By Carlos Whitlock Porter
A truism of liberalism is that the truth may be approximated through a comparison of opinion. In the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, all articles dealing directly with Jewish matters are written by Jews and Rabbis, dripping with self-pity and self-praise. Articles on peripheral subjects, however, tell a different story.
From the 1911 ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA
RUSSIA: "The Semitic race is represented by upwards of 5,000,000
Jews... The rapidity with which they peopled certain towns (e.g., Odessa) and
whole provinces was really prodigious. The law of Russia prohibits them from
entering Great Russia, only the wealthiest and best educated enjoying this
privilege; nevertheless they are met with everywhere, even in the Urals. Their
chief abodes, however, continue to be Poland... Organized as they are into a
kind of community for mutual protection and mutual help, they soon become
masters of the trade wherever they penetrate. In the villages, they are mostly
innkeepers, intermediaries in trade, and pawnbrokers..." (vol. XXIII, p.
855).
"The numerous outbreaks against the Jews are directed, not against
their creed, but against them as keen business men and extortionate
money-lenders..." (p. 885).
"The wealth of Russia consisting mainly
of raw produce, the trade of the country turns chiefly on the purchase of this
for export... this traffic is in the hands of a great number of middlemen - in
the West, Jews, and elsewhere Russians - to whom the peasants are for the most
part in debt..." (p. 890).
"In the rest of the country they had not
been allowed to reside in the villages, because their habits of keeping
vodka shops and lending money at usurious interest were found to demoralize the
peasantry..." (p. 906).
RUMANIA: "Their improvidence soon got them into the hands of Jewish
money-lenders, who, fortunately for the peasants, were by law unable to become
proprietors of the soil..." (vol. XXIII, p. 828).
"The bitter feeling
against them in Rumania is not so much due to religious fanaticism as to the
fear that if given political and other rights they will gradually possess
themselves of the whole soil... in many places they have a monopoly of the wine
and spirit shops, and retail trade generally; and as they are always willing to
advance money on usury, and are more intelligent and better educated than the
ordinary peasant, there is little doubt that in a country where the large
landowners are proverbially extravagant, and the peasant proprietors needy, the
soil would soon fall into the hand of the Jews were it not for the stringent
laws which prevent them from owning land outside the towns. When in addition it
is considered that the Moldavian Jews, who are mostly of Polish and Russian
origin, speak a foreign language, wear a distinguishing dress and keep
themselves aloof from their neighbours, the antipathy in which they are held by
the Rumanians generally may be understood" (p. 829).
HUNGARY: "The
Jews... monopolize a large portion of trade, are with the Germans the chief
employers of labour, and control not only the finances but to a great extent the
government and the press of the country. Owing to the improvidence of the
Hungarian landowners and the poverty of the peasants, the soil of the country is
gradually passing into their hands" (vol. XIII, p. 897).
GERMANY: "Nearly
all the bankers and stockbrokers in Germany were Jews. Many of the leaders of
the liberal parties, e.g., Bamberger and Lasker, were of Jewish origin; the
doctrines of Liberalism were supported by papers owned and edited by Jews; hence
the wish to restore more fully the avowed Christian character of the state,
coinciding with the attack on the influence of finance, which owed so much to
the Liberal economic doctrines, easily degenerated into attacks on the Jews" (vol. XI, p. 888).
From the 1922 ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA
POLAND: "THE JEWISH QUESTION: One of the most important questions to
be considered by the new Polish State is that of the Jews. Numerically they form
roughly one seventh of the population. In Warsaw a third of the population are
Jews; in many provincial towns four out of every five inhabitants are Jews, and
in some nine out of ten, and of these the vast majority are Eastern Jews who in
language, religion, and customs differ from the population. Their language is
Yiddish, a Middle-High German dialect; for the purposes of writing, Hebrew
characters are used. Their dress is peculiar to themselves and their 'unclean
habits and low standards of conduct' are neither European nor modern'.
