Esther Turns a Trick
The sort of resentment and hostility which the Jews generate among their Gentile hosts by behavior based on the deep-seated belief that the world is their oyster is illustrated well by the Old Testament tale of Esther. Set in the fifth century B.C., it suggests that the Persians of that era had already had their fill of Jewish arrogance and pushiness and wanted badly to get rid of their Semitic guests.
The Jewish response to Persian anti-Semitism was to slip a Jewish prostitute into the palace of the Persian king, concealing her Jewishness until she had used her bedroom skills to win the king's favor and turn him against his own nobles. The ensuing slaughter of 75,000 Persian noblemen described in the Book of Esther is probably a figment of the Jewish imagination, but it is nevertheless still celebrated with glee and gloating, more than 2,400 years after the event, by Jews around the world in their annual Purim festival.
Treacherous Friendship Unfortunately, later massacres instigated or perpetrated by the Jews against their non-Jewish hosts in response to anti-Semitism were all too real. The great English historian Edward Gibbon describes some of these which took place in the first and second centuries A.D.:
From the reign of Nero (54-68) to that of Antoninus Pius (138-161) the Jews discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections. Humanity is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed in the cities of Egypt, of Cyprus, and of Cyrene, where they dwelt in treacherous friendship with the unsuspecting natives, and we are tempted to applaud the severe retaliation which was exercised by the arms of the legions against a race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government but of human kind.
... In Cyrene they massacred 220, 000 Greeks; in Cyprus 240,000, in Egypt a very great multitude. Many of these unhappy victims were sawn asunder, according to a precedent to which David had given the sanction of his example. The victorious Jews devoured the flesh, licked up the blood, and twisted the entrails like a girdle round their bodies. (History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter XVI) Laundered History Actually, very little of humanity is shocked at the recital of these Jewish atrocities today, for the simple reason that the carefully laundered "approved" textbooks used in the schools omit any mention of them. Instead, humanity is treated to one television "documentary" after another, from "Holocaust" to "Masada," in which the blameless, longsuffering Jews are "persecuted" by their enemies.
When one looks at all of Jewish history from the time of the Egyptian sojourn to the present, the outstanding feature which emerges is its endless series of cycles, each consisting of a period of increasingly arrogant and blatant depredations by the Jews against their hosts, followed by a period of reaction, in which either the exasperated Gentiles slaughter, drive out, and otherwise "persecute" the Jewish offenders; or the Jews manage to get the drop on their hosts instead and arrange a slaughter of Gentiles; or both.
Dual Existence
Indeed, this feature of Jewish history is not only outstanding, it is essential: without it the Jews would have ceased to exist by Roman times, at the latest. For the Jews are a unique people, the only race which has deliberately chosen a dual mode of national existence, dispersed among the Gentile nations from which they suck their sustenance and at the same time fiercely loyal to their center in Zion, even during the long periods of their history when Zion was only an idea insteadof a sovereign political entity.
Without the diaspora the concrete Zion -- i.e., the state of Israel -- could not exist; and without the abstract Zion -- i.e., the concept of the Jews as a united and exclusive whole, divinely ordained to own and rule theworld -- the diaspora could not exist.
Power of the Diaspora
Israel would not survive a year, were it not for the flow of "reparations" payments from West Germany, the billions of dollars in economic and military aid from the United States, and, most of all, the threat of armed retaliation by the United States against any Arab nation which actually makes a serious effort to dispossess the Jews of their stolen Arab territory.
It is certainly not love for the Jews on the part of the masses of Germans and Americans which maintains this support for Israel. It is instead a combination of two things:
first, the enormous financial and political power of the Jews of the United States, the latter exercised primarily through the dominant Jewish position in the controlled news media; and second, the influence of a relatively small but vocal and well-organized minority of Jew-worshipping Christian fundamentalists, who accept at face value the Jews' claim to be the divinely ordained rulers of the world.
Barrier of Hatred
And the diaspora would survive little more than a generation, were it not for the Jewish consciousness, the concept of Zion. It is this alone which keeps the dispersed Jews from becoming assimilated by their Gentile hosts, for the Jewish consciousness inevitably raises a barrier of mutual hatred between Jews and Gentiles.
