Antisemitism - Its History and Causes E-Book

Bernard Lazare

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 412

Beschreibung

This book deals with the origin and development of anti-Judaism and incidentally refers much of the history of Israel to this sentiment. One great cause of antisemitism the author finds in Jewish commercialism. Other causes exist in the exclusiveness, the persistent patriotism and pride of Israel. Jewish influences, in spite of race prejudices have been powerful in the councils of nations. Even Napoleon lent an ear to them, and suspended during one year judicial decisions in behalf of the Jewish usurers of the Rhine provinces. The modern aspects of antisemitism are carefully considered by the author. The instinctive, the legal, the Christian, the Christian-socialist, the metaphysical, as well as the ethnological and national phases are successively taken up. In one chapter the causes of antisemitism are set down, and there and in subsequent chapters make excellent reading. In conclusion the author forecasts the ruin of antisemitism because it carries in itself the germ of destruction. In preparing the way for Socialism and Communism it is laboring at the elimination not only of the economic cause, but also of the religious and ethnic causes to which it owes its own growth.

Leseprobe

Antisemitism

Its History and Causes

BERNARD LAZARE

Antisemitism, B. Lazare

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783988680198

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

PREFACE.1

CHAPTER I. GENERAL CAUSES OF ANTISEMITISM.2

CHAPTER II. ANTI-JUDAISM IN ANTIQUITY.12

CHAPTER III. ANTI-JUDAISM IN CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITY FROM THE FOUNDATION OF THE CHURCH OF CONSTANTINE.21

CHAPTER IV. ANTISEMITISM FROM CONSTANTINE TO THE EIGHTH CENTURY.32

CHAPTER V. ANTI-JUDAISM FROM THE EIGHTH CENTURY TO THE REFORMATION.47

CHAPTER VI. ANTI-JUDAISM FROM THE TIME OF THE REFORMATION TILL THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.63

CHAPTER VII. ANTI-JUDAIC LITERATURE AND THE PREJUDICES.75

CHAPTER VIII. MODERN LEGAL ANTI-JUDAISM.89

CHAPTER IX. MODERN ANTISEMITISM AND ITS LITERATURE.102

CHAPTER X. THE RACE.112

CHAPTER XI. NATIONALISM AND ANTISEMITISM.124

CHAPTER XII. THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT IN JUDAISM.138

CHAPTER XIII. THE JEW AS A FACTOR IN THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIETY.—POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS CAUSES OF ANTISEMITISM.149

CHAPTER XIV. THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF ANTISEMITISM.165

CHAPTER XV. THE FATE OF ANTISEMITISM.178

Preface.

Portions of this book, which at various times appeared in the newspapers and periodicals, received the honor of being noticed and discussed. This has induced me to write the few lines that follow. I have been charged by some with being an antisemite, by others, with exhibiting too great bias in defending the Jews, and my writings have been judged either from the antisemitic or the philosemitic standpoint. This is wrong, for I am neither an antisemite nor a philosemite; it has been my intention to write neither an apology nor a diatribe, but an impartial study in history and sociology.

I do not approve of antisemitism; it is a narrow, one-sided view, still I have sought to account for it. It was not born without cause, I have searched for its causes. Whether I have succeeded in discovering them, it is for the reader to decide.

An opinion as general as antisemitism, which has flourished in all countries and in all ages, before and after the Christian era, at Alexandria, Rome, and Antiochia, in Arabia, and in Persia, in mediaeval and in modern Europe, in a word, in all parts of the world wherever there are or have been Jews,—such an opinion, it has seemed to me, could not spring from a mere whim or fancy, but must be the effect of deep and serious causes.

It has, therefore, been my aim to draw a full-size picture of antisemitism, of its history and causes, to follow its successive changes and transformations. Such a study might easily fill volumes. I have, therefore, been obliged to limit its scope, confining myself to broad outlines and omitting details. I hope to take up, at no distant day, some of its aspects which could only be hinted at here, and I shall then endeavor to show what has been the intellectual, moral, economic and revolutionary role of the Jew in the world.

THE AUTHOR.

CHAPTER I. GENERAL CAUSES OF ANTISEMITISM.

To make the history of antisemitism complete, omitting none of the manifestations of this sentiment and following its divers phases and modifications, it is necessary to go into the history of Israel since its dispersion, or, more properly speaking, since the beginning of its expansion beyond the boundaries of Palestine.

Wherever the Jews settled after ceasing to be a nation ready to defend its liberty and independence, one observes the development of antisemitism, or rather anti-Judaism; for antisemitism is an ill-chosen word, which has its raison d’etre only in our day, when it is sought to broaden this strife between the Jew and the Christians by supplying it with a philosophy and a metaphysical, rather than a material reason. If this hostility, this repugnance had been shown towards the Jews at one time or in one country only, it would be easy to account for the local causes of this sentiment. But this race has been the object of hatred with all the nations amidst whom it ever settled. Inasmuch as the enemies of the Jews belonged to divers races; as they dwelled far apart from one another, were ruled by different laws and governed by opposite principles; as they had not the same customs and differed in spirit from one another, so that they could not possibly judge alike of any subject, it must needs be that the general causes of antisemitism have always resided in Israel itself, and not in those who antagonized it.

This does not mean that justice was always on the side of Israel’s persecutors, or that they did not indulge in all the extremes born of hatred; it is merely asserted that the Jews were themselves, in part, at least, the cause of their own ills.

