“Half of Christendom worships a Jew; the other half worships a Jewess.”—Jewish editorial.
“If the gospel story is correct, Judas was a pretty decent sort of fellow. It was only after he had become a convert to Christianity that he became that which has made his memory an accursed thing for nineteen hundred years.”—Jewish editorial.
“Our land is frequently called a Christian nation. No doubt the majority of our citizens believe this. No less an authority than Justice Brewer of the Supreme Court so expressed himself in 1892. But the statement is clearly false . . . . This is not a Christian nation. In inspiration, at least, it is a Hebrew nation, for the Constitution which we now enjoy traces back to the Hebrew Commonwealth.”—Jewish editorial.
(From the minutes of a meeting of the Committee on Families of the New York Board of Child Welfare.)
Mr. Hebbard: “That is one of the things I have in mind, that a widow brings deliberately into her home a nameless child and the inevitable consequence of that is that her legitimate children are always thereafter pointed out.”
Miss Sophie Irene Loeb: “As far as nameless children are concerned, Christ himself was a nameless child. Let us get away from nameless children.”
Dr. Dirvoch: “I think where there are three or four children in a home and a little stranger enters that home without a father, you are corrupting the morals of those legitimate children by permitting them to remain in such surroundings.”
Miss Loeb: “I say to you that this committee, if it takes such an attitude as that, is one hundred years behind the times.”
Mr. Cunnion: “Anything against purity is immoral.”
Miss Loeb: “What has that to do with the question of purity? Was the mother of Christ pure?”
Mr. Cunnion: “Certainly.”
Miss Loeb: “He had no name!”
Mr. Cunnion: “You can’t bring that in here. We believe he was conceived without sin.”
Mr. Menehan (to Miss Loeb): “That is very wrong to make that statement.”—Cited in a letter of complaint to Mayor Hylan.
“The intimate relation of church and state in the great non-sectarian United States of America received direct demonstration on August 12 (1913), when a deputy sergeant-at-arms of the Senate was hurriedly sent out to get a preacher of any old denomination to open the Senate with prayer. The session opening an hour earlier than usual, the regular chaplain was not at hand, but with still two minutes to spare the deputy returned in an automobile, hurried to the Vice President’s office and introduced the Rev. Dr. C. Albert Homas, of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, to Mr. Marshall just in time for the Vice President to lead the way into the Senate chamber to open the session at 11 o’clock, and once again the Union was saved. We shudder to think what might have happened if no preacher had been captured in time to open the session with prayer!”—Jewish editorial.
“President Wilson in his inaugural address said: ‘The firm basis of the Government is justice, not pity.’ This is sound Jewish doctrine as laid down by Moses and the Prophets in contradistinction to the doctrine of love, as attributed to Jesus. This coming from so good a churchman as President Wilson might be a little surprising were it not that it is a well-known fact that whenever our Christian brethren want to talk to reasoning men they go to the Old Testament for their inspiration.”—Jewish editorial.
“President Wilson at his inaugural gave another instance of the well-known fact that in solemn moments when they need comfort and inspiration, Christians turn to the Old Testament and not to the New. So President Wilson, when he kissed the bible after taking the inaugural oath, selected the passage, Psalm 46.”—Jewish editorial.
“Reference has frequently been made in these columns to a number of addresses made by the late Isaac M. Wise at the celebration in honor of his 80th birthday anniversary in the course of which he predicted that in a quarter of a century from that date (1899) there would be practically nothing left in Protestant Christianity of a belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ or the distinctive dogmas of Christianity, and that all Protestant Christians by whatever name they call themselves, would be substantially Jews in belief. To any one who notes the signs of the times it is apparent that this prophecy is being rapidly fulfilled . . . . The Jesus superstition and the fantastic dogmas built upon his supposed divine origin, die but slowly, but that they are dying is nevertheless apparent.”—Jewish editorial.
The subject of this article is “Religious Prejudice and Persecution—Are the Jews Victims or Persecutors?” A study of history and of contemporary Jewish journalism shows that Jewish prejudice and persecution is a continuous phenomenon wherever the Jews have attained power, and that in neither action nor word has any disability placed upon the Jew equaled the disabilities he has placed and still contemplates placing upon non-Jews. It is a rather startling reversal of all that we have learned from our Judaized histories, but nevertheless, it seems to be the truth.