How can a Jew of the diaspora, who is taught from the cradle that he belongs to a "chosen race," do other than despise the goyim around him, who are not even considered human beingsby his religious teachers? How can he do other than hate them for holding back him and his fellow Jews from the world dominion which he believes belongs rightfully to the Jewish nation? And how can Gentiles fail to sense this contempt and hatred and respond in kind?
Action and Reaction
In recapitulation, the dynamic of the interaction between Jew and Gentile is this: as soon as the Jews have infiltrated a Gentile land in sufficient numbers so that their organized efforts can be effective, they begin exploiting and manipulating. The more wealth and power they accumulate, the more brazenly and forcefully they attempt to accumulate still more, justifying themselves all the while with the reminder that Yahweh has promised it all to them anyway.
Any tendency to empathize or identify with their hosts is kept in check by a nonstop recitation of all the past wrongs the Gentile world has done them. Even before anti-Semitism exists in reality, it exists in the Jewish imagination: the Gentiles hate them, they believe, and so they must stick together for self-protection.
Sure enough, before the Jews' solidarity has a chance to erode appreciably, the Gentiles are hating them. The Gentiles react to the Jews mildly at first and then with more and more resentment and energy as the Jewish depredations continue. It is this action-reaction combination, the hatred and counter-hatred, which keeps the Jews from being absorbed into the host nation.
Exaggerated Losses
Finally there is an explosion, and the most nimble Jews flee to begin the cycle over again in another Gentile land, while the slow ones remain to suffer the pent-up fury of their outraged hosts. The memory of this explosion is assiduously cultivated by the surviving Jews and becomes one more grudge they bear against the Gentile world. They still remember and celebrate the explosions of the Egyptians, the Persians, the Romans, and two dozen other Gentile peoples over the last 35 centuries or so, exaggerating their losses and embellishing the details every time in order to make the memories more poignant, while the Gentiles in each case forget within a generation or two.
These periodic outbursts against the Jews have actually served them doubly well: not only have they been invaluable in maintaining the Jewish consciousness and preventing assimilation, but they have also proved marvelously eugenic by regularly weeding out from the Jewish stock the least fit individuals. Jewish leaders, it should be noted, are thoroughly aware of the details of this dynamic. They fully recognize the necessity of maintaining the barrier of hatred between their own people and the rest of the world, just as they understand the value of an occasional explosion to freshen the hatred when assimilation becomes troublesome.
The blame for the decay of the Roman world has often been placed on the Jews.
Indeed, some especially brazen Jewish writers have proudly accepted that blame and have even boasted that Christianity was invented deliberately by zealous Jews to further subvert and weaken the Roman Empire.
The truth of the matter, however, is that, so long as Roman society was healthy and the Roman spirit strong and sound, both were immune to Jewish malice and Jewish scheming. It was only after Rome was no longer Roman that the Jews were able to work their evil there.
After the old virtues had already been largely abandoned and the blood of the Romans polluted by that of a dozen races, the Jews, of course, did everything to hasten the process of dissolution. They swarmed over decaying Rome like maggots in a putrefying corpse, and from there they began their infiltration of the rest of Europe.
Tribal Connections
Every Roman army from the time of Julius Caesar was followed by a contingent of Jewish slave dealers, ready to purchase prisoners of war for gold on the spot after each successful battle or siege. No sooner were Gaul or Britain or the German lands in the west pacified by Rome's legions than Jews appeared in the conquered region to set up shop and get an early edge on any potential competitors for control of the local commerce.
The great advantage that a Jew had in this regard was that he was never merely an individual entrepreneur: he was an agent of a tribe of entrepreneurs. A Roman might depend on family connections or political alliances to further his commercial enterprises, but he was nearly always outclassed in this regard by a Jewish competitor, whose connections extended literally to every other Jew in the Empire, and beyond.
Inevitable Friction
Thus, the Jews established themselves in every part of Europe over which Rome claimed dominion, and, wherever they could, they remained after that dominion ended.
Except in the Mediterranean provinces and in Rome itself, however, their numbers remained relatively small at first.
Despising farming and all other manual activity, they engaged almost exclusively in trade and finance. Thus, their presence was confined entirely to the towns, and even a relatively large commercial center of 10 or 15 thousand inhabitants might have no more than a few dozen Jews.