The Western Jew is the more civilized type which is generally found in Western
Europe, speaking the language and conforming to the habits of Western
civilization. 'The Eastern Jew is essentially a business or commercial
man, but rarely a producer. He is usually a middleman or intermediary. In towns
the majority of the shops are owned by Jews, but they are a race apart, hated
and despised by the rest of the population, devoted to their religion, which is
a primitive type of Judaism. The Jews have been settled in Poland between
800 and 1,000 years so that they can hardly be considered 'strangers'
in the land; in fact the Slavs cannot be considered very much more native than
they. It was not, however, until about 20 years ago that the present quarrel
between the Jews and the Poles began. The Tsarist Government drove the Jews out
of Russia but gave them exceptional advantages in Poland. These Litvaks (as they
were called) openly professed themselves the partisans of Russia and founded
the Jewish press which set to work openly to fight against Polish autonomy. The
Poles attacked the Jews before the war by means of a national boycott, the only
means by which one subject race could attack another. During and after the war
the hostility to the Jews was increased by the fact that in the German
occupation the Jew was a willing tool of the invader and by the close connection
between the Jews and Bolshevism. The hostility to the Jews was marked in 1918
and 1919 by excesses in which some 200-300 have in fact been killed, but which
have been enormously exaggerated by the Jewish press.'... Capt. Peter
Wright, in his very valuable and interesting report states (Cmd 674, 1920, pp.
17-36) that the great majority of the poor Jews are of the Eastern type and
extreme Orthodoxy (Chassidim). They form an immense mass of squalid and helpless
poverty and Capt. Wright's only recommendation is that the richer Jews should
study the condition of the poor Jews, who either trade as small middlemen, as
hawkers or touts... They are driven to all sorts of illicit and fraudulent
practices as in England, in the East End of London... too large a proportion of
convictions for such offenses can be laid to their account. They are unfit for
the modern economic world for want of education and for Western society because
of their habits and want of cleanliness. They are devoted to their strange old
religion but as they grow richer their piety, as the Chief Rabbi told Capt.
Wright, is destroyed by wealth and they take too little interest in their poorer
brethren. No one who knows Poland can be surprised at the Polish attitude or the
desire of the Poles to be rid of this corrupting influence" (vol. XXXII, p.
123).
HUNGARY: "The Jewish question has become important in
Hungary... As they grew rich through trade, the ghetto became too small for
them. As they owned no land, they were not tied to the soil and streamed into
the cities, where they found more opportunities of making money and adding to
their wealth. Above all Budapest, as the centre of commerce and industry and the
seat of the banks, had a strong attraction for them. Three distinct classes of
the Jews grew up: the Orthodox, who wished to remain Jews with all the habits
and customs of the ghetto; those who in most respects relinquished their
position of religious isolation and strove after assimilation... and thirdly the
cosmopolitan Jews, the revolutionaries, who were the enemies of all national
feeling and represented materialistic internationalism. It was the part played
by this third class of Jews... which has made the Jewish question acute in
Hungary. As Hungary has no true middle class, they exercised great influence on
the intellectual life of the country..." (vol. XXXI, p. 408).
"Instead of the national heroes, Marx, Engels & Lenin were glorified... In boys and girls schools, the pupils received enlightened instruction in the processes of generation, birth, etc., with disastrous results to the juvenile morality" (vol. XXXI, p. 416).
"The leaders of the Social Democrats and Bourgeois Radicals
were, almost without exception, of Jewish origin. This was also the case with
the most prominent members of Government of the Republic..; these were the men who had made it impossible to resist the invasion of Hungary by force of arms ..."
(vol. XXXI, p. 415).
"Since most of the ruling politicians and People's Commissars...
belonged to the younger generation of Jews anti-Communist feeling in the country
assumed more and more the character of anti-Semitism" (vol. XXXI, p. 417).