Attention is once more called to the fact that the Jews themselves are not raising the cry of “religious persecution” here or elsewhere, but they are allowing their “Gentile fronts” to do it for them—just as they have not denied the statements made in this series (among themselves they freely admit most of them) but let “Gentile fronts” do it for them. The Jews would not be averse to raising the cry of “religious persecution” perhaps, (provided they could make it stand) were they not afraid that it would call attention to their own persecuting activities. But their “Gentile fronts” have brought that upon them.
There is no Christian church that the Jews have not repeatedly attacked.
They have attacked the Catholic Church. This is of special interest just now when Jewish agents are doing their utmost to arouse Catholic sentiment in their favor by circulating charges which these agents personally know to be false. THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT has perfect confidence in the information which Catholic leaders may have on the Jewish Question. On this subject the Catholic priesthood is not misled.
Examples of this attack are numerous. “Half of Christendom worships a Jewess,” is not a statement but a slur, flung by Jewish men who say in the ritual of morning prayer: “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast not made me a woman.” The Talmudists’ discussions of the Virgin Mother are often vile. The Christian festivals, whose preservation is due to the Catholic custom and conscience, are all attacked by Jews.
The American Israelite, whose great prestige in American Jewry is due to its having been founded by Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, opposed the establishment of Columbus Day and berated Governor Hughes for signing the law making it a holiday in New York. The act that established it deserved “the contempt of thinking men.” Why? Is not the discovery of America a memorable event? Yes, but Columbus was a Catholic! However, in recent months the Jews are proving him to have been a Jew, so we may expect some day to see Columbus Day insisted upon with Jewish rites.
The Catholic Columbian made editorial reference to the increasing Jewish influence on the American press, in these words: “Jewry is getting its grip on the news of this country as it is on Reuter’s and the Havas agency in Europe.”—A perfectly polite and true observation.
But the Jewish editorial thunderer came back—“The Columbian, in its sneaking Jesuitical way, does not mention the fact that these (the Jewish) papers are the very cleanest in the country. The Columbian cannot point to a single daily owned by one of its co-religionists that begins to compare with the above papers.”
The sweet spirit here evidenced is very significant today when an appeal is being made to create a strong pro-Jewish Catholic sentiment.
If there is in the world any extra-ecclesiastical undertaking by Catholics which has won the undivided approval of the Christian world as the Passion Play of Oberammergau has done, the present writer does not know what it is. Yet in a volume entitled “A Rabbi’s Impressions of the Oberammergau Passion Play,” Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf, D.D., of Philadelphia, has stigmatized that notable production as reeking with falsehoods and vicious anti-Semitism. In the rabbi’s eyes, of course, it is, for to him the entire Christian tradition is a poisonous lie. The whole fabric of Christian truth, specially as it concerns the person of Christ, are “the hallucinations of emotional men and hysterical women.”
“Thus,” says the rabbi (p. 127) “was invented the cruel story that has caused more misery, more innocent suffering, than any other work of fiction in the range of the whole world’s literature.” And thus the simple peasants of Oberammergau, presenting the Catholic faith in reverent pageant, are labeled anti-Semites.
These are not isolated instances. Antagonism to the Catholic Church runs throughout Jewish literature. The Jewish attitude was summed up in an editorial in the Jewish Sentinel of November 26, 1920, as follows: “Our only great historical enemy, our most dangerous enemy, is Rome in all its shapes and forms, and in all its ramifications. Whenever the sun of Rome begins to set, that of Jerusalem rises.” These, however, are matters well known to Catholic leaders.
In their turn the other Christian denominations have been attacked. When the Methodist Church put on a great pageant entitled “The Wayfarer,” Rabbi Stephen S. Wise played critic and made the solemn and silly statement that had he been a South Sea Islander (instead of the itinerant platform performer which he is) his first impulse after seeing “The Wayfarer,” would have been to rush out into the street and kill at least three Jews. It says a great deal, perhaps, for the channel in which Rabbi Wise’s impulses run, but the tens of thousands of Methodists who saw “The Wayfarer” will not be inclined to attribute such a criticism to the spirit of tolerance which Rabbi Wise so zealously counsels the Christians to observe.
