đź“•You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel
Contents page of "You Gentiles" (1924) by the revered, acclaimed and highly-decorated jew Maurice Samuel.
"Is there, between us Jews and you gentiles, that is between the Jew on the one hand and the Englishman, the Frenchman, the American on the other hand, that which transcends all the differences which exist among yourselves, so that, in relation to us, you are gentiles first,"
"our existence is secured at an infinite expense of special effort on our part, and of peculiar discomfort to you. Wherever the Jew is found he is a problem, a source of unhappiness to himself and to those around him."
"...we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divides all of you from us."
"I set it down clearly that in this Western world there are essentially two peoples as spiritual forces, only two human sections with essential meaning - jew and gentile."
"I can only affirm—to the Jews, in the main, belongs the Jewish life-force, a consistent and coherent force, a direction in human thought and reaction. To you others belongs the gentile life-force, a mode of life and thought distinct from ours."
"Essentially our prophetic books cannot change your gentile nature: but in stray, predestined hearts they bring forth fruit. Your outlook on life, your dominant reactions, are the same to-day as they were two thousand years ago."
"As a few gentiles have spoken in Jewish tones, so more than one Jew speaks the language of the gentile... Yet the cleavage is there, abysmal and undeniable. In the main, we are forever distinct. Ours is one life, yours is another."
"Because I have mingled intimately with the jewish world and the gentile world, I know well how easily exceptions obscure the rule: but I know just as well the unsounded abyss between us."
"I do not believe that this primal difference between gentile and Jew is reconciliable. You and we may come to an understanding, never to a reconciliation."
"Christianity (the reality, not the credo) is not a variant of Judaism, whatever Christ or his chroniclers may have in-tended. Your nature is the same to-day as it was before the advent of Christianity."
This man's style of writing is so dull... I'm just going to have to put the bits I find interesting as to not bore you to death.
"Your spirit is sport: particularly your young men, who are not yet absorbed in the struggle for existence, and whose emotions are therefore for the largest part free, must find in sport, in games, in contests, the most satisfactory expression of their instincts."
"Your attitude toward combat (duels, wars) and all the virtues pertaining to it, is one from which we shrink. To you courage is an end in itself, to be glorified, worshiped, as imparting morality to an act. To us, courage is merely a means to an end."
"I do not find in the Bible delight in war and warriors. Our exultation in victory was not the glorification of the warrior, but only a fierce joy at having survived. We fought bitterly, vindictively, in order to kill: and our God was a God of war."
"The splendor of war, in preparation and in action and in recollection, in the rhythm of training armies, in the frantic excitement of battle, in the glorious commemoration of monument and song and tapestry, is the flower of your civilization, material and spiritual."
"In the eyes of a pietist, a Jew who does not follow the rules and regulations of the synagogue, who even denies all dogma is not a non-Jew: he is a bad Jew, a sinful and rebellious Jew."
"in the Jew, nation and people and faculties and culture and God are all one. We do not say: “I am a Jew,” meaning, “I am a member of this nationality”:"
"Because I am Jewish I look with ultimate aversion on the world which finds supreme and ideal expression in Plato’s Republic."
Morality
"Your loyalty has nothing to do with ultimate moral values. It is part of the game—and life is to you a game, on the football field, in the college, in the factory, on the battlefield."
"In the synagogue all is disorder; we talk during service; we answer out of turn; and when we answer in mass one begins earlier, another ends later;"
"This blaring of trumpets, this beating of the drums, this Left-Right-Left-Right, rhythmic, snappy form-fours, this intoxication of united mass movement, which sends you gentiles frantic with excitement is a laughable exhibition to us. "Foolish gentiles!" we say contemptuously."
"Every member of that country is a member of the team, must take the good with the bad, must pay the debts contracted by government. It cannot be a nation otherwise."
"I say, therefore, that in the conflict between us you have fought us physically, while our attack on your world has been in the spiritual field."
"We are a disturbing influence in your life not through our own fault. First: we are not in your midst by our own will, but through your action; and second (which is more to the point) : we do not attack you deliberately."
"No Jew, however modern, or radical, is acceptable to the anti-Semite. It is now a racial question."
"Our ability to imitate extends only to inessentials, appearances, surface desires and ambitions. We fail to be gentiles."
"We modern Jews of the Western world are in this fundamentally different from you."
"If anything, you must learn (and are learning) to dislike and fear the modern and “assimilated’’ Jew more than you did the old Jew, for he is more dangerous to you."
"Because your chief institution is the social structure itself, it is in this that we are most manifestly destroyers."
"In everything we are destroyers—even in the instruments of destruction to which we turn for relief."
"We jews, we the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing that you do will meet our needs and demands. We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world which it is not in your nature to build..."
"Religions change their gods, but remain the same religions. The atheist gentile has made Science his god, but it has not changed his religion."
"Whatever in you can be imitated, we do imitate admirably, but though you cannot quite define it, you are aware of a deception."
"Our geniuses, in the midst of your world, are an alien and destructive element, more clearly revealed as such because they are articulate. They are our spokesmen; or, better said, ourselves in utterance."
"If there is anything in what I have said you cannot make a gentile of a Jew by arguing with him any more than by lynching him. You can make his children half gentile, his grandchildren only a quarter Jewish—and so on till the balance is perfect."
"the proportionate Judaization of your world. It is unthinkable so vivid an element as the Jewish people should be absorbed into your world without producing an appreciable alteration in its constitution. A world that has absorbed the Jews will to that extent be a Jewish world."
"We cannot assimilate: it is so humiliating to us that we become contemptible in submitting to the process: it is so exasperating to you that, even if we were willing to submit, it would avail us nothing."
"If, then, the struggle between us is ever to be lifted beyond the physical, your democracies will have to alter their demands for racial, spiritual and cultural homogeneity within the State."
"I submit the Jew as an exception. The Jew has no homeland of his own. When the Jew migrates from one country to another, it is almost invariably under pressure of persecution. To close the gate against the Jew is not the same, then, as closing it against the Italian or Pole."
"Whatever we do we are damned—and I would rather be damned standing up than lying down."
