecclésiastiques des divers pays d'Europe.“ The proposal was moved by Mr. Isaac Samuel Avigdor, representative of the Jews of the Alpes-Maritimes. Tama adds that the speech of Avigdor was received with applause and its insertion in the minutes in extenso adopted. — The Jewish historians of to-day do not say a word concerning this important event. Not only Graetz passes it over in silence, but Bédarride also in his Les Juifs en France, 1859, although he seems as if he were reporting in full from the minutes.
    * Die Religion, general note to third chapter.

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among us than the Saracen or the other wrecks of half-Semitic peoples who saved their existence — but not their individuality — by unconditional amalgamation with the nations of South Europe. The Jew, however, was proof against this; though now and then one of them might be dragged to the stake, the very fact that they had crucified Jesus Christ surrounded them with a solemn, awe-inspiring nimbus. And while the people were thus fascinated, the scholars and holy men spent their days and nights in studying the books of the Hebrews: struck down by the commands of Jewish shepherds like Amos and Micah, the monuments of an art, whose like the world has never since seen, fell to the ground; through the scorn of Jewish priests science sank into contempt; Olympus and Walhalla became depopulated, because the Jews so wished it; Jehovah, who had said to the Israelites, “Ye are my people and I am your God,“ now became the God of the Indo-Europeans; from the Jews we adopted the fatal doctrine of unconditional religious intolerance. But at the same time we adopted very great and sublime spiritual impulses; we were taught by prophets, who preached such strict and pure morals as could have been found nowhere else save on the distant shores of India; we became acquainted with such a living and life-moulding faith in a higher divine power that it inevitably changed our spirit and gave it a new direction. Though Christ was the master-builder, we got the architecture from the Jews. Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Psalmists became, and still are, living powers in our spiritual life.

WHO IS THE JEW?

    And now, when this inner contact is beginning to grow weaker, while the outer friction referred to above is being daily more felt, now, when he cannot any longer

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rid ourselves of the presence of Jews, it is not sufficient for us to know that almost all pre-eminent and free men, from Tiberius to Bismarck, have looked upon the presence of the Jew in our midst as a social and political danger, we must be in a position to form definite judgments on the basis of adequate knowledge of facts and to act accordingly. There have been published Anti-Semitic catechisms, in which opinions of well-known men have been collected in hundreds; but apart from the fact that many a remark when taken apart from the context does not give quite fairly the intention of the writer, and that out of many others it is merely ignorant blind prejudice that speaks, a single opinion of our own is manifestly worth more than two hundred quotations. Moreover I do not know how we can form a competent judgment, if we do not learn to take a higher standpoint than that of political considerations, and I do not know how we can arrive at this standpoint except through history, not, however, modern history — for there we should be judge and suitor at the same time — but through the history of the growth of the Jewish people. There is no lack of documents; in the nineteenth century especially they have been tested, critically sifted and historically classified by the devoted work of learned men, mostly Germans, but also distinguished Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Englishmen; much remains to be done, but enough has already been accomplished to enable us to survey clearly and surely in its general features one of the most remarkable pages of human history. This Jew, who appears so eternally unchangeable, so constant, as Goethe says, really grew into what he is, grew slowly, even artificially. And of a surety he will pass away like all that has grown. This fact already brings him nearer to us as a human being. What a “Semite“ is, no one can tell. A hundred years ago science thought it knew what it meant; Semites

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were the sons of Shem; now the answer becomes more and more vague; it was thought that the criterion of language was decisive: a very great error! The idea “Semite“ indeed remains indispensable because it embraces collectively a many-sided complex of historical phenomena; but there is absolutely no sure boundary-line; at the periphery this ethnographical conception merges into others. Finally “Semite“ remains as the name of an original race, like “Aryan,“ one of those counters without which one could not make oneself understood, but which one must beware of accepting as good coin. The real genuine coins are those empirically given, historically developed national individualities, of which I have spoken in the former chapter, such individualities as the Jews for example. Race is not an original phenomenon, it is produced; physiologically by characteristic mixture of blood, followed by inbreeding; psychically by the influence which long-lasting historical and geographical conditions exercise upon that special, specific, physiological foundation. * If we wish then (and I think that must be the principal task of this chapter) to ask the Jew: Who art thou? we must first try to discover whether there was not a definite mixture of blood underlying the fact of this so clearly marked race, and then — if the answer is in the affirmative — trace how the peculiar soul, which thus was produced, differentiated itself more and more. Nowhere can we trace this process as we can in the Jew: for the whole national history of the Jews is like a continuous process of elimination; the character of the Jewish people ever becomes more individual, more outspoken, more simple; finally there remains in a way nothing of the whole being but the central skeleton; the slowly ripened fruit is robbed of its downy, fresh-coloured covering and of its juicy flesh, for these