The Episcopal Church also has felt the attack of the Jews. Recently the Jewish press raised a clamor that the Episcopal Church was not competent to teach Americanism in our cities because it held that Christianity and good citizenship were synonymous. And when the Episcopal Church made provision for mission work among the Jews, the torrent of abuse that was poured out gave a very vivid picture of what the Jewish mind naturally turns to when aroused. This abuse is not reproduced here because of its excessive violence and disrespect. It is similar to that which is heaped upon all attempts to explain Christianity to the Jews. “What would the Gentiles do if we sent Jewish missionaries to them?” ask the violent editors. Any Gentile can answer that—nay, even the Jews can answer that. In the first place, the Jews do not want to teach their religion to Gentiles because there is a Talmudical restriction against it; Talmudically the Gentiles are not good enough to mingle with the religious matters of the Jews. In the second place, the Jews do send missionaries everywhere, not to spread Jewish religious principles, but propaganda favoring the Jews as a race and people, as is done in our colleges through the so-called “Jewish Chautauqua.” In the third place, let there be produced one Jewish missionary, who has ever received anything but considerate reception wherever he has appeared.
The Jews are bitter against all Christian denominations because of the conversion of numerous Jews to them. A large number of Jews have become Catholics; one of the Knights of Columbus’ most useful lecturers against the menace of radical socialism is a converted Jew. It is so also with the Presbyterian Church which has been the most recent victim of Jewish vituperation. But only upon the Catholic Church has the Jew poured more wrath and malediction than he has poured upon Christian Science. The Christian Science church has attracted large numbers of Jewish converts. Some of them have become very active, devoted members of that form of faith. Scores of columns and pages have been devoted to their denunciation in Jewish newspapers, magazines and books. Christian Science is a peculiar anathema to the Jew.
Where then is the religious prejudice? Search through the publications of all the churches named, and you cannot find in all their history so much of the spirit of prejudice and persecution as you can find expressed in the Jewish press in one single day. Jewry reeks with such prejudice. In politics, education, social functions, public holidays, literature and newspapers, they see everywhere traces of “Christological manifestations” and cry them down.
No public man has ever given public evidence of his Christian faith without rebuke from the Jews. Mr. Bryan, Mr. Marshall, Mr. Taft, Mr. Wilson, two of them Presidents, one of them Vice President, and the other Secretary of State, have all been taken to task from time to time for their sins in this respect. Mr. Marshall is a devout man, whose faith is real to him, and he speaks very naturally about it at times. He has, therefore, been attacked oftener in the Jewish press than has any other public man of recent times. Nothing is more ludicrous to the Jewish press than a Vice President of the United States openly confessing that he is an “idolator,” that is, a worshipper of the dead Jewish imposter whom the Christians ignorantly call “Christ.” To Mr. Marshall’s honor, be it said, he never apologized, he never begged to withdraw his public statements. Neither did William J. Bryan, whose lecture “The Prince of Peace” contained statements in honor of Christ which brought him into conflict with Jewish spokesmen everywhere, and whose remarks about missions after a trip around the world were savagely attacked by Jews. Mr. Bryan did not apologize either. Mr. Taft was promptly called down on several occasions for using forms of the word “Christian,” which were particularly offensive to the Jewish press because they had advertised far and wide during the Taft campaign that Mr. Taft was practically a Jew in his belief in that he had abandoned all the distinctive Christian doctrines pertaining to Christ. After his lapses in which he used the term “Christian” approvingly, it was explained on his behalf (1) that he was accommodating himself to the audience, and (2) that he used the term as a synonym for civilization! But isn’t it significant that the name of Christ should be an integral part of the very name of the highest civilization? Mr. Taft was a true liberal, liberal enough to tolerate Christian orthodoxy. And that was a rather weak spot, as far as the Jews’ estimate of him went.
Mr. Wilson, while President, was very close to the Jews. His administration, as everyone knows, was predominantly Jewish. As a Presbyterian elder, Mr. Wilson had occasional lapses into the Christian mode of thought during his public utterances, and was always checked up tight by his Jewish censors. In 1914, speaking before the American University at Washington, he said:
“That is the reason why scholarship has usually been most fruitful when associated with religion, and scholarship has never been, so far as I can at this moment recall, associated with any religion except the religion of Jesus Christ.”
That was terrible. So terrible that Herman Bernstein was chosen to administer the castigation.
And Mr. Wilson made proper reparation:
“My dear Mr. Bernstein: I am sorry that there should have been any unfair implication in what I said at the opening of the American University. You may be sure that there was nothing of the kind in my mind, or very certainly nothing in my thoughts that would discriminate in the important matter you speak of against Judaism. I find that one of the risks and penalties of extemporaneous speaking is that you do not stop to consider the whole field, but address yourself merely to the matter in hand. With sincere respects and appreciation,
Cordially yours,
Woodrow Wilson.”
The heading given this notice in the Jewish press was, “He Did Not Mean It.”
