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THE PERSECUTION
OF
THE JEWS.
PART I.
BY
SALADIN.
[reprinted from “the secular
review.”]
London :
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON St., E.C.
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THE
PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
Through circumstances intrinsic and extrinsic, the Jews
occupy the position of the most remarkable people in
the world’s history. It is a far cry from Abraham to
Moses Montefiore, from Miriam to Sarah Bernhardt,
from David to Disraeli; but between these pillars on
the left and right horizon of history there is not a single
gap w’here the Jewish people had ceased to be—a single
breach in the invulnerable line of the Jewish nationality
and faith. The Jews alone, as a distinct and specialised
race, link the dim morning of the Past with the mid-day
warmth of the Present. We have now no Chaldeans,
no Assyrians, no Persians, no Egyptians, no Greeks, no
Romans, as history knew them in the ages of their power
and pride. But the Jew of ancient Ai and Jericho is
the Jew of modern Houndsditch and Petticoat Lane.
The Nathan with whom you pledge your finger ring has
the blood, the features, and the faith of the Abraham
who dwelt in Ur of the Chaldees. The ancient Greek,
in spite of his art, has perished ; the ancient Roman,
in spite of his arms, has vanished from the earth ; but
the monotheistic sept of Syrian shepherds survive long
after the last hour of the Greek epic and the Roman
legion has been struck on the clock of Time. Nearly
one-third of the inhabitants of the globe, the Christians
and Mohammedans combined, are indebted for their
religion to this primitive tribe of husbandmen and cattle
drovers.
Our Bible is a surviving shred of their ancient litera
ture ; and, on the maternal side, their blood flowed in
the veins of the Redeemer. They have survived, while
the most indestructible tower, temple, and monument
in their Palestine have crumbled into undistinguishable
�4
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
ruin. Lost among the nations of the earth, as a drop
of water is lost in a bucketful, they yet retain their in
flexible individuality. The God of Jacob is still their
God, the Mighty One of Israel their rock and stay ; and,
through a perfect hell-fire of persecution, burning through
the centuries, they have passed, impervious as a sheet of
asbestos to the fierce flame-forks of the furnace. For
eighteen centuries they have been strangers in a strange
land, repudiating the Messiahship of the Son of Mary,
and waiting, with patience unalterable and faith invincible,
for the coming of Shiloh.
Not only is Judaism the root from which Christianity
has sprung, but the first Christian preachers in the Roman
empire were Jews, with whom it seemed that Judaism
and Christianism were reconcilable. They practised the
rite of circumcision, and, like their fathers, conformed
to the Mosaic law, and moulded the polity of the Chris
tian Church upon that of the Jewish synagogue. But
the conservatism of Judaism on the one hand, and the
obstinacy of Christian fanaticism on the other, soon led
to the parting of the ways. A council was held at
Jerusalem about the year 49 a.d., which forever divorced
Judaism and Christianity, and left them, as regarded
each other, in an attitude of aversion, which it needed
only time to ripen into one of implacable hostility.
Originally, all that was necessary for a Jew who desired
to enter the Christian fold was to admit that he believed
Jesus Christ to be the promised Messiah, and, as an
outward seal to this admission, submit to the rite of
baptism. But immediately the Hebrew race perceived
that the Messiah who competed for their suffrages did
not establish a temporal kingdom for the people of
Israel, they would have none of him. Instead of any
prospect of imperial ascendancy, they saw Jerusalem
compassed about with armies, and the prospect of the
legions of Vespatian blotting the kingdom of David and
Solomon out of the map of the world. And, if any
further barrier were wanted to completely arrest the
ingress of the Jews into the Christian Church, the
doctrine of the Trinity furnished that barrier. The
Christian constructed his three-pronged God out of
sundry shreds and patches, in order that that God might
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
5
be all things to all men. He was three to win over
Roman Polytheism ; he was one to conciliate Jewish
Monotheism. But the arithmetical juggle pleased none,
except those in the inner circle, and who had vested
interests in its propagation. The Romans declined to
accept this numerical puzzle in the place of their three
¿Zzz majores ; and the Jews, whose devotion to the
Monotheistic principle amounted to fanaticism, objected
to see their one and indivisible living and true God
split up into a sort of breakfast-fork, with three prongs.
And before, under Constantine, Christianity had mounted
the throne of the Caesars, the Jews had washed their
hands of it forever. It takes thousands of pounds
now-a-days to convert a single Jew, as the statistics of
Christian missions among them testify; and even when
this Jew is converted, he turns out such a questionable
specimen that his fellow-Christians have to keep their eye
upon him, lest he should steal the communion plate or
skedaddle with the trappings of the altar.
Down through all their ancient history, full of blood
and tenderness, guilt and simplicity, we are constrained
to follow the Jews with an absorption of interest such as
the readers of the world have never extended to the
primitive annals of any other people whatsoever. I am
exceptionally interested in all their crimes and follies,
and in their wars and amours, whose fringes are illumed
by a poetic halo in all that lies between the blood-soaked
grass of Esdrselon and the heads of yellow grain that
gleamed among the fingers of Ruth as she gleaned in
the field of Boaz. But the interest reaches a point of
dark and terrible intensity when the dial of Time
indicates that it is 1,130 years, seven months, and fifteen
days from the laying of the foundation of the Temple
by Solomon. Then it was that the kingdom of Judah
expired in a convulsion of fire and gore, and threw the
remnant of her desolate children upon the tender
mercies of all the nations of a hostile world. My lip
has quivered, and tears have coursed down my cheeks,
as, in the pages of their own Josephus, my blood
has alternately curdled and boiled in the contemplation
of the colossal and tragic tableau when the fire, leaping
and roaring over the roof of the holy of holies, threw a
�6
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
light, lurid and unearthly, up the slope of Calvary and
Olivet and the hills that encompassed Jerusalem.
What mystical terror, portent, and prodigy hushed the
earth and air during the year that preceded the siege by
Titus ? Who can withhold his sympathy from the race
of old whom their God had, at last, forsaken, who no
longer guided them with the cloud and the pillar of
flame ? No longer did the schekincih, the visible symbol
of the invisible God of the Hebrews, glow between the
cherubim. But, on the eighth of the month Xanthicus,
’ at the ninth hour of the night, for full half-an-hour, a
light, which was not the light of the God of Jacob,
lingered over the altar while the Passover was being
celebrated, bursting in upon the blackness of night with
a radiance baleful and terrible. The clouds were full of
chariots and armed men, while the wind was sobbing
with cries of pain and waving the garments on the limbs
of the dead. And, for a full year—fearful omen of
doom—over Jerusalem a comet lay weirdly across the
sky—a comet shaped like a sword. Its hilt was bloody
red, and its blade streamed away in tracks of illimitable
fire. The portents beheld by the Ancient People were
not in vain: the Roman conquered—Jerusalem fell;
the glory of Judea and the world is a chaos of corpses
and cinders and death. Scorched black from the con
flagration of their Temple, and wet-shod in the blood
of their own kindred, a remnant escaped to wail, for
century upon century, that the Temple was no more.