    * Cf. p. 288. For the Semites, see also p. 361.
 
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might become spotted and worm-eaten; the stony kernel alone remains, shrivelled and dry, it is true, but defying time. However, as I have pointed out, this was not always the case. That which has been transferred from the sacred books of the Hebrews to the Christian religion does not come down from the senility of real Judaism, but partly from the youth of the much wider and more imaginative “Israelite“ people, partly from the mature years of the Judean, just after he had separated from Israel and when he had not yet proudly isolated himself from the other nations of the earth. The Jew whom we now know and see at work has become Jew gradually; not, however, as pseudo-history would have us believe, in the course of the Christian Middle Ages, but on his national soil, in the course of his independent history; the Jew moulded his own destiny; in Jerusalem stood the first Ghetto, the high wall which separated the orthodox and the pure-born from the Goyim, and prevented the latter from entering the real city. Neither Jacob, nor Solomon, nor Isaiah would recognise his posterity in Rabbi Akiba (the great scribe of the Talmud) much less in Baron Hirsch or the diamond king Barnato. *
    Let us therefore try by the shortest way, i.e., by the greatest possible simplification, to make plain the essential features of this peculiar national soul, as it gradually became more clearly and one-sidedly developed. This needs no great learning; for to the question: Who

    * For the Messianic period the dream of the later Jews (in contrast to the more free-thinking Israelites of former centuries) was to keep strangers out of Jerusalem altogether: read Joel iii. 2; and as this very late prophet — from the Hellenic period — says at the same time that God will always dwell in Jerusalem and only in Jerusalem, this command means the banishment of all peoples from God's presence. Such was the tolerance of the Jews! — It is only logical that most of the Rabbis excluded all non-Jews from a future world, while others endured them there as a despised throng (see Tractate Gittin, fol. 57a of the Babylonian Talmud, and Weber, System der altsynagogalen palästinischen Theologie, p. 372, from Laible); the comical thing is the assertion of the Jews to-day that their religion is the “religion of humanity!“

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art thou? the Jew himself, as I have said, and his ancestor the Israelite have given from the first the clearest of answers: then we have the mass of scientific work, from Ewald to Wellhausen and Ramsay, from De Wette and Reuss to Duhm and Cheyne; we have only to make out the sum total, as the practical man needs it, who, in the midst of the stormy bustle of the world, wishes to be able to base his judgment upon definite ascertained facts.
    I have only two more remarks to make, about method pure and simple. Having already, particularly in the chapter on the Revelation of Christ, discussed the Jew in detail and as this theme will probably come up again, I may here confine myself to the central question and refer the reader for much information on other points to what has been said or will be said elsewhere in my book. As regards the authors consulted, I could not help using, in addition to the Bible and some thoroughly competent modern Jewish writers, also some scholars who are not Jews; this was quite necessary for our knowledge of the prophets and the correct interpretation of historical events; but these scholars, even the most free-thinking of them, are all men who display great — perhaps exaggerated — admiration of the Jewish nation, at least in its earlier form, and who are all inclined to look upon this people as in some sense a “chosen“ one, so far as religion is concerned. I have, however, in the interests of the exposition entirely disregarded those writers who are avowedly Anti-Semitic.

