The Jews and the Khazars

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The Jews and the Khazars
Fact Paper 23
© Samuel Kurinsky, all rights reserved
Chinese tomb figure of a mounted foreigner, late 7th to early 8th century.
The so-called "silk route" across Central Asia was pioneered a thousand
years earlier by Persian Jews. Seventeen hundred years later Marco Polo
followed the same route and achieved fame by relating his adventures in
a Genovese jail to a fellow prisoner who happened to be a scribe. The
statue depicts a "Ferghana" horse, a breed employed in Persia; the
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heavily bearded rider bears distinctly Semitic features (as interpreted by
the Chinese sculptor). The Judaic/Persian entrepreneurs traded with the
Turkic tribes at trading posts along the route. Among these nomadic
tribes were the Khazars, who obtained agricultural and technological skills
from the Judaic traders. The Khazar kings, nobility and many tribesmen
converted to Judaism and the Khazars became a sedentary nation.
Together with their Judaic compatriots they advanced civilization
throughout Russia and Transylvania.
Photograph by courtesy of the Ontario Museum, George Crofts collection.
• An Unusual Association
• Evidence of Judaic Presence
• The Perfidy of the Byzantines
• The Distortion of History
• Notes
An Unusual Association
One of the most ignoble examples of the institutionalized
obfuscation of history is that applied to the history of the
Khazars by the Byzantines, the Islamic Muhammadans,
the pan-Arabists, and the Russian/Stalinist
ethnocentrists. Each in turn went to great lengths to
expunge whatever records endured the destruction of the
Khazar kingdom, and to put a self-serving spin on the
surviving elements.
One reason for the extraordinary effort to distort history
was the unique relationship that developed between the
Khazars and the Jews. The two peoples, whose languages
had different roots, one illiterate and the other highly
literate, one shamanist and the other monotheistic, one
nomadic and the other urban, peacefully merged to share
a common destiny. How, indeed, did such a strange union
evolve?
The association of the two peoples begins early on. The
Jews encountered the Turkic tribes, including the Khazars,
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in the fifth century BCE in Asia, when Judaic
entrepreneurs from Persia passed over the Pamir
mountains to blaze a new trade route to Kaifeng, then the
capital of China.1 Trading centers sprang up along the
trail to serve the passing traders and their heavily laden
beasts. The caravansaries became bustling commercial
towns in which Jews were prominent. Samarkand,
Bukhara, Tashkent, Balkh, Kabul, and other posts along
the tortuous route through the central Asian deserts and
mountains burgeoned with the passing centuries. The
Jews and the Turkic nomads enjoyed a peaceful exchange
of goods in these strategic centers throughout that long
period.
Many Turkic tribes began to infiltrate into Europe about
the fifth century CE. The Magyars moved into what is now
Finland; The Avars, Sabirs and Bulgars occupied the
Danube basin; the Khazars followed the Kok Turks and
spread out along the northern flanks of the Caucacus
Mountains, skirting the Aral, Caspian and Black Seas. The
tent-dwelling, horse-riding, Khazar herdsmen absorbed
some peoples of that hilly area, allied themselves with
others, and became transformed into a sedentary nation.
The Khazars were brought into contact with other
communities of Jews already functioning around the
Caspian Sea from the time Sidonese Israelites had been
deported in 351 BCE. Documentary evidence shows that,
likewise, both Karaite and Rabbinate Jews had been in
continuous habitation in the Crimea at least as far back as
the first century CE.2
The Judaic communities around the Caspian Sea
burgeoned with refugees after Roman legions crushed the
Bar Khochba revolt and proceeded to destroy the Judaic
state in 135 CE. The expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem
and the enslavement and exportation of scores of
thousands of Jews spurred the exodus to the east.
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A few centuries later the Khazars moved into the area and
evolved into a vigorous civilization. They became selfsufficient
enough to become independent of the
sovereignty of the Khagans who ruled over the vast
eastern Turkic empire. They conducted affairs under their
own Khans, warrior kings who derived from the same
roots which produced the much-feared Genghis Khan.3
New waves of Judaic immigrants again joined those
established in the region as a result of recurrent problems
with the Byzantines, the Persian Sassanians, and finally
with the Arabs. Jews crossed the Caucasus and found
respite among the Khazars. Jews became the
technological and commercial advisors to the Khazar
Khans. The Khazars were duly impressed with the
technical sagacity and cultural acumen of the Jews. Abba
Eban notes that:
"As elsewhere, the Jews engaged in pioneering pursuits.
