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The courts of law had become a weapon in the hands of the anti-Jewish leaders. The feeling of safety, which had been restored by the published portion of the imperial reply at the audience of May 11, was rapidly evaporating. The Jews were again filled with alarm, while the instigators of the pogroms took courage and decided that the time had arrived to finish their interrupted street performance.
Philo's work was made to serve as the guide of that Christian Gnosticism which, within the next hundred years, proclaimed that Judaism was the work of an evil God, and that the essential mission of Jesus the good Logos was to dethrone Jehovah! But though the Logos conception was turned to non-Jewish and anti-Jewish purposes, it was in Philo the offspring of a pure and philosophical monotheism.
In those days, when history and fiction were not clearly distinguished, he was apt to hide his attacks under the guise of history, and stir up odium by scurrilous and offensive accounts of the ancient Hebrews. Hence anti-Jewish literature originated at Alexandria.
The rich Jews can buy immunity or protection. If as a result of vicious propaganda serious anti-Jewish riots take place in this country the victims will not be the rich Jewish financiers and brokers, against whom the Dearborn Independent fulminates, but innocent and inoffensive, hard-working men and women and their children.
As was mentioned in an early chapter of this book, the then Minister of the Interior was the same man who had been Director of Police over the whole empire at the time of the anti-Jewish riots which followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II. in 1881, and which started the great emigration of Jews to America.
In this wise, beginning with the May laws of 1882, the Government gradually succeeded in monopolizing all anti-Jewish activities by letting bureaucratic persecutions take the place of street pogroms. However, in 1883 and 1884, the "street" made again occasional attempts to compete with the Government.
This action saved the lives of scores of prisoners, and put a stop to the obscure agitation which endeavored to revive the medieval spectre. The Polish Diet of 1818 reflected the same state of mind which had previously found expression in political literature: an unmistakable preponderance of the anti-Jewish element.
Nevertheless, the broad religious tolerance initiated by the first Caesar was being continually impaired. The Jewish public worship was prohibited in Rome, and the Jews were expelled from the city in 19 C.E.; while at Alexandria an anti-Jewish persecution was instigated by Sejanus, the upstart freedman, who became the chief minister of Tiberius.
Only when it became hardened into dogma, fixed not only as good doctrine, but as the only saving doctrine, as the tree of life opposed to the Torah, the tree of death only then did it become anti-Jewish, and appear as a bastard offspring of the Hebraic God-idea and Greek culture.
The coercive baptism of Jewish children was provided for in a separate enactment, the Statute on Conscription, which is declared "to remain in force." In this way the Statute of 1835 reduces itself to a codification of the whole mass of the preceding anti-Jewish legislation.
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