Considering the unanimity of antisemitic manifestations, it can hardly be admitted, as had too willingly been done, that they were merely due to a religious war, and one must not view the strife against the Jews as a struggle of polytheism against monotheism, or that of the Trinity against Jehovah. The polytheistic, as well as the Christian nations combatted not the doctrine of one sole God, but the Jew.

Which virtues or which vices have earned for the Jew this universal enmity? Why was he ill-treated and hated alike and in turn by the Alexandrians and the Romans, by the Persians and the Arabs, by the Turks and the Christian nations? Because, everywhere up to our own days the Jew was an unsociable being.

Why was he unsociable? Because he was exclusive, and his exclusiveness was both political and religious, or rather he held fast to his political and religious cult, to his law.

All through history we see the conquered peoples submit to the laws of the conqueror, though they may guard their own faith and beliefs. It was easy for them to do so, for with them a line was drawn between their religious teachings which had come from the gods, and their civil laws which emanated from legislation and could be modified according to circumstances, without inviting upon the reformers the theological anathema or execration; what had been done by man could be undone by man. Thus, if the conquered rose up against the conquerors, it was through patriotism alone, and they were actuated by no other motive but the desire to regain their land and their liberty. Aside from these national uprisings, they seldom took exception to being subjected to the general laws; if they protested, it was against particular enactments which placed them into a position of inferiority towards the dominant people; in the history of the Roman conquests we see the conquered bow to Rome when she extended to them the laws which governed the empire.

Not so with the Jewish people. In fact, as was observed by Spinoza, “the laws revealed by God to Moses were nothing but laws for the special government of the Hebrews.” Moses, the prophet and legislator, assigned the same authority for his judicial and governmental enactments, as for his religious precepts, i.e., revelation. Not only did Yahweh say to the Jews, “Ye shall believe in the one God and ye shall worship no idols,” he also prescribed for them rules of hygiene and morality; not only did he designate the territory where sacrifices were to be offered, he also determined the manner in which that territory was to be governed. Hach of the given laws, whether agrarian, civil, prophylactic, theological, or moral, proceeded from the same authority, so that all these codes formed a whole, a rigorous system of which naught could be taken away for fear of sacrilege.

In reality, the Jew lived under the rule of a lord, Yahweh, who could neither be conquered, nor even assailed, and he knew but one thing, the law, i.e., the collection of rules and decrees which it had once pleased Yahweh to give to Moses,—a law divine and excellent, made to lead its followers to eternal bliss; a perfect law which the Jewish people alone had received.

With such an idea of his Torah, the Jew could not accept the laws of strange nations; nor could he think of submitting to them; he could not abandon the divine laws, eternal, good and just, to follow human laws, necessarily imperfect and subject to decay. If only he had been allowed to make one part of this Torah; to put on one side all civil ordinances, on the other all religious decrees! But had they not all a sacred character, and did not the welfare of the Jewish people depend upon their full observance?

These civil laws which attached to the people, not to municipalities, the Jews would not abandon upon settling among other nations, for though these laws no longer had any justification beyond Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Israel, they were none the less religious obligations binding upon all the Jews, who, by an ancient covenant with the Deity, had undertaken to fulfill them.

Thus, wherever colonies were founded by the Jews, to whatever land they were deported, they insisted, not only upon permission to follow their religion, but also upon exemption from the customs of the people amidst whom they were to live, and the privileges to govern themselves by their own laws.

At Rome, at Alexandria, at Antioch, in Cyrenaica they were allowed full freedom in the matter. They were not required to appear in court on Saturday; they were even permitted to have their own special tribunals, and were not amenable to the laws of the empire; when the distribution of grains occurred on a Saturday their share was reserved for them until the next day; they could be decurions, being at the same time exempt from all practices contrary to their religion; they enjoyed complete self-government, as in Alexandria; they had their own chiefs, their own senate, their ethnarch, and were not subject to the general municipal authorities.

Everywhere they wanted to remain Jews, and everywhere they were granted the privilege of establishing a State within the State. By virtue of these privileges and exemptions, and immunity from taxes, they would soon rise above the general condition of the citizens of the municipalities where they resided; they had better opportunities for trade and accumulation of wealth, whereby they excited jealousy and hatred.

Thus, Israel’s attachment to its law was one of the first causes of its unpopularity, whether because it derived from that law benefits and advantages which were apt to excite envy, or because it prided itself upon the excellence of its Thora and considered itself above and beyond other peoples.

Still had the Israelites adhered to pure Mosaism, they could, doubtless, at some time in their history, have so modified that Mosaism as to retain none but the religious and metaphysical precepts; possibly, if they had no other sacred book but the Bible they might have merged in the nascent church, which enlisted its first followers among the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Jewish proselytes. One thing prevented that fusion and upheld the existence of the Hebrews among the nations; it was the growth of the Talmud, the authority and rule of the doctors who taught a pretended tradition. The policy of the doctors to which we shall return further made of the Jews sullen beings, unsociable and haughty, of whom Spinoza, who knew them well, could say: “It is not at all surprising that after being scattered for so many years they have preserved their identity without a government of their own, for, by their external rites, contrary to those of other nations, as well as by the sign of circumcision, they have isolated themselves from all other nations, even to the extent of drawing upon themselves the hate of all mankind.”

Man’s aim on earth, said the doctors, is the knowledge and observance of the law, and one cannot thoroughly observe it without denying allegiance to all but the true law. The Jew who followed these precepts isolated himself from the rest of mankind; he retrenched himself behind the fences which had been erected around the Torah by Ezra and the first scribes, later by the Pharisees and the Talmudists, the successors of Ezra, reformers of primitive Mosaism and enemies or the prophets. He isolated himself, not merely by declining to submit to the customs which bound together the inhabitants of the countries where he settled, but also by shunning all intercourse with the inhabitants themselves. To his unsociability the Jew added exclusiveness.

