Chosen Peoples: Being the First "Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture" delivered before the Jewish Historical Society at University College on Easter-Passover Sunday, 1918/5678Zangwill, Israel
Religion
Chosen Peoples: Being the First "Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture" delivered before the Jewish Historical Society at University College on Easter-Passover Sunday, 1918/5678
Zangwill, Israel
Jews -- Election, Doctrine of; National characteristics, German
Returning now finally to our starting-point, the proposition that
"Germanism is Judaism," we are able to see its full grotesqueness. If
Germanism resembles Judaism, it is as a monkey resembles a man. Where
it does suggest Judaism is in the sense it gives the meanest of its
citizens that they form part of a great historic organism, which moves
to great purposes: a sense which the poorer Englishman has
unfortunately lacked, and which is only now awakening in the common
British breast. But even here the affinities of Germany are rather
with Japan than with Judaea. For in Japan, too, beneath all the
romance of Bushido and the Samurai, lies the asphyxiation of the
individual and his sacrifice to the State. It is the resurrection of
those ancient Pagan Constitutions for which individuality scarcely
existed, which could expose infants or kill off old men because the
State was the supreme ethical end; it is the revival on a greater
scale of the mediaeval city commune, which sucked its vigorous life
from the veins of its citizens. Even so Prussia, by welding its
subservient citizens into one gigantic machine of aggression, has
given a new reading to the Gospel: "Blessed are the meek, for they
shall inherit the earth."
Nietzsche, who, though he strove to upset the old Hebrew values, saw
clearly through the real Prussian peril, defined such a State as that
"in which the slow suicide of all is called Life," and "a welcome
service unto all preachers of death"--a cold, ill-smelling, monstrous
idol. Nor is this the only affinity between Prussia and Japan. "We
are," boasts a Japanese writer, "a people of the present and the
Tangible, of the Broad Daylight and the Plainly Visible."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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