SYSTEMATIC ARRANGEMENT OF THE INVESTIGATION

    There is one point — in my opinion a very important one — upon which the science of the last years has shed a good deal of light, namely, the anthropogeny of the

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Israelites, that is, the history of the physical development of this special national race. Of course here, as everywhere, there is a past which is closed to our knowledge, and beyond doubt much that daring archaeologists have felt and guessed with the feelers of their wonderfully trained instinct rather than seen with their own eyes, will yet be essentially corrected by newer investigations and discoveries. But that makes no difference to us here. The important thing — the great, solid achievement of history — is, first, the fact that the Israelite people represents the product of manifold mixing, and that, too, not between related races (as the ancient Greeks, or the English of to-day) but between types that morally and physically are absolutely distinct; and secondly, the fact that genuine Semitic blood (if this makeshift word is to have a sense at all) makes up, I suppose, hardly the half of this mixture. These are certain results of exact anatomical anthropology and of historical investigation, two branches of knowledge which here extend to each other a helping hand. A third point completes those just named; for it we are indebted to the critical endeavours of Biblical archaeology, which has at last thrown light upon the very complicated chronology of the books of the Old Testament, which belong to entirely different centuries and were put together quite arbitrarily, though not without a plan: these teach us that the real Jew is not to be identified with the Israelite in the wider sense of the word, that the house of Judah, even at the time of its settling in Palestine, was through blood-mixture and character distinct in several points from the house of Joseph (which embraced the other tribes): the Judean stood in fact in a kind of intellectual dependence upon the Josephite, and only at a relatively late time, after the violent separation from his brothers, did he begin to go his own way, the way that led to Judaism, and which very soon afterwards by the elevation

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of inbreeding to a religious principle isolated him from the whole world. The Jew can be called an Israelite in so far as he is an offshoot of that family; the Israelites, on the other hand, even those of the tribe of Judah, were not Jews; the Jew began to develop only after the more powerful tribes of the North had been destroyed by the Assyrians. In order to ascertain who the Jew is, we have therefore first of all to establish who the Israelite was and then to ask how the Israelite of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin became a Jew. And here we must be careful how we use our sources of information. For it was only after the Babylonian captivity that the specifically Jewish character was artificially brought into the Bible, by whole books being invented and ascribed to Moses and frequently by the introduction in verse after verse of interpolations and corrections which obliterated the wider views of old Israel and replaced them by the narrow Jerusalemic cult of Jehovah, giving the impression that this cult had existed from time immemorial and had been directly ordained by God. This has long prevented us from clearly understanding the gradual and perfectly human historical development of the Jewish national character. Now at last light has been thrown on this sphere too. Here also we can say: we hold in our hand a sure and lasting result of scientific investigation. Whether later investigations prove this or that sentence of the Hexateuch, which to-day is ascribed to the “jahvistic“ text, to belong to the “elohistic,“ or to have been inserted by the later “editor,“ whether a definite utterance was made by Isaiah himself or by the so-called second Isaiah — all these are certainly important questions, but their solution will never in any way alter the established fact that real Judaism, with the special Jehovah faith and the exclusive predominance of priestly law, is due to a demonstrable and very peculiar historical sequence of events and to

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the active intervention of certain far-sighted and clear-headed men.
    These three facts form the essential basis of all knowledge of the Jewish character; they must not remain the possession of a learned minority but must be incorporated in the consciousness of all educated people. I repeat them in preciser form:
    (1) The Israelite people has arisen from the crossing of quite different human types;
    (2) The Semitic element may well have been the stronger morally, but physically it contributed scarcely one-half to the composition of the new ethnological. individuality; it is therefore wrong shortly to call the Israelites “Semites,“ for the part played by the various human types in the formation of the Israelite race demands a quantitative and qualitative analysis;
    (3) The real Jew only developed in the course of centuries by gradual physical separation from the rest of the Israelite family, as also by progressive development of certain mental qualities and systematic starving of others; he is not the result of a normal national life, but in a way an artificial product, produced by a priestly caste, which forced, with the help of alien rulers, a priestly legislation and a priestly faith upon a people that did not want them.
    This furnishes us with the arrangement of the following discussion. I shall first of all consult history and anthropology, in order that we may learn from what races the new Israelite race (as the foundation of the Jewish) was descended; then the part played by these various human types must be analysed with regard to their physical and particularly their moral significance, and here our attention must be directed especially to their religious views: for the basis of Judaism is the faith which it teaches and we cannot judge the Jew correctly either in history or in our midst, if we are not quite clear about