*
* On the Passover night, in the houses of many of the Jews, it
has been observed that, as soon as the out-doors are set open, and
the master of the house hath uttered these passages of Scripture—
namely, Psalms lxxix. 6, lxix. 24, and Lam. iii. 66—some one slips
cunningly, as if he would not be seen, into the room where they
sup, clad in linen, or other extraordinary vestments, to the end the
children may believe that Elias is present, while the company
perform the ordinary closing religious offices at table, concluding
all with the following most singular prayer for the rebuilding of
the Temple :—“ Almighty God, now speedily and quickly build
thy temple ; quickly in our days, out of hand ; now build it, now
build it, now build it, now build it, now speedily build thy temple.
Merciful God, great God, gentle God, highest God, good God,
sweet God, excellent God, God of the Jews, speedily restore thy
temple ; quickly, quickly, in our days ; now build it, now build it,
now build it, now quickly build thy temple. Powerful God, living
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
7
The winds of winter were kinder than the Gentiles to
the now scattered remnant of the People of God :—
“ Oh, where shall Israel lave her bleeding feet ?
And when shall Zion’s songs again seem sweet ?
The wild-dove hath her nest, the fox his cave,
Mankind their country—Israel but the grave.”
For 300 years Christianity waged a tooth-and-nail
battle for existence. Toleration was such in the Roman
empire that no religious sect was prosecuted in its
capacity as a religious sect. But Christianity was prose
cuted, not for its tenets, but for its crimes. Its votaries
were the off-scourings of the human race—the Cat-andLadleites of Asia Minor. Their feebly-treasonable
ravings about Jesus being a king Rome could afford to
sneer at; but when the lascivious rabble, in their Agapes,
indulged in secret but fiendish rites, involving murder,
incest, and promiscuous sexual intercourse, in defence
of the lives and morals of her citizens, Rome stepped
in with the scourge of punishment; and, if certain of
the Christian miscreants were burnt to death, they were
consumed in a fire less baleful than that of their own
lasciviousness ; and they were never torn to pieces by
wild beasts who were such ignoble beasts as they were
themselves
Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, found it
politically expedient to clothe this maniacal rabblement
with the purple of power. It was meet that Constan
tine, one of history’s thorough-paced villains, and the
murderer of his own wife and son, should be the first
Christian Emperor. And, further, it was meet that the
Salvation Army, made up of the roughs, not of to-day,
but of eighteen centuries ago, should hasten to dip
their foul hands in human blood. In the Jews they
saw the descendants of those who had slain Christ, and,
accordingly, against this inoffensive people they directed
the full fury of persecution. Even if it were true that, some
God, mighty God, famous God, mild God, eternal God, terrible
God, choicest God, royal God, rich God, beautiful God, faithful
God, now speedily restore thy temple : quickly, quickly, in our
days ; speedily, quickly ; now build it, now build it, now build it,
now build it ; now quickly build thy temple.”—Bradshaw’s
“Josephus,” pp. 551, 552, note. •
�8
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
three centuries earlier, the Jews had executed the halffabulous Christ, what then ? It is alleged that Christ
came from heaven for the express purpose of being
crucified, and surely the Christians should have felt
themselves under a heavy obligation to the Jews for
crucifying him. According to their theory, if he had
not been crucified, the world would have been lost. In
fact, to what is called “ the Christian scheme of salva
tion ” Judas Iscariot was as necessary as Jesus Christ
himself. But, with the consistency for which the Chris
tians have always been remarkable, and the benevolence
for which they have ever been distinguished, they set
themselves to persecuting and slaughtering the Jews,
although they owed the wondrous birth of their Christ
to a Jewish woman, and the atoning death of their
Christ to a Jewish betrayer. They assailed the
Hebrew and other heretics “ with stones, and other
manifestations of rage.” Rather an apt way this was, it
must be admitted, of following “ the meek and lowly
Jesus,” who flogged certain parties out of the Temple
with knotted cords ! A brick or paving stone describ
ing a parabola has ever been, and forever must remain,
one of the most convincing of Christian arguments. A
paving stone, as a projectile, carries more syllogistic
reasoning about it than does a polemical burlesque like
Paley’s “ Evidences.” Brains incapable of the reception
of Christian truth should be beaten out with a brick
bat, so that the Lord be glorified.
Constantine, the debauchee and murderer, permitted
his Christians to hurl stones at the Jews ; but should a
Jew, by way of self-defence or retaliation, throw a stone
at a Christian, that Jew would be forthwith tied to the
nearest stake, fuel would be piled round him and ignited,
and, amid Christian jeer and hiss and yell, the descen
dant of Abraham would be burned to a cinder in the
name of his own fatal countryman, Jesus of Nazareth.
When the Roman Empire fell to pieces there was plenty
of ignorance, the very kind of manure upon which the
upas-tree of Christianity grows most rankly. The follower
of the Lamb was absorbed in superstitious monkery and
brutalising militarism : he was either bending his servile
knee at a shrine or having his few brains knocked out
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
9
in a fight. And these ignorant swaggerers of crucifix
and dagger had, as is the rule, conceit commensurate
with their ignorance. They, in their own opinion, were
the salt of the earth. The poor visionary and fanatic
who was a carpenter and a god had come down specially
from heaven to offer for them a sacrifice of blood, and
they took care to offer him a sacrifice of blood in return :
their lips were ever uttering credos, and their swords were
ever red.
The Jews, encouraged and abetted by the Saracens,
kept Europe from receding to absolute military barbar
ism and the cultus of the Galilee fishermen. “The
intellectual activity of the Asiatic and African Jews soon
communicated an impulse to those of Europe. The
Hebrew doctor was viewed by the vulgar with wonder,
fear, and hatred ; no crime could be imputed to him
too incredible. Thus Zedekias, the physician to Charles
the Bold, was asserted to have devoured at one meal, in
the presence of the court, a waggon-load of hay, together
with its horses and driver. The titles of some of the
works that appeared among them deserve mention, as
displaying a strong contrast with the mystical designa
tions in vogue. Thus Isaac Ben Soleiman, an Egyptian,
wrote ‘ On Fevers,’ ‘ On Medicine,’ ‘ On Food and Reme
dies,’ ‘ On the Pulse,’ ‘ On Philosophy,’ ‘ On Melancholy,’
‘An Introduction to Logic.’ The simplicity of these
titles displays an intellectual clearness and a precision of
thought which have ever been shown by the Israelites.