All of the President’s offending took place in 1914. The second offense he gave was by taking the position of honorary chairman of the International Lord’s Day Congress, which was to be held the next year in connection with the Panama Exposition. It was, however, the Christian Sunday which received the bulk of the abuse on that occasion.
The subject is “religious prejudice.” Where does it exist in this country in more continuous and virulent character than among the Jews? Read these items selected at random from Jewish papers:
“District Grand Lodge No. 4, Independent Order B’nai B’rith, voted at the annual election held in San Francisco, March 2 (1911) to exclude from the order Jews who join the Christian Science Church. The body after earnest discussion decided that the portals of the order shall be closed against the Christian Scientist Jews on the ground that such Jews have abjured Judaism. The vote upon the question was almost unanimous.”
“The Jewish Community of Philadelphia has found it necessary to publish a warning to the Jewish people against the Daily Vacation Bible Schools which are being established in various parts of the city, also against certain missions and settlement houses, all of which are traps into which Jewish children are decoyed for the purpose of seducing them from the religion of their parents. These institutions belong to that class of conversionist agencies which wage a campaign for the seeking of converts through workers . . . (who) are a class of criminals that keep just within the law and deserve no better treatment than is usually accorded to people of that kind.”
When a bishop of the Episcopal Church said, “We must make the United States indisputably a Christian nation,” the Jewish press retorted that such a thing could not be done until the Constitution of the United States had been “abolished.” “Christian America” is a persecuting term according to the professional Jewish spokesmen, and the most laborious efforts have been put forth by them to prove on paper that the United States is not and cannot be Christian.
Not only do the Jews disagree with Christian teaching—which is their perfect right, and no one dare question it—but they seek to interfere with it. It is not religious tolerance in the midst of religious difference, but religious attack that they preach and practice. The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and certain patriotic songs shows that.
When Cleveland and Lakewood arranged for a community Christmas, the Cleveland Jewish press said: “The writer of this has no idea how many Jews there are in Lakewood, but if there is only one, there should be no community Christmas, no community religion of any kind.” That is not a counsel of tolerance, it is a counsel of attack. The Christmas literature of American Judaism is fiercer than the flames of the Inquisition. In the month of January, the Jewish press has urged its readers to begin an early campaign against Christmas celebrations the next Christmas—“Only three hundred and sixty days before Christmas. So let us do our Christmas arguing early and take plenty of time to do it.”
If anything, Easter is attacked yet more bitterly. But we refrain, for good reasons, from repeating what Jews commonly say on such occasions. The strange inconsistency of it all is to see the great department stores of the Levys and the Isaacs and the Goldsteins and the Silvermans filled with brilliant Christmas cheer and at Easter with the goods appropriate to the time. The festivals of the “heathen” are very profitable. Jewish merchants have been chided for this—not over-severely—by certain rabbis. But on the whole the rabbis had better remain content, for there are no forces more rapidly secularizing the two festival days than are the merchandising and profiteering forces.
Even religious intolerance has its gleesome moments, and the Jews’ come whenever the signs appear of the greater secularization of the church. One parallel between the Protocols and the real hopes of the Jews is written in the common Jewish prophecy that Christianity is doomed to perish. It will perish by becoming, to all intents and purposes, Judaism. And it will become Judaism, first, by ousting all the doctrines pertaining to the person of Christ, excising from the Gospels the great “I Ams” which are His distinctive teachings concerning Himself; and, second, by devitalizing Christianity of all the spiritual content which flows from a union by faith with a Person believed to be divine. That is the only way it can be done. There may be a union of all the churches of the Christian faith because the fundamentals are the same; no union of Christianity and Judaism can occur unless Judaism takes in Jesus as the Messiah, or unless Christianity ejects Him as the Messiah. Judaism sees the union coming by the ejection of the Lord as the Messiah, and rejoices at every sign of it.
Dr. Charles F. Aked, who has since blossomed out as a Jewish spokesman, delivered a sermon in which he cast aside all the “supernatural” elements in the life of Christ, from His birth, to the significance of His death, and was hailed by the Jewish press as “the fulfillment of the prophecy that within fifty years the religion of all the American people, outside the Catholic Church, would be Judaism in principle even though not in name.”
“No Jew,” says the American Israelite, “will conceal his gratification when he finds Christians virtually admitting that liberal Christianity is practically an acceptance of the doctrine of liberal Judaism.”