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his religion; last of all I shall try to show how under the influence of remarkable historical events specific Judaism was established and stamped for ever with its peculiar and incomparable individuality. In this way we shall perhaps attain the object of this chapter, as I have defined it; for the Jewish race — though later at certain times it adopted not a few alien elements — remained on the whole purer than any other, and the Jewish nation has been from the first an essentially “ideal“ one, that is, one resting on faith in a definite national idea, not on the possession of a free State of its own, nor on communal life and work on the soil of that State: and this idea is the same to-day as it was two thousand years ago. Now race and ideal make up the personality of the human being; they answer the question: Who art thou?

ORIGIN OF THE ISRAELITE

    The Israelites * sprang from the crossing of three (perhaps even four) different human types: the Semitic, the Syrian (or, more correctly, Hittite) and the Indo-European. Possibly Turanian blood, or, as it is more frequently called in Germany, Sumero-Accadian blood, also flowed in the veins of the original ancestors.
    In order that the reader may clearly understand how this crossing took place, I must first give a brief historical sketch. It will freshen the memory in regard to familiar facts and help to make the history of the origin of the Jewish race comprehensible.
    Although the term “Semite,“ as applied to a pure autonomous race existing since the beginning of time,

    * And not they only but also their relatives, the Ammonites, the Moabites and the Edomites. These four make up the family of the “Hebrews,“ a name usually — but wrongly — applied to the Israelites alone or sometimes even to the Jews. See Wellhausen: Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte, 3rd ed. p. 7. To the same family belong likewise the Midianites and the Ishmaelites (Maspero: Histoire ancienne, 1895, ii. 65.)

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a special creation of God, so to speak, is certainly a mere abstraction, yet it is not so hazardous as the word “Aryan“: for there still exists to-day a people which is supposed to represent the pure, untarnished type of the primeval Semite, viz., the Bedouin of the Arabian desert. * Let us discard the hazy Semite and confine ourselves to the Bedouin of flesh and blood. It is supposed, and there are good grounds for the supposition, that some thousands of years before Christ, human beings, very closely resembling the Bedouins of to-day, migrated from Arabia in an almost unbroken stream to east and north into the land of the two rivers. Arabia is healthy, so its population increases; its soil is extremely poor, so a portion of its inhabitants must seek sustenance elsewhere. It seems that sometimes great migratory hordes composed of armed men had thus wandered forth; in such cases the surplus population had been cast out with irresistible force from their home, and left as conquerors upon the neighbouring countries; in other cases single families with their herds wandered peacefully over the indefinitely marked boundary from one grazing-place to another: if they did not at once turn off to the west, as many of them did, it might happen that they advanced as far as the Euphrates and so, following the stream, worked their way into the north. In historical times (under the Romans and subsequent to Mohammed) we have memorable instances of this summary manner of getting rid of superfluous population; † in the great civilised States between

    * This seems to be unanimously asserted by all writers. I have quoted Burckhardt in the course of this chapter. Here I shall only refer to a more modern, universally recognised authority — W. Robertson Smith. In his Religion of the Semites (1894, p. 8) he says: “It can be taken for granted that the Arabs of the desert have from time immemorial been an unmixed race.“ The same author points out that it is inadmissible to put the Babylonians, Phoenicians, &c., down as “Semites“: the only established fact is the relationship of the languages, and all these so-called “Semitic“ nations have sprung from a decided mixture of blood.
    † The last example was in the end of the nineteenth century, when the

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the Tigris and the Euphrates, Semitisation was also the work of great, though more peaceful, masses. Wherever, in fact, as in Babylonian Accadia, the Semites came into contact with a ripe, strong, self-reliant culture, they prevailed over it by fusion with the people — a process which in the case of the Babylonians we can now trace almost step by step. * The Beni Israel, on the other hand, emigrated as simple shepherds in small groups and had, in order to secure the safety of their cattle, to avoid all warlike operations, of which their small number would have rendered them incapable in any case. † The Bible narrative naturally gives us only the faint reflection of primeval oral traditions concerning the earliest wanderings of this Bedouin family; they are in addition much falsified by the misconceptions, theories and purposes of late-born scribes; still there is no reason to doubt the correctness of the general details given, all the less so as they contain nothing that is improbable. Everything is indeed much abbreviated: whole families have dwindled into a single person (a universal Semitic custom, “such as we find only in the case of the Semites,“ says Wellhausen); other pretended ancestors are simply the names of the places in the neighbourhood of which the Israelites had long stayed; movements which required several generations to accomplish are accredited to a