Since it was by the power and patronage of the Saracens
that the Jewish physicians were acting, it is not surprising
that the language used in many of their compositions
was Arabic. Translations were, however, commonly
made into Hebrew, and, at a subsequent period, into
Latin. Through the ninth century the Asiatic colleges
maintained their previous celebrity in certain branches
of knowledge. Thus the Jew, Shabtai Donolo, was
obliged to go to Bagdad to complete his studies in
astronomy. As Arabian influence extended itself into
Sicily and Italy, Jewish intelligence accompanied it, and
schools were founded at Tarentum, Salerno, Bari, and
other places. Here the Arab and Jew Orientalists first
amalgamated with a truly European element—the Greek
�IO
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS
—as is shown by the circumstance that in the college at
Salerno instruction was given through the medium of all
three languages. At one time Pontus taught in Greek,
Abdallah in Arabic, and Elisha in Hebrew. A similar
influence of the Arab and Jew, combined, founded the
University of Montpellier.”*
But what university did Christianity found ? Its uni
versity, if it had founded one, would have had four
chairs—Ignorance, Devotion, Cruelty, and Lust. “ Mahommedanism had all along been the patron of physical
science ; paganising Christianity not only repudiated it,
but exhibited towards it sentiments of contemptuous
disdain and hatred. Hence physicians were viewed by
the Church with dislike, and regarded as Atheists by the
people, who held firmly to the lessons they had been
taught, that cures must be wrought by relics of martyrs
and bones of saints, by prayers and intercessions, and
that each region of the body was under some spiritual
charge—the first joint of the right thumb being in the
care of God the Father, the second under that of the
blessed Virgin, and so on of other parts. For each
disease there was a saint. A man with sore eyes must
invoke St. Clara; but, if it were an inflammation else
where, he must turn to St. Anthony. An ague would
demand the assistance of St. Pernel. For the propi
tiating of these celestial beings it was necessary that fees
should be paid, and thus the practice of imposture
medicine became a great source of profit.”+
On far other bases did the subtle and thoughtful
Hebrew build his system of therapeutics. “ In the
eleventh century nearly all the physicians in Europe
were Jews. This was due to two different causes : the
Church would tolerate no interference with her spiritual
methods of treating disease, which formed one of her
most productive sources of gain ; and the study of medi
cine had been formally introduced into the rabbinical
schools. The monk was prohibited a pursuit which
gave to the rabbi an honourable emolument. If thus
* “The Intellectual Development of Europe,” vol. ii., pp.
120, 121.
+ Ibid, vol. ii., pp. 121, 122.
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
II
the social condition of the rabbis, who drew no income
from their religious duties, induced them to combine
the practice of medicine with their pursuits, great facili
ties had arisen for mental culture through the establish
ment of so many schools. Henceforth the Jewish phy
sician is recognised as combining with his professional
skill a profound knowledge of theology, mathematics,
astronomy, philosophy, music, law. In a singular manner
he stands aloof in the barbarian societies among whom
he lives, looking down like a philosopher upon their
idolatries—permitting, or even excusing, them, like a
statesman. Of those who thus adorned the eleventh
century was Rabbi Solomon Ben Isaac, better known
under the abbreviation Raschi—called by his country
men the Prince of Commentators. He was equally at
home in writing commentaries on the Talmud, or in
giving instructions for great surgical operations, as the
Cæsarean section. He was the greatest French physi
cian of his age.
“ Spain, during the same century, produced a worthy
competitor to him, Ebn Zohr, physician to the court of
Seville. His writings were in Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and
both in prose and verse. He composed a treatise on the
cure of diseases, and two on fevers. In singular contrast
with the superstitious notions of the times, he possessed
a correct view of the morbific nature of marsh miasm.
He was followed by Ben Ezra, a Jew of Toledo, who
was at once a physician, philosopher, mathematician,
astronomer, critic, poet. He travelled all over Europe
and Asia, being held in captivity for some time in India.
Among his medical writings was a work on theoretical
and practical medicine, entitled ‘ Book of Proofs.’
Through the wars arising in Spain between the Moham
medans and Christians, many learned Jews were driven
into France, imparting to that country, by their presence,
a new intellectual impulse. Of such were Aben Tybbon,
who gave to his own profession a pharmaceutical ten
dency by insisting on the study of botany and the art of
preparing drugs. Ben Kimchi, a Narbonnese physician
and grammarian, wrote commentaries on the Bible,
sacred and moral poems, a Hebrew grammar. Not
withstanding the opposition of the ecclesiastics, William,
�12
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
the Lord of Montpellier, passed an edict authorising all
persons, without exception, to profess medicine in the
university of his city. This was specially meant for the
relief of the Jews, though expressed in a general way.
Spain, though she had thus lost many of her learned
men, still continued to produce others of which she
had reason to be proud.
“ Moussa Ben Maimon, known all over Europe as
Maimonides, was recognised by his countrymen as ‘the
Doctor, the Great Sage, the Glory of the West, the
Light of the East, second only to Moses.’ He is often
designated by the four initials, ‘ R. M. B. M.’—that is,
Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, or, briefly, Rambam. His
biography presents some points of interest. He was born
at Cordova a.d. 1135, and, while yet young, wrote com
mentaries on the Taimuds, both of Babylon and Jeru
salem, and also a work on the Calendar ; but, embracing
Mohammedanism, he emigrated to Egypt, and there
became physician to the celebrated Sultan, Saladin.
Among his works are medical aphorisms, derived from
former Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic sources; an
abridgment of Galen ; and of his original treatises, which
were very numerous, may be mentioned those ‘ On
Hemorrhoids,’ ‘ On Poisons and Antidotes,’ ‘ On Asthma,’
‘ On the Preservation of Health ’ (the latter being written
for the benefit of the son of Saladin), ‘On the Bites of
Venomous Animals’ (written by order of the Sultan),
‘On Natural History.’ His ‘ Moreh Nevochim,’ or
‘Teacher of the Perplexed,’ was an attempt to reconcile
the doctrines of the Old Testament with reason. In
addition to these, he had a book on Idolatry, and one
on Christ. Besides Maimonides, the Sultan had another
physician, Ebn Djani, the author of a work on the
medical topography of the city of Alexandria. From the
biographies of these learned men of the twelfth century
it would seem that their religious creed hung lightly upon
them. Not unfrequently they became converted to
Mohammedanism.”*
Meanwhile the Christians were progressing satisfac
torily in divinity and dirt. They called themselves
Ibid, vol. ii., pp. 122, 123, 124.