With the law, yet without Israel to put it into practice, the world could not exist, God would turn it back into nothing; nor will the world know happiness until it be brought under the universal domination of that law, i.e., under the domination of the Jews. Thus the Jewish people is chosen by God as the trustee of His will; it is the only people with whom the Deity has made a covenant; it is the choice of the Lord. At the time when the serpent tempted Eve, says the Talmud, he corrupted her with his venom. Israel, on receiving the revelation from Sinai, delivered itself from the evil; the rest of mankind could not recover. Thus, if they have each its guardian and its protecting constellation, Israel is placed under the very eye of Jehovah; it is the Eternal’s favored son who has the sole right to his love, to his good will, to his special protection, other. men are placed beneath the Hebrews; it is by mere mercy that they are entitled to divine munificence, since the souls of the Jews alone are descended from the first man. The wealth which has come to the nations, in truth belongs to Israel, and we hear Jesus Himself reply to the Greek woman: “It is not meet to take the children’s bread and so cast it unto the dogs.” This faith in their predestination, in their election, developed among the Jews an immense pride. It led them to view the Gentiles with contempt, often with hate, when patriotic considerations supervened to religious feeling.

When Jewish nationality was in peril, the Pharisees, under John Hyrcanus, declared impure the soil of strange peoples, as well as all intercourse among Jews and Greeks. Later, the Shamaites advocated at a synod complete separation of the Jews from the heathens, and drafted a set of injunctions, called The Eighteen Things, which ultimately prevailed over the opposition of the Hillelites. As a result, Jewish unsociability begins to engage the attention of the councils of Antiochus Sidetes; exception is taken to “their persistence in shutting themselves up amidst their own kind and avoiding all intercourse with pagans, and to their eagerness to make that intercourse more and more difficult, if not impossible.” And the high priest Menelaus accuses the law, before Antiochus Epiphanes, “of teaching hatred of the human race, of prohibiting to sit down at the table of strangers and to show good-will towards them.”

If these prescriptions had lost their authority when the cause which had produced and, in a way, justified them, had disappeared, the evil would not have been great. Yet we see them reappear in the Talmud and receive a new sanction from the authority of the doctors. After the controversy between the Sadducees and the Pharisees had terminated in the victory of the latter, these injunctions became part of the law, they were taught with the law and helped to develop and exaggerate the exclusiveness of the Jews.

Another fear, that of contamination, separated the Jews from the world and made their isolation still more rigorous. The Pharisees held views of extreme rigor on the subject of contamination; with them the injunctions and prescriptions of the Bible were insufficient to preserve Man from sin. As the sacrificial vases were contaminated by the least impure contact, they came to regard themselves contaminated by contact with strangers. Of this fear were born innumerable rules affecting every-day life: rules relating to clothing, dwelling, nourishment, all of which were promulgated with a view to save the Israelites from contamination and sacrilege; all these rules might properly be observed in an independent state or city, but could not possibly be enforced in foreign lands, for their strict observance would require the Jews to flee the society of Gentiles, and thus to live isolated, hostile to their environment.

The Pharisees and the Rabbinites went still farther. Not satisfied with preserving the body, they also sought to save the soul. Experience had shown them that Hellenic and Roman importations imperiled what they deemed their faith. The names of the Hellenistic high priests, Jason, Menelaus, &c., reminded the Rabbinites of the times when the genius of Greece, winning over one portion of Israel, came very near conquering it. They knew that the Sadducean party, friendly to the Greeks, had paved the way for Christianity, as much as the Alexandrians and all those who maintained that “none but the legal provisions, clearly enunciated in the Mosaic law, were binding, whereas all other rules growing from local traditions or subsequently issued, could lay no claim to rigorous observance.

It was under Greek influence that the books and oracles originated which prepared the minds for Messiah. The Hellenistic Jews, Philo and Aristobulus, the pseudo-Phocylides and the pseudo-Longinus, authors of the Sibylline oracles and of the pseudo-Orphics, all these successors of the prophets who continued their work, led mankind to Christ. And it may be said that true Mosaism, purified and enlarged by Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, broadened and generalized by the Judaeo-Hellenists, would have brought Israel to Christianity, but for Ezraism, Pharisaism and Talmudism, which held the mass of the Jews bound to strict observances and narrow ritual practices.

To guard God’s people, to keep it safe from evil influences, the doctors exalted their law above all things. They declared that no study but that of the law alone became an Israelite, and as a whole lifetime was hardly sufficient to learn and penetrate all the subtleties and all the casuistry of that law, they prohibited the study of ¢ profane sciences and foreign languages. "Those among us who learn several languages are not held in esteem,” said Josephus; contempt alone was soon thought insufficient, they were excommunicated. Nor did these expulsions satisfy the Rabbinites. Though deprived of Plato, had not the Jew still the Bible, could he not listen to the voice of the prophets? As the book could not be proscribed, it was belittled and made subordinate to the Talmud; the doctors declared: “The law is water, the Mishna is wine.” And the reading of the Bible was considered less beneficial, less conducive to salvation than the reading of the Mishna.

