The International Jew, the world's foremost problem [volume I] : $b being a reprint of a series of articles appearing in the Dearborn Independent from May 22 to October 2, 1920Ford, Henry
General
The International Jew, the world's foremost problem [volume I] : $b being a reprint of a series of articles appearing in the Dearborn Independent from May 22 to October 2, 1920
Ford, Henry
Antisemitic literature; Jews -- United States; United States -- Ethnic relations
This, of course, the modern Jew denies. There is a new position taken by
the modernists among the Jews which constitutes a denial that the Jew
differs from any other man except in the matter of religion. "Jew" they
say is not a racial designation, but a religious designation like
"Episcopalian," "Catholic," "Presbyterian." This is the argument used in
newspaper offices in the Jews' protests against giving the Jewish
designation to those of their people who are implicated in crime--"You
don't give the religious classification of other people who are
arrested," the editor is told, "why should you do it with Jews?" The
appeal to religious tolerance always wins, and is sometimes useful in
diverting attention from other things.
Well, if the Jews are only religiously differentiated from the rest of
the world, the phenomenon grows stranger still. For the rest of the
world is interested less in the Jew's religion than in anything else
that concerns him. There is really nothing in his religion to
differentiate the Jew from the rest of mankind, as far as the moral
content of that religion is concerned, and if there were he would have
overcome that by the fact that his Jewish religion supplies the moral
structure for both of the other great religions. Moreover, it is stated
that there are among English speaking nations 2,000,000 Jews who
acknowledge their race and not their religion, while 1,000,000 are
classed as agnostic--are these any less Jews than the others? The world
does not think so. The authoritative students of human differences do
not think so. An Irishman who grows indifferent to the Church is still
an Irishman, and it would seem to be equally true that a Jew who grows
indifferent to the Synagogue is still a Jew. He at least feels that he
is, and so does the non-Jew.
A still more serious challenge would arise if this contention of the
modernists were true, for it would necessitate the explanation of these
world-controlling Jews by their religion. We should have to say, "They
excel through their religion," and then the problem would turn on the
religion whose practice should bring such power and prosperity to its
devotees. But another fact would intervene, namely, that these
world-controlling Jews are not notably religious; and still another fact
would hammer for recognition, namely, the most devout believers and most
obedient followers of the Jewish religion are the poorest among the
Jews. If you want Jewish orthodoxy, the bracing morality of the Old
Testament, you will find it, not among the successful Jews, who have
Unitarianized their religion to the same extent that the Unitarians have
Judaized their Christianity, but among the poor in the side streets who
still sacrifice the Saturday business for their Sabbath keeping.
Certainly their religion has not given them world-control; instead, they
have made their own sacrifices to keep it inviolate against modernism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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