Arabs, who from time immemorial had migrated not only to north and east, but also to west and south, completely devastated a great part of Central Africa. Immense kingdoms, which in the year 1880 were densely populated and entirely under cultivation, have since become a desert. Stanley tells us of a single Arab chieftain who laid waste a region of two thousand square miles! (See the books of Stanley, Wissman, Hinde, &c., and the short summary in Ratzel: Völkerkunde, 2nd ed. ii. 430.) Cf. also p. 115, note.
    * See Hummel, Sayce, Budge and Maspero with regard to the lost race of the Accadians or Sumerians, the creators of the magnificent Babylonian culture, and their gradual Semitisation.
    † To complete and correct what follows, see the interesting and excellent book of Carl Steuernagel: Die Einwanderung der israelitischen Stämme in Kanaan. Berlin, 1901.

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single individual. This need of simplifying the complex, of pressing together what lies far apart, is just as natural to this people as it is to the poet who consciously creates. Thus, for example, the Bible represents Abraham, when already a married man, as emigrating from the district of Ur, on the lower course of the Euphrates, to northern Mesopotamia, at the foot of the Armenian mountain range, to that Paddan-Aram, of which the book of Genesis so often speaks and which lies beyond the Euphrates, between it and the tributary Khabur, in a straight line about 375 miles, but following the valley and the line of grazing-tracts at least 937 miles from Ur (cf. the map on p. 365); but more than that, this same Abraham is said to have moved later from Paddan-Aram towards the south-west, to the land of Canaan, from there to Egypt and finally (for I leave his shorter journeys out of account) from Egypt to Canaan again and all this accompanied by so numerous herds of cattle that he was forced, in order to find sufficient grazing land for them, to separate from his nearest relatives (Genesis xiii.). In spite of this compression the old Hebrew tradition contains all we require to know, particularly in places where the oldest tradition is before us in almost unfalsified form, and Biblical criticism already gives us full information with regard to it. * From this tradition we learn that the Bedouin family in question first of all wandered into the valley of the southern Euphrates and stayed a considerable time in the neighbourhood of the city of Ur. This city lay to the south of the great river and formed the farthest outpost of Chaldea. Here for the first time the nomads came into touch with civilisation. The shepherds could not indeed enter into this district itself, since magnificent cities and a highly developed agriculture required every inch of ground available, but here they

    * Cf.especially Gunkel's Handkommentar zur Genesis, 1901 (now published in a second improved edition).

364 JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
received imperishable impressions and instruction (to which I shall refer later); it was here too that they first became acquainted with such names as Abraham and Sarah, which their love of punning make them translate later into Hebrew (Genesis xvii. 1-6). They could not stay long in the vicinity of such high culture, or perhaps they were pushed forward by sons of the desert who were pressing on behind. And thus we see them moving ever farther and farther towards the north, * to the then sparsely populated Paddan-Aram, † where they must have stayed for a long time — at the very least for several centuries. When, however, the pasture of Mesopotamia was no longer sufficient for the increased number of human beings and cattle, a portion of them moved from that north-eastern corner of Syria, Paddan-Aram, to the south-western corner nearest Egypt, to Canaan, where they were hospitably received by a settled agricultural people and received permission to pasture their herds on the mountains. But Paddan-Aram lived long in the memory of the descendants of Abraham as their genuine home. Jehovah himself calls Paddan-Aram Abraham's “country“ (Genesis xii. 1), and the mythical Abraham still speaks, long after he has settled in Canaan, with longing of his distant “country“ and sends messengers to his “land“ (Genesis xxiv. 4 and 7), in order to get in touch again with the relatives who had remained

