CONFESSIONS OF A JEW— THE DEVASTATING RAMIFICATIONS OF PAUL OF TARSUS
AND CHRISTIANITY IN DESTROYING ROMAN CIVILIZATION
Of course, you do resent us. It is no good telling me you don't. So
let us not waste any time
on denials and alibis. You know you do, and I know it, and we
understand each other. To be
sure, some of your best friends are Jews, and all that. I have heard
that before once or twice, I
think. And I know, too, that you do not include me personally— "me"
being any particular
individual Jew— when you fling out at us in your wholesale fashion,
because I am, well, so
different, don't you know, almost as good as one of yourselves. That
little exemption does not,
somehow, move me to gratitude; but never mind that now. It is the
aggressive, climbing,
pushing, materialistic sort you dislike— those, in a word, who
remind you so much of your own
up-and-coming brethren. We understand each other perfectly. I don't
hold it against you.
Bless my soul, I do not blame anybody for disliking anybody. The
thing that intrigues me
about this anti-Jewish business, as you play at it, is your total
lack of grit. You are so indirect
and roundabout with it, you make such transparent excuses, you seem
to be suffering from selfconsciousness
so horribly, that if the performance were not grotesque, it would be
irritating.
It is not as if you were amateurs: you have been at it for over
fifteen centuries. Yet watching
you and hearing your childish pretexts, one might get the impression
that you did not know
yourselves what it is all about. You resent us, but you can not
clearly say why. You think up a
new excuse— a reason is what you call it— every other day. You have
been piling up
justifications for yourselves these many hundreds of years and each
new invention is more
laughable than the last and each new excuse contradicts and
annihilates the last.
Not so many years ago I used to hear that we were money-grubbers and
commercial
materialists; now the complaint is being whispered around that no
art and no profession is safe
against Jewish invasion.
We are, if you are to be believed, at once clannish and exclusive
and unassimilable because
we won't intermarry with you, and we are also climbers and pushers
and a menace to your
racial integrity.
Our standard of living is so low that we create your slums and sweat
industries, and so high
that we crowd you out of your best residential sections. We shirk
our patriotic duty in wartime
because we are pacifists by nature and tradition, and we are the
arch-plotters of universal wars
and the chief beneficiaries of those wars (see "The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion.")
We are at once the founders and leading adherents of capitalism and
the chief perpetrators
of the rebellion against capitalism.
Surely, history has nothing like us for versatility!
And, oh! I almost forgot the reason of reasons. We are the stiff-
necked people who never
accepted Christianity, and we are the criminal people who crucified
its founder.
But I tell you, you are self-deceivers. You lack either the self-
knowledge or the mettle to face
the facts squarely and own up to the truth. You resent the Jew not
because, as some of you seem
to think, we crucified Jesus but because we gave him birth. Your
real quarrel with us is not that
we have rejected Christianity but that we have imposed it upon you!
Your loose, contradictory charges against us are not a patch on the
blackness of our proved
historic offense. You accuse us of stirring up revolution in Moscow.
Suppose we admit the
charge. What of it? Compared with what Paul the Jew of Tarsus
accomplished in Rome, the
Russian upheaval is a mere street brawl.
You make much noise and fury about the undue Jewish influence in
your theaters and movie
palaces. Very good; granted your complaint is well-founded. But what
is that compared to our
staggering influence in your churches, your schools, your laws and
your governments, and the
very thoughts you think every day?
A clumsy Russian forges a set of papers and publishes them in a book
called "The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion", which shows that we plotted to bring on the
late World War. You believe
that book. All right. For the sake of argument we will underwrite
every word of it. It is genuine
and authentic. But what is that beside the unquestionable historical
conspiracy which we have
carried out, which we have never denied because you never had the
courage to charge us with it,
and of which the full record is extant for anybody to read?
If you really are serious when you talk of Jewish plots, may I not
direct your attention to one
worth talking about? What use is it wasting words on the alleged
control of your public opinion
by Jewish financiers, newspaper owners and movie magnates, when you
might as well justly
accuse us of the proved control of your whole civilization by the
Jewish Gospels?
