Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8Hubbard, Elbert
Philosophy
Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8
Hubbard, Elbert
Philosophers
Well does Moses Mendelssohn, the Jew, say: "The Ghetto is an arrangement
first contrived by Jews for keeping infidels out of a sacred precinct.
When the infidels were strong enough they turned the tables and forbade
the Jews to leave their Ghetto except at certain hours. For the misery,
poverty and squalor of the Ghetto the Jew is not to blame--if he could,
he would have the Ghetto a place of opulence, beauty and all that makes
for the good. Every undesirable thing he would bestow on the outsider.
In the twilight days of Jewish power, the Jew, with bigotry, arrogance
and intolerance unsurpassed, regulated the infidels and fixed their
goings and comings as they now do his, and he would do it again if he
had the power. The Jew never changes--once a Jew always a Jew."
This was written by a man who was not only a Jew, but a man. He was a
Jew in pride of race--in racial instinct, but he was great enough to
know that all men are God's children, and that to set up a fixed,
dogmatic standard regulating every act of life has its serious
penalties. He was a Jew so big that he knew that the cruelty and
inhumanity visited upon the Jews by Christians was first taught to these
Christians by Jews--it is all in the Old Testament. The villainy you
have taught me I will execute. It shall go hard, but I will better the
instruction.
The Christians who had persecuted Jews were really orthodox Jews in
disguise, and were actuated more by the Jewish Law expressed in the Old
Testament, than by the life of Jesus, who placed man above the Sabbath
and taught that the good is that which serves.
And so Benedict Spinoza, the Rabbi, gentle, spiritual, kind, heir to the
Jewish faith, learned in all the refinements of Jewish Law, knowing
minutely the history of the race, knowing that for which the curses of
Judaism were reserved, perceiving with unblinking eyes the absurdity and
folly of all dogmatic belief, gradually withdrew from practising and
following "Law," preferring his own commonsense. There were threats,
then attempts to bribe, and again threats and finally excommunication
and curses so terrible that if they were carried out, a man would walk
the earth an exile--unknown by brothers and sisters, shunned by the
mother that gave him birth, a moral leper to his father, despised,
rejected, turned away, spit upon by every being of his kind.
And here is the document:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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