They taught their rather primitive neighbors more
advanced ways of cultivating the soil, and means of
exchanging goods among themselves and with foreign
nations. They taught the art of writing. A tenth century
Arab author states, 'The Khazars use the Hebrew
script.'"4
Evidence of Judaic Presence
One of the arts introduced into the Khazar region was
that of glassmaking, a pyrotechnological tour-deforcedominated
by Judaic masters of the art. The trail of
the associated Judaic/Khazar traders through central Asia
and up the Russian rivers are peculiarly coincident with
that of the establishment of glassworks, an art that
provides unique evidence of the presence of the Jews.
The earliest glassworks found in the southern foothills of
the Caucasus was at Mecheta-Santawbro, which appears
to date back to the fourth century, pre-dating the
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association between the Khazars and the Jews.5 The
Mecheta glasshouse seems to have continued operation
into the ninth century as the Judaic/Persian traders
reached a peak of activity. A significant glass workshop
was excavated at Orbeti, dating from the seventh and
eighth centuries, the period in which the Khazars
converted to Judaism and an exodus from Persia took
place. The art thereafter spread with the advancing
Khazar/Judaic influence up the Volga, Don, Danube,
Dniester and Dniepr rivers into Transylvania (now
Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania) and Silesia (now
Poland).
A camel caravan leaving Kaifeng during the Northern Song period
(960-1127). The caravan is pictured issuing from the Judaic sector of the
city. The Jews traded with Turkic tribes along the route between Kaifeng
and the Near East. Among these tribes were the Khazars. The Khazars
had already converted to Judaism several centuries before the above illustrated
caravan left Kaifeng.
From an embroidered reproduction of a famous scroll painting, Riverside
Scene at Clear and Bright Festival Time, by Zhang Zeduan, 12th century.
Studies of glassware of the eighth through the thirteenth
centuries found throughout the vast territory from central
Asia through Russia. Poland, and the Danube basin, have
shown a correlation of style and composition by which the
art can be traced back through time and territory to a
single source, the Near-Eastern enclaves where the Jews
were carrying on the art. Maria deKowna, of the Polish
Academy of Sciences, expressed amazement at the
phenomenon of commonality. Comparing the
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characteristics of glass beads found throughout the
territory, the single most prevalent glass artifact,
DeKowna demonstrated that they "exhibit a strong
resemblance (form, colour, and motif of ornamentation)
which cannot but suggest their influx into the territory
from one unique center of production."6
DeKowna's observations are supported by numerous
analyses conducted in the past 60 years. The ruins of
glassmaking and jewelry shops were found in the artisan's
quarters within the confines of a mighty Khazar fortress
defending the Khazar city of Sarkal, situated at the lower
reaches of the Don. By that time the Khazars had
converted to Judaism. The Khazars were persuaded by the
unpretentious precepts of Judaic philosophy, the
rationality of Judaic religion, and the technological
advances wrought by their Judaic advisors. The khan,
nobles and many of their subjects demonstrated the
impact the Jews had made not only by converting but by
bringing Jews into the government. It was a government
whose tenets incorporated the democratic, tolerant
teachings of the Jews. The composition of the
governmental court is given by al-Masudi, a Baghdadborn
Arab, who wrote a comprehensive treatise on history
and geography about 956:
"The custom in the Khazar capital is to have seven
judges. Of these two are for the Muslims, two are for the
Khazars, judging according to the Torah (Mosaic Law),
two for the Christians, judging according to the Gospel,
and one for the Saqualibbah, Rus, and other Pagans."7
Martin Gilbert noted that the Khazar king, Bulan,
converted to Judaism about 700 CE and that a later king,
Bulan, strengthened Judaism among the Khazars by
inviting rabbis into his kingdom and erecting synagogues.
Gilbert extols the composition of the judicial court and
adds, "Religious toleration was maintained for the
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kingdom's 300 years."8
The most revealing, and probably the most accurate,
description of the process by which the Khazars discarded
Shamanism and adopted Judaic religion and law came
down to us from Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, a youthful Jew
appointed by the caliph of Cordoba to an important
administrative post. Hasdai was a linguist, a doctor and a
scientist who continued important researches, developing
new medicines and rediscovering ancient formulas while
carrying on delicate diplomatic assignments for the caliph,
Hasdai carried the title nasi (prince) among the Jews, for
the caliph had conferred upon him the authority to settle
the affairs of the Judaic community as he saw fit.