Unfortunately, this is true. Liberal Christianity and Liberal Judaism meet, but only by the surrender of all that is distinctively Christian in doctrine. A liberal Christian is more Jewish than Christian. The statement may sound harsh and arouse resentment, but it is a very simple matter for any liberal Christian to convince himself of this by reading the volume of liberal Jewish doctrine put out by Kaufman Kohler, president of the Hebrew Union College. Liberalism is the funnel by which Christianity is expected to run into Judaism, just as liberalism so-called in other departments of life is expected to bring about certain other Jewish aims.
“Liberalism” in Jewish thought means a wide-open country in every way. Judaism has opposed every significant reform that has come to the country; prohibition, Sunday decency, movie and stage regeneration, and community reverence for sacred things. Judaism has been the prop of the liquor traffic, Sunday desecration, movie and stage excesses, and public contempt for the sacred things of the prevailing religion; and it is all too evident that the Jewish propaganda has made serious inroads everywhere.
A Congregational Church in New Jersey decided to abandon the Bible in some of its classes and substitute sociology, politics, municipal government and kindred subjects for study, and the Jewish press hailed it as another sign that the church was “in a fair way to adopt what is in substance American Judaism.” In St. Louis a clergyman, instead of preaching sermons, began to act out moralistic dramas which he himself had written, and the Jewish press again hailed it as a sign of the dissatisfaction of the Christian with his church. Everything done in every branch of the Christian church has been closely watched, and wherever a departure occurred from the distinctly Christian position it was extravagantly applauded; and wherever loyalty to the landmarks appeared, it was just as extravagantly condemned. Judaism does not wish the Christian church to remain Christian. This accounts for destructive Higher Criticism being almost exclusively the work of Jews, although the world has long known them under the guise of “German critics.”
Jewish intolerance today, yesterday and in every age of history where Jews were able to exert influence or power, is indisputable except among people who do not know the record. Jewish intolerance in the past is a matter of history; for the future it is a matter of Jewish prophecy. One of the strongest causes militating against the full Americanization of several millions of Jews in this country is their belief—instilled in them by their religious authorities—that they are “chosen,” that this land is theirs, that the inhabitants are idolators, that the day is coming when the Jews will be supreme. How can they otherwise act than in agreement with such declarations? You can see what is meant if you read Jewish articles describing the shoving aside of the New England people by the Jews; the supercilious attitude adopted toward the stock that made America is merely a fore-shadowing of what would be the complete attitude if power and influence made it possible. Bolshevism, which began with the destruction of the class that contained all the promise of a better Russia, is an exact parallel for the attitude that is adopted in this country regarding the original stock.
We are not permitted by the Jews to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in our schools because one of the stanzas has a Christian flavor. The Jews claim that the presence of one Jewish child in any assembly of children ought in “fairness” to prevent the singing of that historic song.
Norman Hapgood, writing in a Jewish publication, said: “I need hardly explain that I do not think Jews ought to insist overmuch on their rights or nationality in a negative sense. They ought to be as much Jews as they can, but ought to be as little as possible of what is merely anti-Christian. For the Jews to try to get a song out of the public schools because it praises Jesus is perhaps natural but hardly wise.” Mr. Hapgood received a lot of abuse for his well-conceived counsel.
Again we come to the end of our space with the record hardly scratched. Sufficient has been presented to show the strong, unceasing anti-Christian activity of the Jews in the United States. Had the Jewish press been read extensively by non-Jews during the past 15 years, this present series of articles would have been unnecessary—the people would have known the facts. It is to present some of the facts that are illustrated in the Jewish press along the line of religious intolerance that these two articles have been written.
Jewish spokesmen plead for suppression of facts in the name of “religious tolerance,” and they denounce exposure of facts as being “religious persecution.” Read the whole non-Jewish religious and secular publications and you will not find one one-hundred-thousandth part of the animosity against the Jewish religion which is found in the Jewish press—continuously found week after week for long years—against the Christian religion. The present writer has never seen nor heard of an article attacking the Jews’ religion.
So, once for all, in spiking the cry of “religious persecution,” we show that it exists in quantity and strength among the Jews—nowhere else. No one imbued with the American spirit would or could condemn, hinder, or even remonstrate with any person on account of the faith he holds.
As to “religious prejudice” or “persecution” entering into the present series of articles—there they are, reprinted in booklet form for permanent examination: where is the prejudice or persecution? Cite the page!
Jewish spokesmen would use their energy to better advantage, and more to the honor of the Jewish people, if they would address themselves to what is in the articles, rather than to what is not in them. The statements made by THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT have been voluminously discussed; but they are still awaiting an answer.
[THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT, issue of 11 June 1921]