Even their small numbers did not prevent nearly continuous friction between them and their Gentile neighbors, however. As Europe's population, commerce, industry, and wealth grew during the Middle Ages, so did the numbers of Jews everywhere and with them the inevitable friction.
Wholesale Expulsions
Everyone has heard of the wholesale expulsions of Jews which occurred in virtually every country of Europe during the Middle Ages: from England in 1290, from Germany in 1298, from France in 1306, from Lithuania in 1395, from Austria in 1421, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497, and so on. What many do not realize, however, is that the conflict between Jew and Gentile was not confined to these major upheavals on a national scale. Hardly a year passed in which the Jews were not massacred or expelled from some town or province by an exasperated citizenry. The national expulsions merely climaxed in each case a rising popular discontent punctuated by numerous local disturbances.
Much has beenmade of the religious bigotry of the medieval Church in explaining the unpopularity of the Jews. Indeed, religion often did flavor Gentile reactions against the Jews.
When the Jews were driven out of Clermont (modern Clermont-Ferrand, known to its Roman founders as Augustonemetum) in Frankish Gaul in 576 by an enraged mob, for example, the proximate excuse was that a Jew, in order to show his contempt for Christians, had thrown rancid oil on an Easter parade as it wound through the Jewish quarter of the town.
Predictable Outrage Likewise, on a separate occasion, when the Jews of a Frankish town were massacred by the Gentile populace, the reason given by the chroniclers was that, after a Jewish criminal had been handed over by the Gentile authorities to the Jewish community for punishment, in accord with the custom of the times, the Jews arrogantly overreached themselves by reenacting the crucifixion of Jesus: they scourged the man and put a crown of thorns on his head before nailing him to a cross. The Gentile Christians were predictably outraged and reacted accordingly.
Sometimes clerics played a role in inciting such actions against the Jews, but far more often the people acted spontaneously, and religion was generally only a cover for other motives, which stemmed much more from the economic activity of the Jews than from their contempt for Christianity.
Bred to Business The Jews were more successful at commerce than the Gentiles were, partly because the former collaborated with one another in virtually every transaction, while the latter usually did not. Thus, a Jewish wholesaler always had a lower price for a Jewish retailer than for a Gentile retailer, while a Gentile wholesaler merely tried to get the best price he could from all comers, Jew or Gentile.
In addition to the benefits of racial solidarity, the Jews were probably better businessmen, on the average, than their Gentile competitors. The Jews had been bred to a mercantile life for a hundred generations. The result was that all the business -- and all the money-- of any nation with a Jewish minority tended to gravitate into the hands of the Jews.
The more capital they accumulated, the greater was their advantage, and the easier it was to accumulate still more.
Instability of Capitalism Of course, the Jews were willing to share their wealth with their Gentile hosts -- for a price. They would gladly lend money to a peasant, in return for a share of his next crop or a lien on his land; and to a prince, in return for a portion of the spoils of his next war.
Eventually, half the citizens of the nation were hopelessly in debt to the Jews.
Such a state of affairs was inherently unstable, and periodic explosions were inevitable. Time after time princes and people alike found that the best way out of an increasingly tight financial squeeze was a general burning of the Jews'. books of account --and of the Jews too, if they did not get out of the country fast enough. The antipathy which already existed between Jews and Gentiles because of the Jews' general demeanor made this solution especially attractive, as did the religious intolerance of the times.
Fatal Fascination One would think that one episode of this sort in any country would be enough for the Jews, and that they would thenceforth stay away from a place where they were so manifestly unwelcome. But they could not. Any country in Europe temporarily without a Jewish minority to soak up the country's money like a sponge had an irresistible attraction for them.
Before the embers of the last general Jew-burning were cool, other Jews were quietly sneaking in to take the place of the ones who had been slaughtered.
The great 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol embodied this extraordinary Jewish peculiarity in a character in his Taras Bulba, the story of a Cossack chieftain. The character, Yankel, is one of a group of Jewish, merchants and their dependents who have attached themselves to the Cossacks' camp. One day the Cossacks rid themselves of the Jewish pests by throwing them all in the Dnieper and drowning them -- all except Yankel, who hides beneath a wagon.