    * The direction was marked out for them; from Ur they could choose no other course; for the wilderness runs for several hundred miles parallel to the Euphrates, only a small stretch of watered land separating the two; but suddenly, exactly at the 35th degree, the wilderness ceases and the land of Syria opens up to west, south and north. Syria stretches southwards to Egypt, westwards to the Mediterranean Sea, northwards to the Taurus, in the east it is bounded to-day by the Euphrates, but according to former conditions and ideas it embraced Mesopotamia, which lies beyond the middle Euphrates, and here the children of Abraham had their home for centuries.
    † At a later time Mesopotamia was for long an artificially watered and consequently richly-cultivated region; in former times, however, it was, as it is to-day, a poor land, where only nomadic shepherds could find a living (cf. Maspero: Histoire ancienne, i. 563.)

365 JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
there. And thus the sons of Abraham, although already settled in Canaan, remained half Mesopotamians during all the long years which have been compressed and represented under the pseudo-mythical names Isaac

SKETCH-MAP

and Jacob; it is a perpetual coming and going; the southern branch feeling that it belongs to one principal northern stem. * But the moment came when they had to move farther towards the south; in dry years the pastures of Canaan were no longer sufficient, and perhaps

    * This period, during which “Father Jacob developed into the people of Israel,“ Wellhausen describes as an interval of several centuries' duration (Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte, p. 11).
 
366 JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
too the Canaanites felt the burden of their increasing numbers; so at the time when the friendly half-Semitic Hyksos were in power, they wandered away to the land of Goshen, belonging to Egypt. It was this long stay in Egypt * that first broke off all connection between them and their kinsmen, so that, when the Israelites once more returned to Palestine, they still recognised the Moabites, Edomites and the other Hebrews as distant blood-relations, but felt for them no longer love but hatred and contempt, a state of feeling which received a refreshingly artless expression in the genealogies of the Bible, according to which some of these races owe their origin to incest, while others are descended from harlots.
    We can only speak of Israelites in the historical sense of the word from the moment when, as a not very numerous, but yet firmly united people, they forcibly took possession of Canaan on their flight from Egypt, and founded there a State that experienced many different but mostly very sad strokes of fortune, but which, in spite of the fact that it lay (like the rest of Syria) between hammer and anvil, that is, between warring “great Powers,“ continued to stand as an independent kingdom for almost seven hundred years. We must emphasise the fact that these Israelites were not very numerous; it is important from an historical as well as from an anthropological point of view; for to this circumstance we must ascribe the fact that the former and really domiciled inhabitants of Canaan (a mixture of

    * According to Genesis xv. four hundred years, which is naturally not to be taken literally but simply as an expression for an almost unthinkably long time. The number forty was among the Hebrews the expression for an indefinitely large number, four hundred a fortiori. Renan is of opinion that the stay of the Israelites in Egypt did not last more than one hundred years and that only the Josephites (probably only very distant relations with a strong mixture of Egyptian blood) were settled there for very long (Histoire du peuple d'Israël, 13e éd. i. pp. 112, 141, 142).

367 JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Hittites and Indo-European Amorites) were never destroyed and always formed and even still form the stock of the population. * The mingling of races, of which I shall immediately speak, and which had begun as soon as the Israelites entered Syrian territory, continued in the autonomous State of Israel, that is, in Palestine, and came to a sudden stop only after the Babylonian exile, and that in Judea alone, by the introduction of a new law. The fact that the Jews at a later time separated as an ethnological unity from the rest of the Israelites is purely and simply due to this, that the inhabitants of Judea by energetic enactments at last put a stop to the continual fusion (see Ezra ix. and x.).
    The reader who would like further information on this matter may supplement the knowledge he has derived from this hasty sketch by consulting Wellhausen's concise Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte, Stade's Geschichte des Volkes Israel, Renan's detailed and yet lightly written Histoire du peuple d'Israël, and Maspero's comprehensive and luminous Histoire ancienne des peuples de l'Orient classique; † in the meantime my sketch may suffice to show the origin of the Israelites in broad outline and to impress upon the memory in the simplest form the seemingly complicated facts of the case. I shall now attempt to show how the original, purely Semitic