You have not begun to appreciate the real depth of our guilt. We are
intruders. We are
disturbers. We are subverters. We have taken your natural world,
your ideals, your destiny, and
played havoc with them. We have been at the bottom not merely of the
latest Great War but of
nearly all your wars, not only of the Russian but of every other
major revolution in your history.
We have brought discord and confusion and frustration into your
personal and public life. We
are still doing it. No one can tell how long we shall go on doing it.
Look back a little and see what has happened. Nineteen hundred years
ago you were an
innocent, care-free, pagan race. You worshipped countless Gods and
Goddesses, the spirits of
the air, of the running streams and of the woodland. You took
unblushing pride in the glory of
your naked bodies. You carved images of your gods and of the
tantalizing human figure. You
delighted in the combats of the field, the arena and battle-ground.
War and slavery were fixed
institutions in your systems. Disporting yourselves on the hillsides
and in the valleys of the great
outdoors, you took to speculating on the wonder and mystery of life
and laid the foundations of
natural science and philosophy. Yours was a noble, sensual culture,
unirked by the prickings of
a social conscience or by any sentimental questionings about human
equality.
Who knows what
great and glorious destiny might have been yours if we had left you
alone.
But we did not leave you alone. We took you in hand and pulled down
the beautiful and
generous structure you had reared, and changed the whole course of
your history. We
conquered you as no empire of yours ever subjugated Africa or Asia.
And we did it all without
armies, without bullets, without blood or turmoil, without force of
any kind. We did it solely by
the irresistible might of our spirit, with ideas, with propaganda.
We made you the willing and unconscious bearers of our mission to
the whole world, to the
barbarous races of the earth, to the countless unborn generations.
Without fully understanding
what we were doing to you, you became the agents at large of our
racial tradition, carrying our
gospel to the unexplored ends of the earth.
Our tribal customs have become the core of your moral code. Our
tribal laws have furnished
the basic groundwork of all your august constitutions and legal
systems. Our legends and our
folk tales are the sacred lore which you croon to your infants. Our
poets have filled your
hymnals and your prayer-books. Our national history has become an
indispensable part of your
pastors and priests and scholars. Our kings, our statesmen, our
prophets, our warriors are your
heroes. Our ancient little country is your Holy Land. Our national
literature is your Holy Bible.
What our people thought and taught has become inextricably woven
into your very speech and
tradition, until no one among you can be called educated who is not
familiar with our racial
heritage.
Jewish artisans and Jewish fishermen are your teachers and your
saints, with countless
statues carved in their image and innumerable cathedrals raised to
their memories. A Jewish
maiden is your ideal of motherhood and womanhood. A Jewish rebel-
prophet is the central
figure in your religious worship. We have pulled down your idols,
cast aside your racial
inheritance, and substituted for them our God and our traditions. No
conquest in history can
even remotely compare with this clean sweep of our conquest over you.
How did we do it? Almost by accident. Two thousand years ago nearly,
in far-off Palestine,
our religion had fallen into decay and materialism. Money-changers
were in possession of the
temple. Degenerate, selfish priests mulcted our people and grew fat.
Then a young patriotidealist
arose and went about the land calling for a revival of faith. He had
no thought of setting
up a new church. Like all the prophets before him, his only aim was
to purify and revitalize the
old creed. He attacked the priests and drove the money-changers from
the temple. This brought
him into conflict with the established order and its supporting
pillars. The Roman authorities,
who were in occupation of the country, fearing his revolutionary
agitation as a political effort to
oust them, arrested him, tried him and condemned him to death by
crucifixion, a common form of
execution at that time.
The followers of Jesus of Nazareth, mainly slaves and poor workmen,
in their bereavement
and disappointment, turned away from the world and formed themselves
into a brotherhood of
pacifist non-resisters, sharing the memory of their crucified leader
and living together
communistically. They were merely a new sect in Judea, without power
or consequence, neither
the first nor the last.
