The following article was written by Marcus Eli
Ravage, a Jewish writer who was the Rothschilds’ (the Jewish bankers) approved
biographer. It appeared in THE CENTURY MAGAZINE, JANUARY 1928, Vol. 115, No. 3,
pp. 346-350. The original was in two-column format.
MARCUS ELI RAVAGE
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 self-consciousness so horribly, that if the performance were not grotesque, it would be irritating.
It is not as if you were amateurs: you have been at
it for over fifteen centuries. Yet watching you and hearing your childish
pretexts, one might get the impression that you did not know yourselves what it
is all about. You resent us, but you cannot clearly say why. You think up a new
excuse—a “reason” is what you call it—every other day. You have been piling up
justifications for yourselves these many hundreds of years and each new
invention is more laughable than the last and each new excuse contradicts and
annihilates the last.
Not so many years ago I used to hear that we were
money-grubbers and commercial materialists; now the complaint is being
whispered around that no art and no profession is safe against Jewish invasion.
We are, if you are to be believed, at once clannish
and exclusive and unassimilable because we won’t intermarry with you, and we
are also climbers and pushers and a menace to your racial integrity.
Our standard of living is so low that we create your
slums and sweated industries, and so high that we crowd you out of your best
residential sections.
We shirk our patriotic duty in wartime because we
are pacifists by nature and tradition, and we are the arch-plotters of
universal wars and the chief beneficiaries of those wars (see the late
“Dearborn Independent,” passim, and “The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion”).
We are at once the founders and leading adherents of
capitalism and the chief perpetrators of the rebellion against capitalism.
Surely, history has nothing like us for versatility!
And, oh! I almost forgot the reason of reasons. We
are the stiff-necked people who never accepted Christianity, and we are the
criminal people who crucified its founder.
But I can tell you, you are self-deceivers. You lack
either the self-knowledge or the mettle to face the facts squarely and own up
to the truth. You resent the Jew not because, as some of you seem to think, he
crucified Jesus but because he gave him birth. Your real quarrel with us is not
that we have rejected Christianity but that we have imposed it upon you!
Your loose, contradictory charges against us are not
a patch on the blackness of our proved historic offense. You accuse us of
stirring up revolution in Moscow. Suppose we admit the charge. What of it?
Compared with what Paul the Jew of Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the Russian
upheaval is a mere street brawl.
You make much noise and fury about the undue Jewish
influence in your theaters and movie palaces. Very good; granted your complaint
is well-founded. 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 the
battle-ground. War and slavery were fixed institutions in your systems.
Disporting yourselves on the hillsides and in the valleys of the great
outdoors, you took to speculating on the wonder and mystery of life and laid
the foundations of natural science and philosophy. Yours was a noble, sensual
culture, unirked by the prickings of a social conscience or by any sentimental
questionings about human equality. Who knows what great and glorious destiny
might have been yours if we had left you alone.
But we did not leave you alone. We took you in hand
and pulled down the beautiful and generous structure you had reared, and
changed the whole course of your history. We conquered you as no empire of
yours ever subjugated Africa or Asia. And we did it all without armies, without
bullets, without blood or turmoil, without force of any kind. We did it solely
by the irresistible might of our spirit, with ideas, with propaganda.
We made you the willing and unconscious bearers of
our mission to the whole world, to the barbarous races of the earth, to the
countless unborn generations. Without fully understanding what we were doing to
you, you became the agents at large of our racial tradition, carrying our
gospel to the unexplored ends of the earth.
Our tribal customs have become the core of your
moral code. Our tribal laws have furnished the basic groundwork of all your
august constitutions and legal systems. Our legends and our folk tales are the
sacred lore which you croon to your infants. Our poets have filled your hymnals
and your prayer books. Our national history has become an indispensable part of
your pastors and priests and scholars. Our kings, our statesmen, our prophets,
our warriors are your heroes. Our ancient little country is your Holy Land. Our
national literature is your Holy Bible. What our people thought and taught has
become inextricably woven into your very speech and tradition, until no one
among you can be called educated who is not familiar with our racial heritage.
Jewish artisans and Jewish fishermen are your
teachers and your saints, with countless statues carved in their image and
innumerable cathedrals raised to their memories. A Jewish maiden is your ideal
of womanhood. A Jewish rebel-prophet is the central figure in your religious worship.
We have pulled down your idols, cast aside your racial inheritance, and
substituted for them our God and our traditions. No conquest in history can
even remotely compare with this clean sweep of our conquest over you.
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 patriot-idealist
arose and went about the land calling for a revival of faith. He had no thought
of setting up a new church. Like all the prophets before him, his only aim was
to purify and revitalize the old creed. He attacked the priests and drove the
money-changers from the temple. This brought him into conflict with the
established order and its supporting pillars. The Roman authorities, who were
in occupation of the country, fearing his revolutionary agitation as a
political effort to oust them, arrested him, tried him and condemned him to
death by crucifixion, a common form of execution at that time.
The followers of Jesus of Nazareth, mainly slaves
and poor workmen, in their bereavement and disappointment, turned away from the
world and formed themselves into a brotherhood of pacifist non-resisters,
sharing the memory of their crucified leader and living together
communistically. They were merely a new sect in Judea, without power or
consequence, neither the first nor the last.
Only after the destruction of Jerusalem by the
Romans did the new creed come into prominence. Then a patriotic Jew named Paul
or Saul conceived the idea of humbling the Roman power by destroying the morale
or its soldiery with the doctrines of love and non-resistance preached by the
little sect of Jewish Christians. He became the Apostle to the Gentiles, he who
hitherto had been one of the most active persecutors of the band. And so well
did Paul do his work that within four centuries the great empire which had
subjugated Palestine along with half of the world, was a heap of ruins. And the
law which went forth from Zion became the official religion of Rome.
This was the beginning of our dominance in your
world. But it was only a beginning. From this time forth your history is little
more than a struggle for mastery between your own old pagan spirit and our
Jewish spirit. Half your wars, great and little, are religious wars, fought
over the interpretation of one thing or another in our teachings. You no sooner
broke free from your primitive religious simplicity and attempted the practice
of the pagan Roman learning than Luther armed with our gospels arose to down
you and enthrone our heritage. Take the three principal revolutions in modern
times—the French, the American and the Russian. What are they but the triumph
of the Jewish idea of social, political and economic justice?
And the end is still a long way off. We still
dominate you. 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 cross-purposes with your native
spirit, which keeps you everlastingly ill-at-ease, and which you lack the
spirit either to reject or to accept in full.
In full, of course, you never have accepted our
Christian teachings. In your hearts you still are 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
Sunday-school 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 point-blank: “For
this mess thanks to you, to your prophets and to your Bible.”