While the massacre is taking place, Yankel trembles in fear of being discovered. As soon as it is over and things have quieted down again, he creeps from his hiding place. The reader expects that Yankel will then waste no time putting as much distance between himself and the Cossacks as possible. But, no; Yankel instead rushes to set up a stall and begin selling gunpowder and trinkets to the men who have just drowned his kinsmen. His eagerness to resume business seems doubled by the fact that now he has no competitors.
Advice and Bribes The Jews were often able to ameliorate their situations greatly during the Middle Ages by establishing special relationships with Gentile rulers. They served as financial advisers and tax collectors for the princes of the realm and of the Church, always ready with rich bribes to secure the protection of their patrons when the hard-pressed common folk began agitating against them. They made themselves so useful to some rulers, in fact, that they were favored above Christian subjects in the laws and decrees of those rulers.
The Frankish emperor Charlemagne was one who was notorious for the favors and privileges he bestowed on the Jews, and his successor followed his example. It is especially instructive to read what the noted Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz has to say on this matter in his encyclopedic work, History of the Jews (v. III, ch.6 of the 1894 English edition, issued by the Jewish Publication Societyof America):
Power Over the Christians The successor of Charles the Great, the generous but weak Louis [ruled 814-840], in spite of his religious inclination, which obtained for him the name of "the Pious," showed extraordinary favor to the Jews. He took them under his special protection.... They enjoyed the right of settling in any part of the kingdom. In spite of numerous decrees to the contrary, they were not only allowed to employ Christian workmen, but they might even import slaves.
The clergy were forbidden to baptize the slaves of Jews in order to enable them to regain their freedom. Out of regard for them the market day was changed from the Sabbath day to Sunday. The Jews were freed from the punishment of scourging [which was inflicted on Gentiles], and had the jurisdiction over Jewish offenders in their own hands.... They were allowed to carry on their trades without let or hindrance, but they had to pay a tax to the [emperor's] treasury, and to render account periodically of their income. Jews also farmed the taxes, and obtained through this privilege a certain power over the Christians, although this was distinctly contrary to the provisions of canonic law.
An officer (Magister Judaeorum) was appointed whose duty it was to watch over the rights of the Jews, and not permit them to be encroached upon.... One is almost tempted to believe that the remarkable favor shown to the Jews by the pious emperor was mainly due to commercial motives. The international commerce which Charlemagne had established, and which the counselors of Louis wished to develop, was mostly in the hands of Jews, because they could more easily enter into commercial relations with their brethren in other lands as they were not hampered by military service. [The Jews and the clergy were exempted from military duty.] Admired for Cleverness Graetz goes on to boast that Jews were feted in Louis's court, were admired for their cleverness and wealth by all his courtiers, and, in general, exerted more influence on the styles and mores of European society than in any other era before the l7th century, when the Puritans introduced a new period of Jew-worship.
The medieval Church was at least as much at fault as the royalty in showing favor to the Jews. There were exceptions to the rule, however: several Church leaders heroically stood up for the common people and condemned the Jews for exploiting them. One of these was Agobard, a ninth-century bishop of Lyons. In Graetz's words:
A Good Christian The female slave of a respected Jew of Lyons ran away from her master, and to regain her freedom she allowed herself to be baptized (about 827). The Jews, who saw in this act an encroachment on their chartered rights and on their property, demanded the surrender of the runaway slave. On Agobard's refusal to grant this, the Jews turned to Eberard, the Magister Judaeorum, who threatened to punish the bishop if he persisted in his refusal to restore her to her master.
This was the beginning of a contest between Agobard and the Jews which lasted for several years.... Agobard delivered anti-Jewish speeches, and urged his parishioners to break off all intercourse with the Jews, to do no business with them, and to decline entering their service. Fortunately, their patrons at court were active on their behalf, and did their best to frustrate the designs of the fanatic priest. As soon as they were informed of his action they obtained letters of protection (indiculi) from the emperor....
A letter was likewise sent to the bishop commanding him, under a severe penalty, to discontinue his anti-Jewish sermons. Another letter was sent to the governor of the Lyons district, bidding him render the Jews all assistance (828). Agobard took no notice of these letters.... The Jew-hater Agobard did not rest in his efforts against the Jews.