Only after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans did the new
creed come into
prominence. Then a patriotic Jew named Paul or Saul conceived the
idea of humbling the
Roman power by destroying the morale or its soldiery with the
doctrines of love and nonresistance
preached by the little sect of Jewish Christians. He became the
Apostle to the
Gentiles, he who hitherto had been one of the most active
persecutors of the band. And so well
did Paul do his work that within four centuries the great empire
which had subjugated Palestine
along with half of the world, was a heap of ruins. And the law which
went forth from Zion
became the official religion of Rome.
This was the beginning of our dominance in your world. But it was
only a beginning. From
this time forth your history is little more than a struggle for
mastery between your own old pagan
spirit and our Jewish spirit. Half your wars, great and little, are
religious wars, fought over the
interpretation of one thing or another in our teachings. You no
sooner broke free from your
primitive religious simplicity and attempted the practice of the
pagan Roman learning than
Luther, armed with our gospels, arose to down you and re-enthrone
our heritage. Take the three
principal revolutions in modern times— the French, the American and
the Russian. What are
they but the triumph of the Jewish idea of social, political and
economic justice?
And the end is still a long way off. We still dominate you. At this
very moment your churches
are torn asunder by a civil war between Fundamentalists and
Modernists, that is to say between
those who cling to our teachings and traditions literally and those
who are striving by slow steps
to dispossess us. In Dayton, Tennessee, a Bible-bred community
forbids the teaching of your
science because it conflicts with our ancient Jewish account of the
origin of life; and Mr. Bryan,
the leader of the anti-Jewish Ku Klux Klan in the Democratic
National Convention, makes the
supreme fight of his life in our behalf, without noticing the
contradiction. Again and again the
Puritan heritage of Judea breaks out in waves of stage censorship,
Sunday blue laws and
national prohibition acts. And while these things are happening you
twaddle about Jewish
influence in the movies!
Is it any wonder you resent us? We have put a clog upon your
progress. We have imposed
upon you an alien book and an alien faith which you cannot swallow
or digest, which is at crosspurposes
with your native spirit, which keeps you everlastingly ill-at-ease,
and which you lack
the spirit either to reject or to accept in full.
In full, of course, you never have accepted our Christian teachings.
In your hearts you are
still pagans. You still love war and graven images and strife. You
still take pride in the glory of
the nude human figure. Your social conscience, in spite of all
democracy and all your social
revolutions, is still a pitifully imperfect thing. We have merely
divided your soul, confused your
impulses, paralyzed your desires. In the midst of battle you are
obliged to kneel down to him
who commanded you to turn the other cheek, who said "Resist not
evil" and "Blessed are the
peacemakers." In your lust for gain you are suddenly disturbed by a
memory from your Sundayschool
days about taking no thought for the morrow. In your industrial
struggles, when you
would smash a strike without compunction, you are suddenly reminded
that the poor are blessed
and that men are brothers in the Fatherhood of the Lord. And as you
are about to yield to
temptation, your Jewish training puts a deterrent hand on your
shoulder and dashes the
brimming cup from your lips.
You Christians have never become
Christianized. To that extent
we have failed with you. But we have forever spoiled the fun of
paganism for you.
So why should you not resent us? If we were in your place we should
probably dislike you
more cordially than you do us. But we should make no bones about
telling you why. We should
not resort to subterfuges and transparent pretexts. With millions of
painfully respectable Jewish
shopkeepers all about us we should not insult your intelligence and
our own honesty by talking
about communism as a Jewish philosophy. And with millions of hard-
working impecunious
Jewish peddlers and laborers we should not make ourselves ridiculous
by talking about
international capitalism as a Jewish monopoly. No, we should go
straight to the point. We
should contemplate this confused, ineffectual muddle which we call
civilization, this half-
Christian half-pagan medley, and— were our places reversed— we
should say to you pointblank:
"For this mess thanks to you, to your prophets and to your Bible."
The following is an excerpt from "The White Man's Bible" by Ben Klassen:
The following was written by Marcus Eli Ravage, a Jewish writer (1884-1965). It appeared
in the now defunct Century Magazine in the February, 1928 issue. It is so clear, so direct, and its
implications so far-reaching, that the full disaster, so explicitly spelled out herein, completely
escapes the average befuddled White Christian.
Here is the heading and text of Ravage’s article:
A REAL CASE AGAINST THE JEWS