However, the Rabbinites could not kill Jewish curiosity with one blow; it required centuries. It was as late as the fourteenth century, after Ibn Ezra, Rabbi Bechai, Maimonides, Bedares, Joseph Caspi, Levi Ben Gerson, Moses of Narbonne, and many others, were gone, all true sons of Philo and the Alexandrians, who strove to verify Judaism by foreign philosophy; after Asher Ben Yechiel had induced the assembly of the rabbis at Barcelona to excommunicate those who would study profane sciences; after Rabbi Shalem, of Montpellier had complained to the Dominicans of the Moreh Nebukhim, and this book, the highest expression of the ideas of Maimonides, had been burned;—it was only after all this that the rabbis ultimately triumphed.

Their end was attained. They had cut off Israel from the community of nations; they had made of it a sullen recluse, a rebel against all laws, foreign to all feeling fraternity, closed to all beautiful, noble and generous ideas; they had made of it a small and miserable nation, soured by isolation, brutalized by a narrow education, demoralized and corrupted by an unjustifiable pride.

With this transformation of the Jewish spirit and the victory of sectarian doctors, coincides the beginning of official persecution. Until that epoch there had only been outbursts of local hatred, but no systematic vexations. With the triumph of the Rabbinites, the ghettos come into being. The expulsions and massacres commence. The Jews want to live apart,—a line is drawn against them. They detest the spirit of the nations amidst whom they live,—the nations chase them. They burn the Moreh,—their Talmud is burned and they themselves are burned with it.

It would seem that no further agency was needed to render the separation of the Jews from the rest of mankind complete and to make them an object of horror and reprobation. Still another cause must be added to those just mentioned: the indomitable and tenacious patriotism of Israel.

Certainly, every people was attached to the land of its birth. Conquered, beaten by the conquerors, driven into exile or forced into slavery, they remained true to the sweet memories of their plundered city or the country they had lost. Still none other knew the patriotic enthusiasm of the Jews. The Greek, whose city was destroyed, could elsewhere build anew the hearth upon which his ancestors bestowed their blessings; the Roman who went into exile took along with him his penates; Athens or Rome had nothing of the mystic fatherland like Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was the guardian of the Tabernacle which received the divine word; it was the city of the only Temple, the only place in the world where God could efficiently be worshipped and sacrifices offered to Him. It was only much later, at a very late day, that prayer houses were erected in other towns of Juda, or Greece, or Italy; still in those houses they confined themselves to the reading of the law and theological discussion; the pomp of Jehovah was known nowhere but at Jerusalem, the chosen sanctuary. When a temple was built at Alexandria, it was considered heretical; indeed, the ceremonies which were celebrated there had no sense, for they ought not to be performed anywhere but in a true temple; so St. Chrysostom, after the dispersion of the Jews and the destruction of their city, was justified in saying: “The Jews offer sacrifices in all parts of the earth except there where the sacrifice is permitted and valid, i. e., at Jerusalem.”

With the Hebrews the air of Palestine is the best; it is sufficient to make a man learned; its holiness is such that whoever resides beyond its limits is as if he had no God? Therefore one must not live elsewhere, and the Talmud threatens with excommunication those who would eat the passover lamb in a foreign land.

All Jews of the period of dispersion sent to Jerusalem the didrachm tax for the maintenance of the temple; once in their lives they came to the holy city, as later the Mohammedans came to Mecca; after their death they were carried to Palestine, and numerous craft anchored at the coast, loaded with small coffins which were thence forwarded on camel’s back.

It was because in Jerusalem only, in the land given by God to their ancestors, their bodies would be resurrected. There those who had believed in Yahweh, who had observed his law and obeyed his word, would awake at the sound of the last trumpet and appear before their Lord. Nowhere but there could they rise at the appointed hour; every other land but that washed by the yellow Jordan was a vile land, fouled by idolatry, deprived of God.

When the fatherland was dead, when adversity was sweeping Israel all over the world, after the Temple had perished in flames, and when the heathens occupied the holiest ground, mourning over bygone days became everlasting in the soul of the Jew. It was over; they could no longer hope to see on the day of mercy the black buck carry away their sins into the desert, neither could they see the lamb killed for the passover night, or bring their offerings to the altar; and, deprived of Jerusalem during life, they would not be brought there after death.

God ought not to abandon his children, reasoned the pious; and naive legends came to comfort the exiles. Near the tombs of the Jews who die in exile, they said, Jehovah opens long caverns through which the corpses roll as far as Palestine, whereas the pagan who dies there, near the consecrated hills, is removed from the chosen land, for he is unworthy 0: remaining there where the resurrection will take place.

Still that did not satisfy them. They did not resign themselves to visiting Jerusalem merely as pitiable pilgrims, weeping before the ruined walls, many of them so maddened by grief as to let themselves be trampled upon by horses’ hoofs, embracing the ground while moaning; they could not believe that God, that the blessed city had abandoned them; with Judah Levita they exclaimed: “Zion, hast thou forgotten thy unfortunate children who groan in slavery?”

They expected that their Lord would by his mighty right hand raise the fallen walls; they hoped that a prophet, a chosen one, would bring them back to the promised land; and how many times, in the course of ages, have they left their homes, their fortunes,—they who are reproached of being too much attached to worldly goods,—in order to follow a false Messiah who undertook to lead them and promised them the return so much longed for! Thousands were attracted by Serenus, Moses of Crete, Alroi, and massacred in the expectation of the happy day.

With the Talmudists these sentiments of popular enthusiasm, this mystic heroism underwent a transformation. The doctors taught the restoration of the Jewish empire; in order that Jerusalem might be born anew from its ruins, they wanted to preserve the people of Israel pure, to prevent them from mixing with other people, to inculcate on them the idea that they were everywhere in exile, amidst enemies that held them captive. They said to their disciples: “Do not cultivate strange lands, soon you will cultivate your own; do not attach yourself to any land, for thus will you be unfaithful to the memory of your native land; do not submit to any king, for you have no master but the Lord of the Holy Land, Jehovah; do not scatter amongst the nations, you will forfeit your salvation and you will not see the light of the day of resurrection; remain such as you left your house; the hour will come and you will see again the hills of your ancestors, and those hills will then be the centre of the world, which will be subject to your power.”