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
13
followers of the Lamb; followers of the Skunk would
have been more appropriate. They did not build, like
the Saracens and Jews, museums, observatories, colleges,
and hospitals ; but they built monasteries for lewd and
lazy monks, and they built convents which were fre
quently only ecclesiastical brothels. They also built
castles to harbour tyrants, dungeons to incarcerate
heretics, and fires to roast them. The laity were as
ignorant as bullocks, and most of the clergy could not
even read. Their learning lay in the discussion of such
questions as whether Adam, having had no mother, had a
navel, and whether Christ, when chewed and swallowed
in the sacramental bread, was digestible or not.
By the middle of the fourteenth century Christian
dirt and offal converted much of Western Europe into a
sepulchre. Cleanliness is next to godliness ; but Christ
endom stuck so fast to godliness that it never approached
the virtue that lay next to it. To describe the houses
and streets of the fourteenth century, in Christian coun
tries, would be an outrage upon modern credence.
Thirteen centuries of Jesus, Paul, neo-Platonism, Popery,
and Aristotle had converted some of the finest countries
of the world into a hideous arena, which was, at one and
the same time, a dunghill and a battle-field. On the dung
hill the rank grubs and maggots stood on end and gored
and smashed each other to death, in the name of some
more exalted maggot whom they yclept a king. As if
filth and stench did not furnish the tomb fast enough,
sword and dagger were called in to assist. And they
burned villages and towns till the glare reddened heaven
as if from the conflagration of Sodom or hell, and they
blared on brass and rattled on sheep-skin over desolation
and suffering and slaughter and garments rolled in blood.
And over all the infernal clang rang the bells of the
abbey and convent; and abbot and monk, in the name
of him of Nazareth, blessed the dirty demons who
had succeeded in adding most corpses to an already
putrescent world. Stinks were in perfection, rags were
in all their glory, and lice in their billions and trillions
bade fair to eat man off the face of the globe and take
it to themselves. They had eaten the human skin into
putrid holes and festering sores. Their principal diffi
�14
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
culty lay in penetrating the dirt with which the skin was
covered. Not unfrequently a coat of tar was laid on the
top of the other dirt for the express purpose of prevent
ing the tarred one from being devoured by vermin.
Europe did three things only: it scratched itself, it cut
its neighbour’s throat, and it prayed. Christianity was
then in her golden prime—no “ Infidels ” then—and
Ignorance was in the zenith of her pride. The priest
bestrode the world like a colossus. The destinies of
mankind hung from the rope that bound the gaberdine
of the monk. God had it all his own way, and proved
himself the God of battles—and dunghills. Everywhere
there were sanctity and stench, prayers and putrescence,
matins and middens, vespers and vermin, deity and
dirt, Jesus and jaundice.
Out from among the hideous rottenness to which I
have alluded stalked The Black Death. Christianity
did not attribute to the jakes, but to the Jews, this visita
tion of the Destroying Angel. The premonitions the
Angel gave were shivering, sickness, and headache. These
were frequently followed by delirium and a place in the
trench-grave before you were quite cold, or even quite
dead. Dying and grave-digging came to be the principal
industry in many parts of Italy, Switzerland, France, and
Germany. The dying and the grave-digging were often
performed by the same person in the same day. In the
morning you drove the loaded dead-cart; before the
evening, swollen and blotched with black spots, you,
with a number of others, were tumbled into the burial
trench amid the grating of spades and a blinding cloud
of quick-lime.
It was Death’s harvest day, and, with his scythe, he
laid low the ripe and the green. According to recent
and careful estimates by the great German physician,
Hecker, the number who died of the Black Death during
the six years of its continuance amounted to twenty-five
millions, or the fourth part of the then inhabitants of
Europe. In many large towns more than half the popu
lation perished under the visitation of the plague. The
malady first broke out in Italy in 1348, and, in a few
months, Florence had lost 60,000, Siena 70,000, and
Venice 100,000 inhabitants. In Naples man and
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
15
beast perished together under the breath of the pesti
lence.
Like the millennial mania, and every other scourge to
Europe, the Black Death was quite a god-send to the
Christian Church. The priests of the poor Galilean who
had not where to lay his head exulted in untold wealth
and boundless luxury. Every person of means who
found the hand of the Black Death upon him, or in
anticipation of its being laid upon him, rushed to
cathedral, convent, or abbey, and gave all he had to the
Lord, that it might be well with his soul when his body
lay in the dead-cart. In the ever-open and insatiable
grave many beheld the punishment for their sins and the
retributive vengeance of an angry God. Many were of
opinion that Satan had been let loose by the Almighty
to take the souls of half Europe to the abode of the
damned. Many, on the other hand, were not ready to
admit that they had perpetrated sins so heinous as to
j'ustify a special outpouring of the vials of Divine wrath ;
and they laid the whole blame of the Black Death at the
door of the Jews. What gave some colour and pretext
to this terrible suspicion of the guilt of Israel was the
fact that comparatively very few of the Jews were swept
away by the plague. Because their social morals and the
sanitary arrangements of their food and their homes were
cleanliness itself compared with those of the Christians,
they were comparatively impervious to the ravages of the
pestilence. From the chaos of Christian ignorance,
death, and filth, the cry arose that the Jews had put
poison in the springs and wells of Europe, and the sword
and torch of Christian fanaticism and hate shed the
blood and burnt the homes of the ancient people of
God. Staggering on the edge of the grave, dirt intro
ducing them through death to dirt, they yet had time to
mix up their terrified hymns and agonised prayers with
butchering their Jewish fellow-citizens and burning their
homes with the old man, the maiden, and the sucking
child.
�
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THE PERSECUTION
OF
THE JEWS
I
PART II.
BY
SALADIN.
[REPRINTED FROM
“THE SECULAR REVIEW.”]
London:
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON St., E.C.