The caliph also assigned the management of customs to
Hasdai, central to the administration of foreign affairs.
Hasdai was in touch with the world through this privileged
post, and he utilized his position to pursue his passion,
which was to to exchange information with Judaic
communities of the Diaspora, to assist those in difficulties
and to find a refuge for the nation. Hasdai, and
beleaguered Jews everywhere, sought desperately to find
a realm where the Jews could live and practice their
religion in freedom. There were persistent rumors that
such a place did indeed exist, stories repeated by
merchants bringing back merchandise from Slavic
countries. Hasdai pressed them for information, met with
Persian emissaries who reported on the kingdom to their
north, and interrogated other envoys arriving at the
court. He obtained a picture of the Judaic kingdom of the
Khazars, despite the barrier of Byzantine belligerence
separating the Khazrs from the west.
Hasdai learned that the Khazars had no formal dynasty of
kings. A noble who distinguished himself militarily might
be chosen to become commander-in-chief, and usually
assumed kingship thereafter. Thus a Jewish commander
achieved this position. His wife, Sarah, persisted in urging
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him to practice Judaism in its entirety. He did so, and
many of the noblemen followed suit. The neighbouring
Moslems and Christians, who had been proselyting their
causes within the Khazar realm, angrily protested,
sending envoys to counteract Judaic influence and win the
nation over to their respective religions.
A disputation was arranged. Greek. Muslim and Judaic
scholars were heard in turn. Since all based themselves
upon the Holy Scriptures of the Judaic Bible, and since
the Jews were able to interpret the hole writings far
better than their competitors, the nobles accepted
Judaism as the true faith. The Khazar Jews who had
relinquished the faith in part or in whole returned to it,
and became the teachers of the Khazars.
If it were not for the correspondence carried on by Hasdai
and by a miserably few references from Arabic and other
sources, the very existence of the Khazars would hardly
have become known!
This hiatus is all the more remarkable inasmuch as the
Khazars endured as a sovereign nation for five centuries.
For two of those centuries the Khazars exercised
hegemony over, and together with their Judaic allies,
brought civilization to a considerable part of southern and
western Russia, the Baltic and, along with other Asian
peoples, controlled much of the effluvial basin of the
Danube. One is left to wonder "How can the dearth of
information about five hundred years of a significant part
of Europe be accounted for?"
The Perfidy of the Byzantines
We start with one of the great ironies of history. The first
attempt to annihilate both the Khazars and their history
was by the Byzantines, whose very existence can be
attributed to the military assistance given them in the
Persian and subsequent Islamic wars with Byzantia. The
Byzantines were allied with the Khazars, who formed the
main bulwark against the dynamic eastern forces. The
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Arabs, having learned from the Persian attempts to
conquer Byzantia that it was necessary to crush the
Khazars first, turned their army against the Khazars,
seeking to protect their flanks in their westward drive
against the Christians. They bypassed the formidable
natural barrier of the Caucasus range through the file of
Durband, along the Caspian shore. After the year 642
they repeatedly drove through the Darband gate, but
their incursions int Khazaria were beaten back each time.
In 652 they suffered a disastrous defeat in which "four
thousand Arabs were killed, including their commander
Abd-al-Rahman ibn-Rabiah; the rest fled in disorder
across the mountains."9
The Arabs, frustrated, turned upon Byzantia, besieging
Constantinople again and again by land and by sea. The
Khazars re-entered the fray in 722. Arab sources speak of
armies of from 100,000 to 300,000 men engaging in the
battlefield during multiple campaigns waged during the
"Second Arab War." It was a war characterized by "deathdefying
fanaticism [and the] traditional exhortation which
would halt the rout of a defeated Arab army and make it
into a fight to the last man: 'To the Garden, Muslims, not
the Fire' - the joys of Paradise being assured to every
Muslim killed in the Holy War."10
In 737 a Pyrrhic victory was won after an insidious attack
which followed an offer of alliance caught the Khazars by
surprise and forced a retreat to the Volga. The Muslim
pincer movement was halted and reversed, and this last
Khazar initiative saved the Byzantine Empire from being
inundated and probably destroyed by Islamic hordes.