Thus all those complex sentiments which had in olden days served to build up the hegemony of Israel, to maintain its character as a nation, to develop a high and powerful originality, all those virtues and vices which gave it the spirit and countenance necessary to preserve a nation; which enabled it to attain greatness and later to defend its independence with desperate valor worthy of admiration; all that, after the Jews had ceased to be a State, combined to shut them up in. the most complete, the most absolute isolation.

This isolation has been their strength, in the opinion of some apologists. If they mean to say that owing to it the Jews have survived, so much is true; if the conditions are considered, however, under which the Jews have preserved their identity as a people, it is obvious that this isolation has been their weakness, and that they have survived up to modern times, as a race of pariahs, persecuted, often martyred. Moreover, it is not only to their seclusion that they owe this surprising persistence. Their extraordinary solidarity, due to their misfortunes, and mutual support count for very much; and even in our day, when they take part in public life in some countries, having abandoned their sectarian dogmas, this very solidarity prevents them from dissolving and disappearing as a people, by conferring upon them certain benefits to which they are by no means indifferent.

This solicitude for worldly goods, which is a marked feature of the Hebrew character, has not been without effect upon the conduct of the Jews, especially since they left Palestine; by directing them along certain avenues, to the exclusion of all others, this feature of their character has drawn upon them the most violent animosities. The soul of the Jew is twofold: it is both mystic and positive. His mysticism has come down from the theophanies of the desert to the metaphysical dreaming of the kabbala; his positivism, or rather his rationalism, manifests itself in the sentences of the Ecclesiastes as well as the legislative enactments of the rabbis and the dogmatic controversies of the theologians. Still if mysticism leads to a Philo or Spinoza, rationalism leads to the usurer, the weigher of gold; it creates the greedy trader. It is true that at times these two states of the mind are found in just opposition, and the Israelite, as it occurred in the Middle Ages, can split his life into two parts: one devoted to meditation on the Absolute, the other to business.

Of the Jewish love for gold, there can be no question here. Though it may have grown so abnormal with this race as to have become well-nigh the only motive of their actions, though it may have engendered a violent and exasperated antisemitism, yet it cannot be classed among the general causes of antisemitism. It was, on the contrary, the effect of those very causes, and we shall see that it is partly the exclusiveness, the persistent patriotism and pride of Israel, that has driven it to become the hated usurer of the whole world.

In fact, all the causes we have just enumerated, if they be general, are not the only ones. I have called them general, because they depend upon one constant element: the Jew. Still the Jew is only one of the factors of antisemitism; he provokes it by his presence, but he is not the only one that determines it. The nations among whom the Israelites have lived, their manners, their customs, their religion, the philosophy even of the nations in whose midst Israel has developed, determine the particular character of antisemitism, which changes with time and place.

We shall trace these modifications and variations of antisemitism through the course of ages down to our epoch; and we shall examine whether, in some countries at least, the general causes I have attempted to deduce are still operating, or whether the reasons for modern antisemitism must not be sought elsewhere.

CHAPTER II. ANTI-JUDAISM IN ANTIQUITY.

Modern antisemites who are in quest of sires for themselves, unhesitatingly trace the first demonstrations against the Jews back to the days of ancient Egypt. For that purpose they are particularly pleased to refer to Genesis, xliii, 32, where it is said: “The Egyptians might not eat bread with the Hebrews; for that it is an abomination unto the Egyptians.” They also rely upon a few verses of the Exodus, among them the following: “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we; come on, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply.” (Exodus, i, 9, 10.)

It is certain that the sons of Jacob who came to the land of Goshen under the Shepherd Pharaoh Aphobis, were treated by the Egyptians with the same contempt as their brothers, the Hyksos, referred to in hieroglyphic texts as lepers, called also “plague” and “pest” in some inscriptions. They arrived at that very epoch when a very strong national sentiment manifested itself against the Asiatic invaders, hated for their cruelty; this sentiment soon led to the war of independence, which resulted in the final victory of Ahmos I., and the enslavement of the Hebrews. However, unless one is a violent anti-Jew, it is impossible to perceive in those remote disturbances anything beyond a mere incident in a struggle between conquerors and conquered.

There is no antisemitism until the Jews, having abandoned their native land, settle as immigrants in foreign countries and come into contact with natives or older settlers, whose customs, race and religion are different from those of the Hebrews.

Accordingly, the history of Haman and Mordecai may be taken as the beginning of antisemitism, and the antisemites have not failed so to do. This view is, perhaps, more correct. Though the historical reality of the book of Esther can scarcely be relied upon, still it is worthy of note that its author puts into the mouth of Haman some of the complaints, which, at a later period, are uttered by Tacitus and other Latin writers. “And Haman said unto the king, Ahasuerus: there is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from all people; neither keep they the king’s laws.” (Esther, iii, 8.)

The pamphleteers of the Middle Ages, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of our own time, say nothing else; and if the history of Haman is apocryphal, which is highly probable, still it cannot be denied that the author of the Book of Esther has very ably brought out some of the causes, which for many centuries exposed the Jews to the hatred of nations.

Yet we must go to the period of Jewish expansion abroad, to be enabled to observe with certainty that hostility against them, which by a peculiar misuse of terms has in our days been called antisemitism.