Consistent Overreachers Agobard lost his struggle with Louis, but his efforts had a long-range effect on the conscience of many of his fellow Franks. Despite the enormous financial power of the Jews and the protection their bribes bought them, they were continually overreaching themselves:
whenever they were given a little rope, they eventually managed to hang themselves. No matter how much favor kings, emperors, or princes of the Church bestowed on them, the unrest their usury created among the peasants and the Gentile tradesmen forced the rulers to slap them down again and again.
The hatred between Jews and Gentiles was so intense by the 12th century that virtually every European country was obliged to separate the Jews from the rest of the populace. For their own protection the Jews retreated into walled ghettos, where they were safe from the fury of the Gentiles, except in cases of the most extreme unrest.
And for the protection of the Gentiles, Jews were obliged to wear distinctiveclothing.
After the Church's Lateran Council of 1215, an edict forbade any Jew to venture out of the ghetto without a yellow ring ("Jew badge") sewn on his outer garment, so that every Gentile he met could beware him.
But these measures proved insufficient, for they failed to deal with the fundamental problem: so long as the Jews remained Jews, there could be no peace between them and any other people.
Edward the Great In England, for example, throughout the 13th century there were outbreaks of civil disorder, as the debt-laden citizens sporadically lashed out at their Jewish oppressors.
Another prominent Jewish historian, Abram Sachar, in his A History of the Jews (Knopf, 1965), tells what happened next:
At last, with the accession of Edward I, came the end. Edward was one of the most popular figures in English history. Tall, fair, amiable, an able soldier, a good administrator, he was the idol of his people. But he was filled with prejudices, and hated foreigners and foreign ways. His Statute of Judaism, in 1275, might have been modeled on the restrictive legislation of his contemporary, St. Louis of France. He forbade all usury and closed the most important means of livelihood that remained to the Jews. Farming, commerce, and handicrafts were specifically allowed, but it was exceedingly difficult to pursue those occupations.
England's Golden Age Difficult indeed, compared to effortlessly raking in capital gains! Did Edward really expect the Jews in England to abandon their gilded countinghouses and grub about in the soil for cabbages and turnips, or engage in some other backbreaking livelihood like mere goyim?
God's Chosen People should work for a living?
Edward should have known better. Fifteen years later, having finally reached the conclusion that the Jews were incorrigible, he condemned them as parasites and mischief-makers and ordered them all out of the country. They were not allowed back in until Cromwell's Puritans gained the upper hand 400 years later. Meanwhile, England enjoyed an unprecedented Golden Age of progress and prosperity without a Jew in the land.
Unfortunately, the other monarchs of Europe, who one after another found themselves compelled to follow Edward's example, were not able to provide the same long-term benefits to their countries; in nearly every case the Jews managed to bribe their way back in within a few years.
Racial Pollution Throughout the Middle Ages the Jews of Europe mingled their Semitic blood with that of the Whites on whom they lived, despite absolute bans everywhere on marriage between Christian and Jew. The Jews absorbed White blood through their notorious fondness for White slave girls, whose offspring were often raised as Jews. To a much greater extent the Whites absorbed Jewish blood, through the folly, encouraged by the Church, of regarding any baptized Jew as White. After the 12th century, fortunately, the mingling was minimized by the confinement of the Jews to ghettos.
The greatest influence on the Jewish racial constitution during the Middle Ages was not White intermixture, however. The conversion of the Khazars, a Hunnic tribe from Central Asia, to Judaism in the eighth century changed substantially the racial basis of the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe.
Sviatoslav the Great As related in the 20th installment in this series, the Khazar political and military power was smashed in the 10th century by Sviatoslav the Great and his Rus warriors, but the Khazars were merely dispersed rather than being annihilated. Today the Jews of Europe, and those who trace their ancestry to Europe, owe much more of their genetic heritage to the Khazars than they do to the Semites who emerged from the Arabian desert at the dawn of history.
The Khazars themselves, however, mixed substantially with their Slav subjects in the centuries prior to their dispersal by Sviatoslav, and they continued to mix with other European peoples until they were ghettoized in the 12th century.