"One
consequence of the Bolshevist rule was the still more intense development of
anti-Semitic feeling. Since the leaders of the Communists were chiefly recruited
among the younger Jewish intellectual circles, the National Assembly in order to
prevent the creation of a Jewish intellectual proletariat, in Sept. 1920,
proclaimed 'Numerus Clausus' for the universities. Under this clause,
Jews could only be admitted to the universities in proportion to their
percentage of the population" (vol. XXXI, p. 418).
ANGOLA: "Southern
Angola in 1909-11, was regarded as a probable choice by the Jewish Territorial
Association as a field for colonization, and Portugal enacted land laws with a
view to that contingency. But Angola was rejected as a home for the Jews" (vol. XXX, p. 139).
From the 1928 ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA
JEWS: "The Jewish population of the world on the outbreak of the War
in 1914 may be estimated at about 14,900,000... The Jews whole-heartedly
supported the revolution... Among the Bolshevik leaders and their satellites
were a certain number of Jews... At the same time, the American Jews began to
play a part of growing importance in the Zionist movement and were concerned in
the negotiations leading up to the Balfour Declaration of which President
Wilson was a consistent and influential advocate." (vol. II, p. 605).
"In
both Russia and Hungary a prominent part in the Bolshevik movement was played by
men who, though long disassociated from the Jewish community, were nevertheless
of Jewish birth." (vol. II, p. 606).
HUNGARY: "The people's commissars
and practically all the leading persons were Jews, a fact which explains the
anti-Jewish feeling which later prevailed in Hungary..." (vol. II, p. 393).
ZIONISM: "Not long after the outbreak of the war, Dr. Weizmann and
his friends were brought in touch with a number of influential public men...
What the Zionists proposed was, in effect, that Great Britain should make it
part of the policy to provide in the peace settlement for the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jews... By the beginning of 1916,
the British Government had come to the conclusion that there were other and more
practical reasons for taking Zionism seriously... The hour of decision
was approaching in the United States, where there was a Jewish population of
over 3,000,000... A declaration in favour of Zionism would help to rally Jewish
opinion throughout the world to the side of the Allies... President Wilson had
personally intervened to make it clear that he would welcome a British
pronouncement in favour of Zionism... in 1922 resolutions associating the United
States with the policy embodied in the Declaration were unanimously adopted by
both Houses of Congress. At the insistence of Great Britain a Zionist delegation
was given a hearing by the Peace Conference in Paris on Feb. 27, 1919..."
(vol. III, p. 1139).
"The Arabs did not take kindly to the Balfour
Declaration, which they did not altogether unnaturally misconstrue... there were
anti-Jewish demonstrations in Jerusalem in 1920..." (vol. III, p. 1140).
BAVARIA: "Meanwhile, the Nationalist leagues had gained in strength
and now began to defy the Governments orders. The most powerful of them were the
National Socialists, an extreme militaristic, nationalist, and, above all,
anti-Semite body, nominally democratic in tendency, but actually largely used by
the rich to break strikes and attack Socialism. This body was raised from
obscurity by one Hitler, a good demagogue but no politician... Hitler and other
leaders were sent to prison or lunatic asylums" (vol. I, p. 342).
There
is a saying in French: the more things change, the more they are the same. The
Jew is eternal.
CARLOS W. PORTER
1994
Note:
The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica
is available on DVD with 1922 and supplement, graphically scanned at 300 dpi, all volumes now for 10 (ten) jewbuckniks on 1 DVD, from:
ADV Plans, LLC
www.theclassicarchives.com
For sale on eBay as a standard item,only ten -- only ten, I repeat -- jewbuckniks.
Very good value for money.
The OCR-scanned HTML version available free on-line at http://www.1911encyclopedia.orgis not reliable (innumerable typographical errors rendering the text incomprehensible in places; texts incomplete; many articles missing (for example, "Infanticide"; the article on "Cannibalism" is not only incomplete, but is mixed up with another article halfway through); a thoroughly sloppy job.
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