Some traditions refer the entrance of the Jews into the ancient world to the epoch of the first captivity. While Nabu-Kudur-Ussur led away to Babylonia a portion of the Jewish people, many of the Israelites, to escape from the conqueror, fled to Egypt, to Tripoli, and reached the Greek colonies. Tradition brings back to the same period the arrival of the Jews in China and India.

Historically, however, the wanderings of the Jews across the globe commence in the fourth century before our era. About 331 B. C. Alexander transported some Jews to Alexandria, Ptolemy sent some of them to Cyrenaica, and about the same time Seleucus led some of them to Antioch. When Jesus was born Jewish colonies flourished everywhere, and it was among them that Christianity recruited its first adherents. There were Jews in Egypt, in Phoenicia, in Syria, in Coele-Syria, in Pamphylia, in Cilicia, and as far as Bithynia. In Europe they had settled in Thessalia, Boeotia, Macedonia, Attica and Peloponnesus. They were to be found in the Great Isles, on Euboea, on Crete, on Cyprus, and at Rome. “It is not easy to find a place on earth,” says Strabo, “which has not received that race.”

Why were the Jews hated in all those countries, in all those cities? Because they never entered any city as citizens, but always as a privileged class. Though having left Palestine, they wanted above all to remain Jews, and their native country was still Jerusalem, i.e., the only city where God might be worshipped and sacrifices offered in His Temple. They formed everywhere republics, as it were, united with Judea and Jerusalem, and from every place they remitted monies to the high priest in payment of a special tax for the maintenance of the Temple—the didrachm.

Moreover, they separated themselves from other inhabitants by their rites and their customs; they considered the soil of foreign nations impure and sought to constitute themselves in every city into a sort of a sacred territory. They lived apart, in special quarters, secluded among themselves, isolated, governing themselves by virtue of privileges which were jealously guarded by them, and excited the envy of their neighbors. They intermarried amongst themselves and entertained no strangers, for fear of pollution. The mystery with which they surrounded themselves excited curiosity as well as aversion. Their rites appeared strange and gave occasion for ridicule; being unknown, they were misrepresented and slandered.

At Alexandria they were quite numerous. According to Philo, Alexandria was divided into five wards. Two were inhabited by the Jews. The privileges accorded to them by Caesar were engraved on a column and guarded by them as a precious treasure. They had their own Senate with exclusive jurisdiction in Jewish affairs, and they were judged by an ethnarch. They were ship-owners, traders, farmers, most of them wealthy; the sumptuousness of their monuments and synagogues bore witness to it. The Ptolemies made them farmers of the revenues; this was one of the causes of popular hatred against them. Besides, they had a monopoly of navigation on the Nile, of the grain trade and of provisioning Alexandria, and they extended their trade to all the provinces along the Mediterranean coast. They accumulated great fortunes; this gave rise to the invidia aurit Judaici. The growing resentment against these foreign cornerers, constituting a nation within a nation, led to popular disturbances; the Jews were frequently assaulted, and Germanicu, among others, had great trouble protecting them.

The Egyptians took revenge upon them by deriding their religious customs, their abhorrence of pork. They once paraded in the city a fool, Carabas by name, adorned with a papyrus diadem, decked in a royal gown, and they saluted him as king of the Jews. Under Philadelphus, one of the first Ptolemies, Manetho, the high priest of the Temple at Heliopolis, lent his authority to the popular hatred; he considered the Jews descendants of the Hyksos usurpers, and said that that leprous tribe had been expelled for sacrilege and impiousness. Those fables were repeated by Cheremon and Lysimachus. It was not only popular animosity, however that persecuted the Jews; they had also against them the Stoics and the Sophists. The Jews, by their proselytism, interfered with the Stoics; there was a rivalry for influence between them, and, notwithstanding their common belief in divine unity, there was opposition between them. The Stoics charged the Jews with irreligiousness, judging by the sayings of Posidonius and Apollonius Molo; they had a very scant knowledge of the Jewish religion. The Jews, they said, refuse to worship the gods; they do not consent to bow even before the divinity of the emperor. They have in their sanctuary the head of an ass and render homage to it; they are cannibals; every year they fatten a man and sacrifice him in a grove, after which they divide among themselves his flesh and swear on it to hate strangers. “The Jews, says Apollonius Molo, are enemies of all mankind; they have invented nothing useful, and they are brutal.” To this Posidonius adds: “They are the worst of all men.”

Not less than the Stoics did the Sophists detest the Jews. But the causes of their hatred were not religious, but, I should say, rather literary. From Ptolemy Philadelphus, until the middle of the third century, the Alexandrian Jews, with the intent of sustaining and strengthening their propaganda, gave themselves to forging all texts which were capable of lending support to their cause. The verses of Aeschylus, of Sophocles, of Euripides, the pretended oracles of Orpheus, preserved in Aristobulus and the Stromata of Clement of Alexandria were thus made to glorify the one God and the Sabbath. Historians were falsified or credited with the authorship of books they had never written. It is thus that a History of the Jews was published under the name of Hecataeus of Abdera. The most important of these inventions was the Sibylline oracles, a fabrication of the Alexandrian Jews, which prophesied the future advent of the reign of the one God. They found imitators, however, for since the Sibyl had begun to speak, in the second century before Christ, the first Christians also made her speak. The Jews would appropriate to themselves even the Greek literature and philosophy. In a commentary on the Pentateuch, which has been preserved for us by Eusebius, Aristobulus attempted to show that Plato and Aristotle had found their metaphysical and ethical ideas in an old Greek translation of the Pentateuch. The Greeks were greatly incensed at such treatment of their literature and philosophy, and out of revenge they circulated the slanderous stories of Manetho, adapting them to those of the Bible, to the great fury of the Jews; thus the confusion of languages was identified with the myth of Zeus robbing the animals of their common language. The Sophists, wounded by the conduct of the Jews, would speak against them in their teaching. One among them, Apion, wrote a Treatise against the Jews. This Apion was a peculiar individual, a liar and babbler, to a degree uncommon even among rhetors, and full of vanity, which earned him from Tiberius the nickname of “Cymbalum mundi.” His stories were famous; he claimed to have called out, by means of magic herbs, the shade of Homer, says Pliny:

Apion repeated in his Treatise against the Jews the stories of Manetho, which had been previously restated by Chaeremon and Lysimachus, and supplemented them by quoting from Posidonius and Apollonius Molo. According to him, Moses was “nothing but a seducer and wizard,” and his laws contained “nothing but what is bad and dangerous.”

As to the Sabbath, the name was derived, he said, from a disease, a sort of an ulcer, with which the Jews were afflicted, and which the Egyptians called sabbatosim, i.e., disease of the groins.

Philo and Josephus undertook the defense of the Jews and fought the Sophists and Apion. In Contra Apionem, Josephus is very severe on his adversary. “Apion,” says he, “is as stupid as an ass and as imprudent as a dog, which is one of the gods of his nation.” Philo, on the other hand, prefers to attack the Sophists in general, and if he mentions Apion at all, in his Legatio ad Caium, it is merely because Apion was sent to Rome to prefer charges against the Jews before Caligula.

In his Treatise on Agriculture he draws a very black picture of the Sophists, and insinuates that Moses has compared them to hogs. Nevertheless, in his other writings, he advises his co-religionists not to irritate them, so as to avoid all provocation to disturbances, but to await patiently their chastisement, which will come on the day the Jewish Empire, the empire of salvation, will be established on earth.

Philo’s injunctions were not heeded; the exasperation on both sides often led to violent riots and massacres of Jews; the latter, however, valiantly defended themselves.

At Rome the Jews had a powerful and wealthy colony as early as the first year of the Christian era. If Valerius Maximus may be trusted, they first came to the city about 139 B. C., during the consulate of Popilius Loenus and Cajus Calpwinius.

Certain it is that, in 160 B. C., an embassy from Judas Maccabee arrived in Rome to negotiate an alliance. with the Republic against the Syrians; other embassies followed, in 143 and in 139.

The settlement of the Jews at Rome probably dates from that time. Under Pompey they came in numbers. Caesar availed himself of their support during the civil wars and lavished favors upon them, and as early as 58 B. C., they had quite a settlement. ‘Turbulent and formidable, they were an important factor in politics; he even granted them exemption from military service. Under Augustus the distribution of free bread was postponed for them whenever it fell due on Saturday. The Emperor gave them permission to collect the didrachm which was sent to Palestine, and he ordered the sacrifice of one or two lambs to be offered in his behalf at the Temple of Jerusalem for all time to come. When Tiberius became emperor, there were at Rome 20,000 Jews, who were organized in colleges and sodalitates.

Except the Jews of prominent families, like the Herods and the Agrippas, who mixed in public life, the Jewish masses lived in retirement. The majority resided in the dirtiest and busiest quarter of the city, the Transtiberinus. They were to be seen near the Via Portuensis, the Emporium and the great Circus, in the Campus Martius, and in Suburra, beyond the Capenian Gate, on the banks of the Egerian Creek, and near the sacred grove. They were engaged in retail trade and the sale of second-hand goods; those at the Capenian Gate were fortune tellers. The Jew of the Ghetto is already there.

At Rome the same causes were at work as at Alexandria. There, also, the excessive privileges of the Jews, the wealth of some of them, as well as their unheard-of luxury and ostentation, excited popular hatred. This resentment was aggravated by deeper and more important reasons of a religious character; it may even be maintained, strange as it may seem, that the motive of Roman anti-Judaism was religious.

The Roman religion resembled in nothing the admirable and profoundly symbolic polytheism of the Greeks. It was ritual rather than mythical; it consisted of customs closely connected with the doings of everyday life, as well as with all sorts of public acts. Rome was one body with its gods; its greatness was bound, as it were, with the rigorous observance of the practices of their national religion; its glory depended upon the piety of its citizens, and it seems that the Roman must have had, like the Jew, that notion of a covenant between the deities and himself, which was to be scrupulously lived up to by both parties. Somehow or other, the Roman was always in the presence of his gods; he left his hearth, where they abode, only to find them again in the Forum, on the public highways, in the Senate, even in the fields, where they kept watch over the power of Rome. At all times and on all occasions sacrifices were offered; the warriors and the diplomats were guided by auguries, and all authority, civil as well as military, partook of the priesthood, for the officer could not perform his duties unless he knew the rites and observances of the cult.

It was this cult that for centuries sustained the Republic, and its commandments were faithfully obeyed; when they were changed, when the traditions became adulterated, when the rules were violated, Rome saw its glory fade, and its agony commenced.

Thus the Roman religion preserved itself for a long time without change. True, Rome was familiar with foreign cults; she saw the worshippers of Isis and Osiris, those of the great Mother and those of Sabazius; still, though admitting them into her Pantheon, she gave them no place in her national religion. All these Orientals were tolerated; the citizens were allowed to practice their superstitions, provided they were harmless; but when Rome perceived that a new faith was subversive of the Roman spirit, she was pitiless, as in the case of the conspiracy of the Bacchantes, or the expulsion of Egyptian priests. Rome guarded herself against the foreign spirit; she feared affiliation with religious societies; she was afraid even of Greek philosophers, and the Senate, in 161, upon the report of the praetor Marcus Pomponius, barred them from entering the city.