��13 30*7^
NJ S9
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
THE
PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
The sphere of Jewish persecution has been so wide, and
has extended over such a long period of time, that the
limits of a brief and discursive paper demand that I
should content myself with a specimen instance or two
of the injustice and cruelty to which the Christians sub
jected the people of Israel. I turn to Strasburg in the
fourteenth century. One of the principal streets in the town
is still pointed out as having been formerly inhabited, like
Old Jewry in London, by Jews exclusively. Five hundred
years ago, at the period of the Black Death, that street
of the Jews presented a far other aspect. It consisted
of two parallel rows of high narrow houses that, as they
ascended from the street, storey after storey, bulged out
and approached each other, till, at the topmost storey,
they almost met. The street was nearly dark, even on
the brightest day, and, looking up, you could see, far over
head, only a thin line of sky. At the corner, where yonnow find the houses numbered 31 and 32 respectively,
stood the synagogue. And the houses opposite stand
on the site of the ancient burial ground which five
hundred years ago gave rest to the exiled sons and
daughters of Israel. All the Jews in Strasburg, num
bering about 2,000, lived in this street.
No street
in the town then opened into this.
It was a cul~d&sac, or turn-again-lane, with facilities for ingress or
egress at one end only, when a huge gate with strong
iron bars was flung open. This gate was closed every
evening, and opened every morning, with the ex
ception of Sundays and holidays, when the grim portal
stood closed all day, lest the Christian city, in its religious
�4
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
solemnities, should be desecrated by the presence of a
Jew.
Tidings reached the Jew street of the terrible perse
cution of their brethren elsewhere because of their sup
posed conspiracy to sweep the Christians off the earth
by poisoning the springs of Europe. Every day the
followers of Christ came to the great gate and leered and
howled at the people of Israel, and threatened vengeance
and thirsted for blood. The Jews well knew that they
were a despised and hated handful in this city of the
stranger; and they howled back no defiance in return.
Centuries of tribulation had taught them that, among
those with whom they sojourned, a very slender pretext
was needed to shed the blood and seize the gold of
Israel. A terrible pretext—-one they were not likely to
let slip—presented itself to the followers of the Lamb.
The Black Death was thrusting them into the grave in
myriads, whole tracts of country were depopulated, and
vessels were at sea, with rich cargoes, with captain and
crew all corpses ; literally—
“ Ships were drifting with the dead
To shores where all was dumb.”
And a dark suspicion had seized the Christian mind that
the Jews were at the bottom of all this : they had killed
the Christ, and now they had set about exterminating
his followers.
Centuries of unprecedented misfortunes as a people
had taught the sons and daughters of Abraham the
virtues of a sublime, even if desperate, resolution. There
was no panic, no stampede. The men quietly waited
or the inevitable, and the women had learnt howto meet
rheir fate without hysterical screams. Home, synagogue,
and sepulchre were all in the one street: in that street they
lived, and in that street they must die. A cloud bigger
than a man’s hand had already gathered on the horizon
of their fortunes. It was lurid with lightning and black
with thunder ; but there was nowhere to flee to escape
from its impending discharge. Over their heads in
Strasburg gathered the mists of death ; but whither in all
the wide world could they go where the earth would be
green and the sky would be blue for them ? They lived
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
5
on sufferance everywhere, and wherever they went they
owed the miserable boon of existence to the contemp
tuous toleration of their enemies.
Heroic even to stoicism, brave even to desperation,
the Jews were still much out of harmony with the ram
pant and zealous militarism of Europe. They who had
fought and bled under Joshua, Saul, and the Maccabees
might have been charged with merciless ferocity, but
never with craven cowardice.
But, ever since the
destruction of their Holy City, the valiant sons of
valiant sires had applied themselves to the cultivation of
the interests of commerce and the arts of peace. And
for this, amid the mad militarism of Christendom, they
were contemned and despised. I understand all the
glory of chivalry, all the romance of war. I have recited
Homer and Scott till the blood rushed to my cheeks in
absolute flame; and with my cane for a sword, and the
ragweeds, thistles, and dog-roses for an enemy, I have
slashed and stabbed and sent their truncated fragments
flying to the four winds of heaven. I myself have tuned
the lyre of Tyrtseus, till, leading an imaginary forlorn
hope, I, once, as the hour of midnight struck, dashed
over the rampart of a feudal ruin, and, plunging to the
neck into the water and mud of the ancient fosse,
struggled through, with clenched teeth, to the battered
and ivy-mantled walls. Never the soldier’s blood burned
fiercer in human veins than it has done in mine ; never
mortal born better understood the fascination that lies
in “ the pomp and circumstance of glorious war ” and
the sublime excitement of toeing the narrow and bloody
line that lies between life and laurels and death and
damnation.
Consequently, my sympathy with the peaceful and non
military character of the Jews does not proceed from the
absence of that ardour within me to which the military
spirit can appeal. But sober sense says that there is no
splendour of achievement that can light up the darkness
of desolation, and nothing that man can win by the
sword that can compensate for the horrors of a single
campaign. Priestcraft appeals to man in his imbecility;
War to man in his delirium. O that Time could, at one
bound, rape ten thousand years from Eternity, and that
�6
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
the sun might look down and, at last, behold man neither
imbecile nor delirious ! The arm that tingles as I write
tells me that in the dance of Death I could be the mad
dest of the mad ; and yet how unspeakably mad is he who,
on the modern battle-field, blazes away out of a ditch and
over a mound of earth, till the bursting of a shell, in the
twinkling of an eye, dashes him into suitable stuffing for
a sausage, his blood and clothes and brain and viscera
splashed around for yards. The most distinguished of
war correspondents* wrote thus from a modern battle
field : “ Let your readers fancy masses of coloured rags
glued together with blood and brains and pinned into
strange shapes by fragments of bones. Let them con
ceive men’s bodies without heads, legs without bodies,
heaps of human entrails attached to red and blue cloth,
and disembowelled corpses in uniform, bodies lying about
in all attitudes with skulls shattered, faces blown off, hips
smashed, bones, flesh, and gay clothing all pounded together
as if brayedin a mortar, extending for miles....... and then
they cannot, with the most vivid imagination, come up
to the sickening reality of that butchery.” It is to the
honour and not to the shame of the Jews that they have
contributed little to the carnage of ancient, mediaeval, or
modern Christendom.
The Plague had not yet shown itself in Strasburg ; but
the report of it had spread terror, and the suspicion that
the Jews were responsible for it terribly imperilled that
peaceful and much-suffering people. Angry groups of
soldiers clashed and brandished their swords at the great
gate of the Jewish street, and furious mobs began to
surge around it, hissing and leering at the people who
had slain the “blessed Lord,” and thirsting for blood
and plunder, from which the civic authorities were with
difficulty able to restrain them. At length, in January,
1349, the authorities had to yield to the ignorant fury
and racial and religious antipathies of the mob. The
bishop and city dignitaries issued a decree to banish
every Jew in Strasburg.
The sentence of banish
ment was equivalent to the sentence of death, for those
against whom the sentence had been passed knew
of no region of the world that would give rest and
protection to their exiled race. They might as well die
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
7
at Strasburg as elsewhere. The sword, the scaffold, and
the river were had recourse to in carrying out the edict
of banishment.
Driven to desperation, from time to
time groups of the doomed people took every man his
sword, and, falling upon the Christian oppressor, sold their
lives full dearly. The Christians hewed their pathway
down the street against all opposition, and, galled by the
fierce but ineffectual resistance of the Jewish sword, they
applied the torch to several of the buildings, and burnt
them and their inmates to death—man, woman, and
child. Six Jews in particular were publicly tried and
executed on the charge of having poisoned the wells.
But this mere sip could not pacify the Cerberus of Chris
tian bigotry and hate. Christianity, even from the
childhood of its Lord, had laid much superstitious stress
on dreams and visions. The dream voice that said,
“ Flee with the young child into Egypt, for Herod will
seek to take his life,” again spoke in the long, assinine
ear of credulity and ignorance. This time it spake to
numbers of the inhabitants of Strasburg, and warned
them that it was the will of God that they should kill
and stay their Jewish fellow-citizens. Sleeping on your
back when you should sleep on your side is apt to give
you visions from heaven or—the other place. Sleep
while your gastric juice is busy at work on a hard-boiled
egg, and the cloudy feet of God or the club feet of Satan
are pretty sure to stand on the vantage-ground of that said
egg and make terrible the realm of “ Chaos and old
Night.” Who would not be a Christian and be privi
leged to mistake the promptings of an indigestible radish
for a dream message from the lips of the Almighty !
Finding that the Jews had poisoned the water, the
Christians, of course, could not drink it. They took to
drinking their own fiery liquors which adumbrage so
beautifully their own fiery lake. And, reeling drunk (no
religionists in the world drink like Christians), they had
further visions and monitions from heaven that it was
their duty to make short work of the descendants of those
who had “ slain the Lord of Glory.” It was resolved
that every Jew must become a Christian, or at once be
Dr. Russell of the Times, writing from the battle field of Sedan.
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
thrust down to hell at the point of the Christian sword.
Sober, rational, discriminating judgment never made a
Christian in this world, and never will till the end of
time. Fanaticism and Terror made Christianity, and
mental and moral laziness prevented her from being
unmade. A fanaticism in favour of Christianity could
not be got up at Strasburg; but there were plenty of
swords and plenty of Christian scoundrels to wield them,
and a terror could soon be inaugurated in the interests
of the most cut-throat faith that ever cursed the race of
man. Full of the spirit of God and the spirit of goblets,
the followers of the crucified carpenter prayed and
hiccupped and flew to arms—and, woe to the people of
Judah !
The Christians have an old-fashioned and silly rite
known as baptism—a rite far older than Christianity,
and practised at this hour among peoples who, fortu
nately, have never heard of the mythical Christ and his
sanguinary faith. But the Christians laid claim to this
incantation and witch-cauldron-looking old rite as if it
were peculiarly their own, and as though it were special
to them to have an infant squalling with cold water on
its face, simultaneously with a Beetle drying his fingers
upon a towel and drawling the gibberish appointed for
the silly occasion.
If you submitted to this rite of
baptism, and said you were a Christian, all was well;
nothing more was required.
In other words, if you
were a Jew, you could become a Christian by getting
damped and being a liar.
The machinery for turning out damped liars in the
interests of Christianity in Strasburg was set vigorously
in motion. At the point of the sword the Jews were
expelled from their street. The dim sun of a January
day in “the year of our Lord ” 1349 shone down coldly
upon the blue steel of the blades, the tossing plumes,
and the glittering helmets and hauberks of a body of
guards. Proud was the poise of head erect, inflated
chest, and vertical sword. There was something im
posing and triumphant in the steady thudding of hoofs,
the jangling of stirrups, and the jingling of bridles;
but, in bitter contrast and tragically mournful, was the
long array that, on foot, followed the prancing chargers
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
9
of the cavalry. There was a melancholy cortege of nearly
2,000 Jews, of both sexes, and ranging in years between
the two extremes that mark the boundaries of human
life. The unconscious babe was there, asleep on the
breast of its wretched mother ; and there was the old
man, tottering on his staff, his head whitened with the
snows of ninety winters. There was the youth, red-lipped
and proud, lithe and elastic as David on the field of
Elah ;* and there was the dark-skinned girl, graceful as
a gazelle, sweet as the rose of Sharon, the girdle round
her waist touched by the ripples of her raven hair, and
her dark eye languishing with that hidden power and
depth of inextinguishable passion which even at this
hour contributes so much to the charm and witchery of
the maid of Judah, and which often, with me, has cast
a retrospective glamour over the sun-embrowned and
half-naked Ruth gleaning in the field at Bethlehem
Judah, and the sweet and innocent and, perchance, too
trustful Mary that legend deemed worthy to be the
mother of the Son of God.
On, on, behind the guards, trailed the cortege, chained
together in groups, with cruel and galling chains cutting
into the brittle bones of the senile and abrasing the tender
flesh of the child. Behind were a party of soldiers who
brought up the rear by cruel prods from their weapons;
in front were the guards ; and on both sides was the infu
riated and howling Christian mob with mud, dead cats,
and rotten eggs and horrid saliva, which they squirted
through their teeth in the faces and on the garments of
the motley and mournful 2,000 who marched up the
street, chained and helpless.
At length the long procession reached the gate of one
of the principal churchyards of the town. There were
the priests with cope and stole and cord, and they held
out to their persecuted victims the cross and fixed to it
a representation of him of Galilee-—forever accursed be
his baneful name—the most terrible slogan-cry of blood
and agony that ever tingled in the ears of the race of
man. Behold the picture, ye that still call yourselves
after the name of Christ. There, with spear and jeer
I Samuel xvii. 2.
�IO
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
and mud and spittle, the people of whom Christ was one
are huddled and driven into the churchyard. There are
Christ’s priests with their crucifixes and their jargon of
sacerdotal Latin. There is the howling and murderous
rabble that fourteen centuries of Christianity had trained
and moulded. There, at one side of the gate, is a vat
of water for the damping of the brows of cowards and
cravens, in the name of Father, Son, and Ghost. This
is the damping apparatus. In close proximity is the
drying apparatus, in the shape of chains and stakes and
faggots. There are two alternatives for the Jews of
Strasburg : Lie and be damped, or Burn and be damned.
Terrible is death, and to none more terrible than the
brave. The thoughtless and the reckless may leap with
a shout into the inscrutable gloom. But the more that
a man is a man, the more does his foot linger and falter
on the line that lies between “ this earnest, anxious
being ” and the world the sound of whose voices and
the roll of whose wheels have never yet sent back an
echo to the bourne of the earth. The 2,000 of men,
women, and children behold inglorious life on the side
of a Lie, and death by fire on the side of the Truth.
Better is a living dog than a dead lion. About one-half
of the unfortunates kissed for bare life the damnable
symbol of Christ the carpenter, and had their brows
sprinkled with the water from the vat. The other half
preferred, to the cool water of the vat, the fiery flame of
the stake. No Christ and cowardice for them. The
Almighty maker of heaven and earth was strong to save.
Whom he loveth he chasteneth. The God who keeps
watch over Israel slumbers not, neither does he sleep.
The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob was potent,
and present to his chosen people as he was in the mystery
at Horeb, strong as he was among the lightnings and
thunders of Sinai. They strode up to the stake un
daunted, and, arrayed in vestments of devouring fire,
sublimely triumphant over Christ and his rabble, passed
through cinders and ashes to Death and God.
The smug and respectable Christian is as ignorant of
how his faith has figured in the guilty past as of the
doom that awaits it in the not far distant future. Chris
tianity’s very priests are ignorant of what Christianity
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
II
really is and has done. This persecution of the Jews of
Strasburg because they had originally crucified the
Christian and lately poisoned the waters is small and
trifling when we look back through the centuries of gloom
where nought is distinguishable save the vague outlines
of mountains of human corpses and oceans of human
blood, lying in a cold and Malebolgean trance under a
world-withering legend anent a crucifixion, an upper
heaven, and a nether hell. And yet this holocaust at
Strasburg is, alone, enough to put the mark of Hecate
upon Christianity’s brow. Who that bears a human
heart does not even yet feel his cheek flush red in the
heat of that Strasburg fire, whose ear does not yet catch
the sound of the January wind roaring and whistling
against the flames, whose nostril is not yet gorged with
the stench of burning flesh, and whose eye does not light
upon the wind-driven heaps of burnt wood and burnt
bones that were drifted over the ground when the fiery
agony was over ?
O for a Redeemer who would live for the world, not
die for it! O for a Sinai whose detonating voice would
enact the brotherhood of mankind, the federation of the
world ! O for a God that would stay forever man’s in
humanity to man, and arrange the stars into the motto,
Philadelphia, to flame every eve across the heavens
from the austral to the boreal pole ! O Omnipotence,
I, a poor Agnostic, groping on the cis-mortal side of the
Infinite, invoke thee to utterly destroy this Christian
Frankenstein which we ourselves have created.
God did not make the bowls of providence roll aright.
The Jews of Strasburg were not burnt because they had
already poisoned the waters, but because, if permitted
to live, they might have poisoned them. The Black
Death did not commence its ravages in Strasburg till
after the Jews had been burnt. Then it broke out with
terrible fury, and tens of thousands of the persecutors
were huddled off to join the persecuted on the bourn
from which no traveller returns. Fresh churchyards had
to be opened ; and the dead-cart plied its trade till the
City of the Dead outnumbered by three to one the City
of the Living. By the end of the year, of Strasburg’s
48,000 inhabitants only 16,000 remained alive. Many
�12
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
of these had preserved their lives by fleeing from the
doomed city and living in the wilds on roots and herbs,
or on grass like Nebuchadnezzar. The ministers of Christ,
whose office it was to remain by the sinner’s dying bed
and shrive the departing soul, fled to the woods and the
hills, and let the departing soul look after itself; and the
Christian corpses which were not devoured in the streets
by dogs and swine and flies were tumbled pell-mell
into trenches, uncoffined, unannealed, like rubbish
shot from the pestilential streets into the insatiable
grave.
In rancorous prejudice, the blood of a Jew (a Jew was
and is, hygienically, far superior to a Christian) was
believed to be rank, black, putrid, and malodorous.
Christ was a Jew, therefore the blood shed upon Calvary
for the redemption of the world was black and putrid
and unsavoury to the nostrils. But Christian stupidity
did not see thus far : from the first it has been built on
bigotry and ignorance, and it is only in proportion as
breadth of view and intelligence supersede these that it
totters to its fall. The pious Christian Queen, Jeanne I.,
in authorising and regulating a brothel at Avignon for
the accommodation of her Christian subjects, enacted
that any Jew found on the establishment should be
flogged. Thus it was implied that the touch of a Jew
was pollution even to a Christian harlot. When executed
for the faith of their fathers, and guiltless of any other
crime, they were reckoned as too filthy and execrable to
be put to death with even the most horrible of Christian
criminals. Down till the fourteenth century they were
executed separately, and, with the head downward,
hung between two dogs. So much for what Christianity
has done in the way of promoting loving-kindness and
the brotherhood of the human race ! The Christ that
cursed Chorazin because it would not attend to his crazy
vapourings was now loyally represented upon the earth
by millions of his followers, and who, unlike him, had
the power to blight society with narrow and bitter intoler
ance. True, in the long dark night of Christian fervour
a voice was now and again heard crying in the wilderness
for mercy to the house of Israel; but the best intellects
that Christ had were, like himself, on the side of cursing
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
13
and persecution : even the learned and subtle St. Thomas
Aquinas was no exception to the rule.
What was always of immense importance with the
Christian was that, by shedding Jewish blood, he became
possessed of Jewish gold. The money the persecuted
people had lent to their Christian persecutors was
forfeited ; and over their burnt ashes were muttered the
sneers of contempt at their cent, per cent, and their lust
for money. But what about the lust for money of those
who, to possess money, resorted to murder and massacre ?
The Jews set the example of amassing capital by trade
and commerce—a lesson Christian Europe was slow to
learn. Christian Europe obtained capital by murdering
those who amassed it, as bees are smoked to death in
the autumn that their slayers may possess all that a
summer of industry has won. Christian Europe at that
time, and for ages after, deemed it mean and sordid to
work for money, and the patrician classes to this day look
haughtily down upon trade and commerce, and manage,
in the fading daylight of the olden times, to live
opulently upon their poorer brethren. But these last
links of the feudal chain will shortly now be called upon
to support a weight that will break them, and there will,
at last, be no wine and no bread for him who will neither
toil nor spin.
I loathe with an utter loathing the wretch whose soul
is balanced on the edge of a sixpence—a mean hen
scraping diamonds, and whose talons were made only
to scratch a dunghill. But, on the other hand, I have
a contempt for the man who has a contempt for money.
He simply admits that he has a contempt for the power
to do good and to help his brothers and sisters of
mankind. It is, perhaps, because I am not a Christian,
but I hereby candidly admit that I have no contempt
for money, as a means to an end. I recognise in it the
Archimedian lever with which, it seems to me, I could
move the globe out of its old orbit of folly and crime,
and set it to revolving in a new ecliptic of knowledge
and happiness. Up to this date I have had only my
own pen, and the pens of such volunteers as rank around
me, to do good for good’s own sake, without a view to
monetary reward or literary fame ; for, at present, fighting
�14
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
in the cohort that I aspire to lead tends to the yew upon
talent’s grave, not to the laurel upon talent’s brow. My
colleagues, unlike the Christian priesthood, toil away
without fee or reward, and often behind a nom de plume
that stands between them and ruin. I should have a
contempt for my cause and my colleagues had I a
contempt for money. With a mere fraction of what the
religious bodies possess I should, in less than thirty
years, set the bells of the English cathedrals to crashing
and jangling out the parting knell of the Christian faith;
and I should have England’s sons and daughters ready
for the reception of a nobler and mightier evangel. Foi
myself I ask nothing. A farle of oat-meal cake, a suit
of hodden grey, and shelter under a roof of thatch will
be sufficient for me. Neither ease nor comfort can fall
to the lot of them who have the daring to ask the world
for the dynamite to blow it out of its orbit, and send it
cycling round the centre of quite another stellar system.
Let those who have the good fortune to possess it
“ count money by the broken hearts it could heal, by
the hungry stomachs it could satisfy, by the hopes deferred
that it could fulfil, by the aspirations it could realise, by
the sorrows that it could transform into joys, by the
uneasy pillows that it could this night turn into softest
down, by the tearful eyes that it could dry, by the bitter
cares that it could allay, and thou wouldst see how far
the incalculable sum of human joy would transcend the
petty total of the gold pieces and outweigh the feather
weight of paper which thy fingers can scarcely estimate.
When will men learn to count their wealth by such
standards as these? When they do, then down with
the empty prison and the useless gallows, and let the
sunbeams of that bright to-morrow be heralded round
the circling orb by the glad cries of the redeemed
millions : The earth is mankind’s and the fulness
thereof !”*
I am weary of the story of ignorance and bigotry and
blood. I could fill volumes where I have filled only pages,
and from Christian records cull such evidences of super
stition and devilry as would seem, to the gentle modern
Lara.
�THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
15
reader, more like fiendish invention than veritable human
history. As a historical student, hundreds of hideous
phantasms crowd upon my memory where, under the
symbol of the Christian cross, under Christian steel, the
racial blood which flowed in the veins of Christ was
poured out like water by those who bore his name and
regarded him as the son of God. Even in this green
England loom up in lurid mists history’s bloody tableaux :
the creatures of King John tearing out of the Jew’s head
tooth by tooth, the ship load of fugitive Jews scuttled in
the Thames, and the roaring flames at York Castle hissing
with Jewish blood shed by Jewish hands, that in death
the children of Israel might escape falling into the hands
of the English followers of Christ.
There rises before me, too, a baleful vision of bigotry
and malice—the charge which was perpetuated from
century to century that the Jews, as an integral part of
their Passover celebrations, crucified a Christian boy in
revengeful mockery of the crucifixion upon Calvary,
performing diabolical incantations with his blood. Thou
sands upon thousands were thrust from the light of the
sun into the gloom of the grave on this charge alone.
All on the line of the march of the Crusaders I see the
Jewish mother slay her girl children, and then herself, to
escape a fate that, by the virtuous woman, is more
terrible than death. Many a Rebecca rushed into the
arms of destruction to escape the embraces of the
Christian ravisher.
It was not at all times that Christian hate, to the im
puted rank and fetid blood of the Hebrew, formed an
effective barrier to Christian lust. Many a Jewish mother
and maid lay stabbed by her own hand at the feet of the
baffled Christian ravishers. And still the chosen people
of God, in their olden faith and lineage, found asylum as
in the shelter of a great rock in a weary land. Trampled
under foot, their burning flesh tainting the air, and their
blood reddening the gutter in every town in Christendom,
they were yet mighty in the unconquerable intensity of
their ethnology and faith, and from the stake and the
dungeon and the fagot they swayed the intellectual and
financial sceptre of the world. Scattered over the globe,
a mere handful among the Gentiles, much of their ancient
�i6
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
empery is still theirs.* Without the Israelite no great
enterprise can be undertaken. The formation of public
opinion, the control of the newspaper press of Europe,
is largely in Jewish hands; through their monetary
advances the tunnel is bored through the rock-ribs of
the mountain, and the cannon thunders, and the clashingsteel of battle rings in response to Jewish gold.
* Just as I go to press I find the Jewish Mission Report ot the
General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland admit that
Jews are the masters in the money market, and in the universities
they hold the premier places. Every tenth educated man in Ger
many, they were told, would in a few years be a Jew. Not only so,
even in politics of European States Jews were eminent; and even
in America they found the Jews governors of States, leaders at the
bar, and exceedingly successful soldiers.
Price Twopence.
Every Thursday.
THE
SECULAR
REVIEW:
A JOURNAL OF AGNOSTICISM.
EDITED BY SALADIN.
Order of your Newsagent, or send direct to the Publishers—W.
Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, Londont E.C.
HISTORICAL PAMPHLETS.
A Reply to Cardinal Manning, by Saladin ...
...
01
The Crusades, by Saladin
...
• ••
o 1
The Covenanters, by Saladin
...
...
■■■
01
Christian Persecution, by Saladin ...
...
....
o 1
The Flagellants, by Saladin
...
...
• ••
01
The Iconoclasts, by Saladin
...
...
01
The Inquisition, Part I., by Saladin
...
...
01
The Inquisition, Part II., by Saladin
...
...
01
The Dancers, Shakers, and Jumpers, Part I., by Saladin
o 1
The Dancers, Shakers, and Jumpers, Part II., by Saladin
o 1
The Persecution of the Jews, Part I., by Saladin
...
01
The Persecution of the Jews, Part IL, by Saladin
...
01
London: W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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The persecution of the Jews
Creator
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Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 2 v. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Reprinted from the Secular Review. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Publisher's advertisements on back cover. "by Saladin" [title page]. Saladin is the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross.
Publisher
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W. Stewart & Co.
Date
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[n.d.]
Identifier
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N593
N594
Subject
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Antisemitism
Judaism
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The persecution of the Jews), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Antisemitism
Jews-Persecutions
NSS