Today the Jews divide themselves into two major categories, the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim. The former are those of substantially Semitic heritage, whose ancestors have lived primarily in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean regions of Europe.
The latter are those from Central and Eastern Europe, who consequently have relatively more Khazar and relatively less Semite in them.
(...)
Mosquitoes and Jews
The common mosquito is a parasite which sucks its sustenance from the bloodstream of its host -- and yet, it can do so only after it has injected some of its own saliva into the host's blood. The reason is that the nutriment the mosquito seeks, the blood cells of the host, will not flow easily into the mosquito's proboscis. in order to suck them up it must first break down their structure, and this is accomplished by the injected saliva.
Likewise, the Jew, in order to prey on other peoples, must disrupt their societies, and he accomplishes this by the injection of his own special poison into their bloodstream.
Order is the Jew's mortal foe. One cannot understand the role of the Jew in modern European history unless one first understands this principle.
The Eternal Bolshevik
It explains why the Jew is the eternal Bolshevik: why he is a republican in a monarchist society, a capitalist in a corporate society, a communist in a capitalist society, a liberal "dissident" in a communist society -- and, always and everywhere, a cosmopolitan and a race mixer in a homogeneous society.
And, in particular, it explains the burning hatred the Jews felt for European institutions during the Middle Ages. It explains why the modern Jewish spokesman, Abram Sachar, in his A History of the Jews, frankly admits that the universal attitude of the Jews toward medieval European society was, "Crush the infamous thing!"
Yet, even in the Middle Ages the Jews did not do badly for themselves, and they certainly had little cause for complaint, except when their excesses brought the wrath of their hosts down on their heads. As was pointed out in the previous installment, the Jews established an early stranglehold on the commerce of Europe, monopolizing especially foreign trade. Even after the establishment of the merchant guilds in the 12th century freed most local trade from the Jews' control, they remained well entrenched in the import-export business.
Gold and Flesh
Their real forte, however, was in two staples of commerce forbidden to most Gentiles in Christian Europe: gold and human flesh. Aristotle's denunciations of usury had influenced the leaders of the Church against moneylending, and the practice was consequently forbidden to Christians on religious grounds -- although the ban was not always strictly observed. The field was left almost entirely to the Jews, who, in contrast to the Christians, used their religion as an explicit justification for usury:
"Unto a stranger (goy) thou mayest lend upon interest but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon interest, that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all that thy settest thine hand to in the land to which thou goest, to possess it." (Deuteronomy 23:20) It is interesting to note the sharp distinction between what it is permissible to do to a Gentile (stranger, or goy) and to a fellow Jew. Moses, the purported author of this basis for all Jewish business ethics, was speaking from the experience the Jews had already gained in Egypt when he indicated that the ultimate goal of moneylending to the strangers in a land "to which thou goest" was to "possess" the land.
White Slavery When it came to the slave trade, the words of Moses were not just permissive, but imperative:
"Both thy male and female slaves, whom thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen [goyim] that are round about you; of them shall ye buy male and female slaves.... And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your slaves forever; but over your brethren, the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigor." (Leviticus 25:44-46) It is truly said by the Jews themselves that the Hebrew spirit breathes in every word of the Old Testament!
In Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean area the guild system did not reach the full development that it did in the West and the North of Europe, and Jews in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and parts of Italy engaged in a few trades besides moneylending and slave dealing:
the liquor business, in particular. Jews eventually owned most of the inns of Eastern Europe.
They also monopolized the garment industry throughout large areas of the East and the South, and the Jewish tailor, the Jewish rag-picker, and the Jewish used clothes peddler are proverbial figures.