    * Sayce: The Races of the Old Testament, 2nd ed. pp.76, 113. “The Roman drove the Jew out of the land that his fathers had conquered; the Jews, on the other hand, had never succeeded in driving out the genuine possessors of Canaan.... The Jew held Jerusalem and Hebron, as well as the surrounding cities and villages, otherwise (even in Judea itself) he formed only a fraction of the population. As soon as the Jew was removed, for example, at the time of the Babylonian exile or after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the original population, freed from the pressure, increased ... and the Jewish colonies in Palestine are to-day just as much foreigners as the German colonies there.“
    † I name only the latest, most important and most reliable books, written by real scholars but accessible to the unlearned. Of the older ones Duncker's Geschichte des Altertums also remains unsurpassed in many respects for the history of Israel.

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emigrant became by crossing first of all a Hebrew and then an Israelite.

THE GENUINE SEMITE

    The preceding historical sketch shows us a Bedouin family as the starting-point. * Let us first of all establish the one fact: this pure Semite, the original emigrant from the deserts of Arabia, is and remains the impelling power, the principle of life, the soul of the new ethnical unity of the Israelites which arose out of manifold crossing. No matter how much, in consequence not only of their destiny but above all of crossing with absolutely different human types, his descendants might differ in course of time morally and physically from the original Bedouin, yet in many points, good as well as bad, he remained their spiritus rector. Of the two or three souls which had their home in the breast of the later Israelites, this was the most obtrusive and long-lived. However, we can only congratulate this Bedouin family on their crossing, for any change in the manner of living is said to have a very bad effect on the high qualities of the genuine and purely Semitic nomads. The learned Sayce, one of the greatest advocates of the Jews at the present day, writes: “If the Bedouin of the desert chooses a settled life, he, as a rule, unites in himself all the vices of the nomad and of the

    * As a matter of fact the current opinion is that the Semite and even that purest Bedouin type are the most absolute mongrels imaginable, the product of a cross between negro and white man! Gobineau preached this doctrine fifty years ago, and was laughed at; to-day his opinion is the orthodox one; Ranke defines it thus in his Völkerkunde (ii. 399): “The Semites belong to the mulatto class, a transition stage between black and white.“ But I think that caution is here necessary. What is taking place before our eyes is not warranted to strengthen the belief that from mulattoes there could spring a firm, unchangeable type that would survive the storms of time: quicksand is not more fickle and changeable than this half-caste; here, then, in defiance of all experience we should have to suppose that the unthinkable, the unexampled had taken place in the case of the Bedouins. (Cf., too, August Ford's remarks, 1900).

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peasant. Lazy, deceitful, cruel, greedy, cowardly, he is rightly regarded by all nations as the scum of mankind.“ * But long before they settled down, this Bedouin family, the Beni Israel, had fortunately escaped such a cruel fate by manifold crossing with non-Semites.
    We saw that the original Bedouin family first stayed for a considerable time on the Southern Euphrates in the neighbourhood of the city of Ur: did crossing take place at this stage? It has been asserted that it did. And since fairly genuine Sumero-Accadians presumably formed the basis of the population of the Babylonian Empire at that time — for the Semites had merely annexed this State and its high civilisation without performing either the mental work or the manual † — it is assumed that the stock of Abraham was quickened by Sumero-Accadian blood. The occurrence of such strange names as Abraham (this was the name of the first legendary founder and king of Ur among the Sumerians) has given weight to this view, as also the fragments of half-understood Turanian ‡ wisdom and mythology, of which the first chapters of Genesis are composed. But such assumptions are purely hypothetical and hence, to begin with, hardly merit serious consideration. Not even probability speaks for this view. The poor shepherds had hardly touched the hem of civilisation, what people then would have entered into family relations with them? And as regards the adoption of such meagre cosmogonic conceptions as we find in the Bible, intercourse with other Hebrews is sufficient to explain that; for the mythology, the science and the culture of the Sumerians (in which we still share, thanks

    * The Races of the Old Testament, p. 106.
    † See especially Sayce: Assyria, p. 24 ff., and Social Life among the Assyrians and Babylonians; also Winckler: Die Völker Vorderasiens (1900), p. 8.
    ‡ The word “Turanian“ has escaped my pen, because many authors regard the Sumero-Accadians as Turanians. See Hommel: Gesch. Babyloniens und Assyriens, pp. 125, 244 f.