From this, one may understand the feeling of the Romans toward the Jews. Greeks, Asiatics, Egyptians, Germans, or Gauls, while bringing with them their rites and beliefs, made no objection to bowing before Mars of the Palatine, or even before Jupiter Latiaris. They conformed, within certain limits, to the rules of the city, to its religious customs; at all events, they showed no opposition. Not so the Jews. They brought with them a religion as rigid, as ritualistic, as intolerant, as the Roman religion. Their worship of Yahweh excluded all other worship; thus they shocked their fellow citizens by refusing to swear to the eagles, whereas the eagle was the deity of the legion. As their religious faith was blended with the observance of certain social laws, the adoption of this faith was pregnant with a change of the social order. Therefore, the Romans were worried by its establishment in their midst, for the Jews were eager to make proselytes.

The proselytic spirit of the Jews is attested by all the historians, and Philo justly says: “Our customs win over and convert the barbarians and the Hellenes, the continent and the isles, the Orient and the Occident, Europe and Asia, the whole world, from end to end.”

The ancient nations, at their decline, were deeply attracted by Judaism, by its dogma of divine unity, by its morals; many of the poor people were attracted by the privileges accorded to the Jews. These proselytes were divided into two great classes: those who accepted the circumcision and thereby entered into the Jewish community, thus becoming strangers to their families, and those who, without complying with the requisites for admission to the community, nevertheless gathered around it.

These conversions, generally by suasion and at times by force, as when the rich Jews converted their slaves, were bound to create a reaction. It was this chief cause, together with the secondary causes previously referred to, viz., the wealth of the Jews, their political influence, their privileged condition, that led to anti-Judaic demonstrations at Rome. The majority of Roman and Greek writers from Cicero on bear witness to this state of mind.

Cicero, who was a disciple of Apollonius Molo, inherited his teacher’s prejudices; he found the Jews in his way: they were with the popular party against the party of the Senate, to which he belonged. He feared them, and we can see from some passages of Pro Flacco, that he hardly dared to speak of them, so numerous were they around him and in the public place. Nevertheless, one day he burst forth. “Their barbarous superstitions must be fought,” says he; he accuses them of being a nation “given to suspicion and slander,” and proceeds by saying that they “show contempt for the splendor of the Roman power.” ‘They were to be feared, according to him— those men who, detaching themselves from Rome, turned their eyes towards the far away city, that Jerusalem, and supported it by denaries which they drew from the Republic. Moreover, he reproached them for winning citizens over to the Sabbatarian rites.

It is this last charge that recurs most frequently in the writings of the polemists, the poets and the historians. The Jewish religion, which charmed those who had penetrated its essence, was repulsive to others who had a scant knowledge of it and regarded it as a heap of absurd and dismal rites. The Jews are nothing but a superstitious nation, says Persius; their Sabbath is a lugubrious day, adds Ovid; they worship the hog and the ass, affirms Petronius’.

Tacitus, well informed as he is, repeats, with regard to Judaism, the fables of Manetho and Posidonius. The Jews, says he, are descended from lepers, they honor the head of an ass, they have infamous rites. He further specifies his charges, which, one would say, are those of modern French Nationalists: “All those who embrace their faith,” says he, “undergo circumcision, and the first instruction they receive is to despise the gods, to forswear their country, to forget father, mother and children.” And he warms up by saying: “The Jews consider as profane all that is held sacred with us.” Suetonius and Juvenal repeat the same thing; the principal charge reads: “They have a particular cult and particular laws; they despise the Roman laws.” This is likewise the complaint of Pliny: “They despise the gods. ”

Seneca has the same grudge, still with the philosopher other motives supervene: There was a rivalry between Seneca, the Stoic, and the Jews, the same as there had been between the Stoics and the Jews at Alexandria. He quarrelled less with their contempt of the gods than with their proselytism which thwarted the spread of the doctrine of the Stoics. He thus gives expression to his displeasure: “The Romans,” says he regretfully, “have adopted the Sabbath.” And, further speaking of the Jews, he says in conclusion: “This abominable nation has succeeded in spreading its usages throughout the whole world; the conquered have given their laws to the conquerors.” Seneca’s view was in accord with the attitude of both the Republic and the Empire, by which measures were adopted from time to time to check Jewish proselytism. Under Tiberius,in the year 22, a senatus-consult was directed against the Egyptian and Judaic superstitions and four thousand Jews, says Tacitus, were deported to Sardinia. Caligula subjected them to vexatious persecution; he encouraged the doings of Flaccus in Egypt, and Flaccus, sustained by the Emperor, robbed the Jews of the privileges granted to them by Cesar; he took away from them their synagogue and directed that they might be treated as inhabitants of a captured city. Domitian imposed a special tax upon Jews and those who led a Judaic life, hoping by the levy of the tax to stop conversions, and Antoninus Pius prohibited the Jews from circumcising others than their sons. Anti-Judaism manifested itself not only at Rome and Alexandria, but wherever there were Jews: at Antioch, where great massacres occurred; in Lybia, where, under Vespasian, the governor Catullus stirred up the populace against them; in Ionia, where, under Augustus, the Greek cities, by an understanding among themselves, forced the Jews either to renounce their faith or to bear the entire burden of public expenditures.