Yankel the Jew None of these trades earned them the love or respect of the Gentiles among whom they lived, however, and usually there was good reason for the lack of affection. The 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol paints an interesting picture of the circumstances surrounding a Jewish innkeeper in the Ukraine:
"He had been living there for some time, renting land, running an inn, and gradually making all the local gentry and aristocracy dependent upon him by draining them of practically all their funds, thus making his presence strongly felt in the area. Not a single house in good repair could be found within a three-mile radius of Yankel's house; everything was left to go to ruin and every penny was spent on drink, until all that was left was poverty and rags as though a fire or a plague had swept over the place. And had Yankel remained there another ten years, he certainly would have succeeded in spreading misery over the entire province." (Taras Butba, chap. 10) East and West The relatively greater opportunities for exploitation of the Gentiles in the East, not to mention the strong presence of the Khazar-descended Jews there, led to a gradual concentration of Europe's Jews in Poland and Russia during the Middle Ages. By the latter part of the l8th century, half the world's Jews were living in Poland. Their power became so great that many medieval Polish coins, minted during periods when Jews were in charge not only of collecting the taxes, but also of administering the treasury itself, bore inscriptions in Hebrew. The Jews even acquired title to the land on which many Polish and Russian churches stood, and they then charged the Christian peasants admission to their own churches on Sunday mornings.
The essential difference between the Jewish experience in Western Europe and that in Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages is that in the West the earlier collapse of feudalism and the rise of the craft and trade guilds allowed the Europeans to win the contest with the Jews for economic dominance. In the East the Jews had already gained such a strong position by the time industry and town life began to compete effectively with agriculture and rural life that they were able to win the ensuing contest with their Gentile hosts.
Only Mercantile Class
In the West the Europeans froze the Jews out of the industrial and much of the commercial life of medieval society; in the East the Jews froze the Europeans out. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews became the only mercantile class in a world of peasants and laborers, and they used all their cunning and all the power of their wealth co keep their Gentile hosts down.
Reaction inevitably set in in the East, however, just as it had in the West. The l7th century was a period of great uprisings against the Jews, a period when such heroes as the great Cossack hetman and Jew-killer, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, flourished.
In the l8th century the rulers themselves were finally obliged to take strong measures against the Jews of the East, so bad had the situation become. Russia's Catherine the Great (1729-96), who had inherited most of Poland's Jews after the partition of the latter country, extended and enforced prohibitions against them which not only limited their economic activity but banned them altogether from large areas.
The Jew as Antigen
The following generalization is certainly imprecise, and many exceptions to it can be cited, but it may nonetheless be helpful to add a further conclusion to the aforementioned difference between the histories of Jew-Gentile relations in the East and in the West: in the West the Europeans won the upper hand early, and, suffering less from the Jews than did their kinsmen in the East, had less opportunity to develop in the Western European bloodstream the antibodies which are the natural reaction to the Jewish presence.
In the East the people freed themselves from Jewish domination much later, but by the time they finally did they had developed a much stronger natural immunity to the Jewish poison. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Pole, the Russian, the Lithuanian, the Ukrainian -- the Eastern European generally -- takes in his hatred of the Jews with his mother's milk, if he is not born with it, and all the pro-Jewish preachments of his church and edicts of his government do little to lessen this natural and healthy antipathy.
It is this which goes a long way toward explaining how the Poles, saddled with a communist government consisting almost entirely of Jews after the Second World War, have been able in the last three decades to do what Adolf Hitler could not: namely, make Poland into a country which is virtually Jew-free today. Of more immediate relevance at this point in our story, it is the relatively weaker natural resistance to Jews in the West which suggests why it was relatively easy for the Jews there to take advantage of the breakdown of the medieval order and the dissolution of long-established social structures in order to make new openings for themselves.
The Reformations
Another factor which undoubtedly made the West more susceptible to the Jews was the Reformation, the lasting effects of which were confined largely to Europe's northwestern regions in fact, to the Germanic-speaking regions: Germany, Scandinavia, England and Scotland, Switzerland. The Church of Rome and its Eastern Orthodox offshoot had always been ambivalent in their attitudes toward the Jews. On the one hand, they fully acknowledged the Jewish roots of Christianity, and Jesus' Jewishness was taken for granted. On the other hand, the Jews had rejected Jesus' doctrine and killed him, saying, "His blood be on us and on our children" (Matthew 27:25), and the medieval Church was inclined to take them at their word.
In addition to the stigma of deicide the Jews also bore the suspicion which naturally fell on heretics of any sort. During the Middle Ages people took Christianity quite seriously, and anyone professing an unorthodox religious belief, whether he actively sought converts or not, was considered a danger to the good order of the community and to the immortal soul of any Christian exposed to him.
From Who we are?
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