40,000 Khazar lives were lost in the process of curtailing
Arab aggression. D. M. Dunlop, author of the most
authoritative work on the Khazars, emphasizes that but
for the Khazars, "Byzantium, the bulwark of European
civilization in the east, would have found itself outflanked
by the Arabs, and the history of Christendom and Islam
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might very well have been different."11
When the Persian Empire began to disintegrate, the
Byzantines launched a perfidious plan to destroy their
erstwhile ally and savior. The plot was fully outlined early
on by Constantine in a dissertation entitled How War is to
be Made on Khazaria and by Whom. Constantine proposed
that surrounding peoples as well as dissident peoples
within the Khazar domain be encouraged to rip apart the
Jewish Empire. The English historian Toynbee, generally
an admirer of Constantine and no friend of the Jews, puts
this patently devious scheme into historical perspective:
"Khazaria was one of the most pacific states in the
world ... her arms had never been directed at the East
Roman Empire. The two powers had, in fact, never been
at war with each other, while, on the other hand, Khazaria
had frequently been at war with the East Roman Empire's
enemies, and this to the Empire's signal advantage.
Indeed, the Empire may have owed it to the Khazars that
she had survived the successive onslaughts of the
Sassanid Persian Emperor Khusraw II Parviz and the
Muslim Arabs."12
The principle of "divide and conquer" was applied by the
Byzantines with consummate duplicity. The Byzantines
had no compunction about secretly encouraging the
pagan Rus tribes to invade Khazar territory from the
north. The city of Kiev had become a great, bustling,
commercial center. This rich and tempting prize was
offered as bait to the Rus by the Byzantines, the first step
toward the implementation of the Constantine plan.The
bribe succeeded; the first break between the Khazars and
the Rus commenced with the occupation of Kiev by the
Rus in the year 862.
Relations nonetheless resumed with time between the
Khazars and the Rus until, circa 965, the Russian Prince
Svyatoslav of Kiev renewed a Byzantine-supported
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campaign against the Khazars by sacking and destroying
Itil, a formidable Khazar commercial and communications
center.
The Khazars again attempted to reconstruct a mutually
beneficial relationship with the Rus by peaceful means. An
old Russian chronicle relates that a group of Jews arrived
in Kiev in the year 986 in an attempt to make peace and
to convert Vladimir, a dissolute son of the prince. But
Vladimir, like his father before him, had accepted
baptism. In 988 the pagan Russian dynastic rulers
officially adopted the Greek Orthodox faith, and relations
between the Rus and the Khazars deteriorated further.
During that same period the Slavic and Scandinavian
peoples likewise converted to the Latin Church of Rome.
The decay of the Abbasid (Persian) Empire during the
tenth century removed the Byzantine fear of the Persians
and rendered the Judaic/ Khazar state superfluous as a
buffer. "Constantinople offered it as bait to the Russians,
who promptly seized the opportunity to invade it."13 The
Byzantines welded their duplicitous alliance with the Rus
by bribing them with the promise of further spoils,
especially by ceding possession of the important Crimean
port of Cherson, until then under contention between
them.
Judaic\Khazar integrity was again threatened by a
concordance between the Byzantine Emperor Leo and the
Magyars, fierce Turkic tribes who had conquered and
absorbed the native Finns. The Byzantines supported the
Magyars to assail the Bulgars, allies of the Khazars, from
the rear. The Magyars invaded and integrated into the
area to become the modern-day Hungarians. Finally, in
the year 1016, the Byzantine and Rus forces joined in a
massive invasion of Khazaria.
The primitive Rus tribes thus became heir to the
industrial, technological and commercial development
that took place under the Judaic/Khazar state over the
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course of three centuries. The presence of residual
communities of Jews in Kiev and elsewhere in the Ukraine
and southern Russia were tolerated, inasmuch as they
were essential for maintaining the industries they had
established and for bringing wealth into the region with
the commercial ties they had likewise established. In
Perislavl and Cernigov major Jewish enclaves continued to
carry on crafts and commerce. The multiplicity of Khazar
and Judaic eponymic names of ancient towns of western
Russia testify dramatically to a continuous and pervasive
Judaic presence: Zydowo, Kozarzewk, Kozara, Kozarzow,
Zhydowska Vola, Zydaticze, to mention but a few.
The Jews were understandably uncomfortable under the
hegemony of the Rus. A movement of Jews into Silesia
(now Poland) and western Russia ensued, enticed into the
region by a newly rising class of feudal noblemen. At this
time the Polish nation was formed, and the Jews were
central to its formation. The Polish, