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Updated: June 5, 2025
What is achieved by transporting a few thousand Jews to another country? Either they come to grief at once, or prosper, and then their prosperity creates Anti-Semitism. We have already discussed these attempts to divert poor Jews to fresh districts.
In this sense Herzl could say later that the Dreyfus affair had made him a Zionist. He saw all about him the ever fiercer light of a blazing anti-Semitism. In the French Chamber of Deputies the deputy Denis made an interpellation on the influence of the Jews in the political administration of the country. In Vienna a Jewish member of the Reichstag rose to speak and was howled down.
The more immediate reaction was undoubtedly a sharpened perception and evaluation of his fellow-members in the Fraternity. Herzl had joined and been active in a duelling Fraternity. Here, too, anti-Semitism was breaking through; student after student expressed himself favorably toward the Jew-baiting speeches of Schoenerer, who was making a special effort to win over the universities.
Here, then, is a program of anti-Semitism which fairly expresses the political and economic aspirations of large groups with whom our American anti-Semites, led by the Dearborn Independent, appear to be working in close co-operation and harmony.
There could not be a more tragic mistake than to infer from the ruthless oppression of the Jews in Russia that anti-Semitism is characteristically Russian. Surely, the fact that the First Duma was practically unanimous in deciding to give equal rights to the Jews with all the rest of the population proves that the Russian people did not hate the Jews.
Well, we have been, indeed, and are, with our submissiveness to authority and our capacity for discipline, the classic land of organized grumbling; and the classic land, too, of anti-semitism which deprived us of the very forces we stood most in need of productive scepticism and the imagination for concrete things. Organized grumbling is not the same thing as political creation.
But the classical exponent of Roman anti-Semitism is Tacitus, the historian who wrote in the time of Nerva and Trajan, i.e. just after Josephus, and who treated of the Jews both in his Annals, which were a history of the last century, and in his Histories, which dealt with his own times.
They wish to deprive Anti-Semitism which everywhere lowers public morals and develops the very worst instincts of its victim. They wish to make unquestionable producers out of the Jews at present reproached with being parasites. They desire to fertilize with their sweat and till with their hands a country that is to-day a desert, until it is again the flowering garden it has once been.
The years 1881-1882 mark off a distinct era in the history of the Jewish people. The revival of anti-Semitism in Germany, the unexpected renewal of persecutions and massacres in Russia and Roumania, the outlawing of millions of human beings, whose situation grew less tenable from day to day in those two countries such were the occurrences that disconcerted the most optimistic.
The wives of several of my colleagues, when Madame Schmoll calls on them, display with intention, under her eyes, anti-Semitic newspapers. And would you believe that the Minister of Public Instruction has refused to give me the cross of the Legion of Honor for which I have applied? There's ingratitude! Anti-Semitism is death it is death, do you hear? to European civilization."
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