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to the idea of creation and of the fall of man, the division of the week and the year, the foundation of geometry, and the invention of writing) had spread far and wide; Egypt was their pupil, * and the Semite, incapable of such deep intuition as the Egyptian, had long ago, before the Beni Israel began their wanderings, adopted as much of Egyptian culture as seemed advantageous and practical and had, as active mediators, spread it wherever they went. The crossing with Sumero-Accadians is therefore just as improbable as it is unproved.
    We are, however, on sure ground, as soon as the emigrants move to north and west. For now they are in the heart of Syria and they never again leave it (except at the time of their short stay on the borders of Egypt). Here, in Syria, our purely Semitic Bedouin family has been changed by crossing, here its members became Hebrews by mingling with an absolutely different type, the Syrian — as so many a Bedouin colony before and after them. At a later period part of the family was forced to emigrate from Mesopotamia, which lay in the north-east corner, to Canaan, in the extreme south-west, where similar race-moulding influences, to which quite new ones were also added, asserted themselves in a still more definite way. It was only here, in Canaan, that the Abrahamide Hebrews changed gradually into genuine Israelites. To this very Canaan the Israelites, now increased in numbers, returned as conquerors, after their sojourn in Egypt; and here they received, in addition to alien blood, a new culture, which transformed them from nomads into settled farmers and city-dwellers.
    We can, therefore, without making any mistake, distinguish two anthropogenetic spheres of influence, which successively came into prominence, a more general one, provided by the entrance into Syria and in particular

    * See Hommel: Der babylonische Ursprung der ägyptischen Kultur (1892).

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by the long stay in Mesopotamia, in regard to which we have no very definite historical dates, but which we may and must deduce from the known ethnological facts; in the second place, a more particular Canaanite influence, which we can prove from the detailed testimony of the Bible. Let us discuss first the more general sphere of influence and then the more particular one.

THE SYRIAN

    If we turn up a text-book of geography or an encyclopaedia, we shall find it stated that the present population of Syria is “to the greatest extent Semitic.“ This is false; just as false as the statement we find in the same sources, that the Armenians are “Aryans.“ Here again we see the widespread confusion of language and race; we should, on the same footing, logically have to maintain that the negroes of the United States were Anglo-Saxons. Scientific anthropology has in recent years, by thorough investigation of an enormous amount of material, irrefutably proved that from the most remote times to which prehistoric discoveries reach back, the main population of Syria has been formed from a type which is absolutely different, physically and morally, from the Semitic, as it is from everything which we are wont to comprise under the term “Aryan“; and this applies not to the population of Syria alone, but also to that of all Asia Minor and the extensive region which we call Armenia at the present day. There are races which have an inborn tendency to restless wandering (e.g., the Bedouin, the Laplander, &c.), others which possess a rare power of expansion (e.g., the Teutonic races); but this inhabitant of Syria and Asia Minor seems to have been distinguished and still to be distinguished by his obstinate attachment to his native soil and the invincible power of his physical constancy. His original home was the

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trysting-place of nations, he himself almost always being vanquished, and the great battles of the world being fought over him — yet he survived them all and his blood asserted itself to such an extent that the Syrian Semite of to-day should be called Semite in language rather than in race, and the so-called Aryan Armenian, of Phrygian origin, has perhaps not 10 per cent. of Indo-European blood in his veins. On the other hand, the so-called “Syrian“ of to-day, the Jew and the Armenian can hardly be distinguished from one another, and this is easily explained, since the primal race which unites all three makes them daily more and more like each other. We may most appropriately apply a quotation from Schiller's Braut von Messina to this Syrian stem:

Die fremden Eroberer kommen und gehen;
Wir gehorchen, aber wir bleiben stehen.

Now the people which enters history at a later time under the name of Israelites was subject to this powerful ethnical influence for many centuries, at least for over ten centuries. That is what I called the general sphere of influence by which our genuine Semitic Bedouin family became a group of the so-called “Hebrews.“ Hebrews are, in fact, a cross between Semite and Syrian. It must not be thought that the nomad shepherds immediately crossed with the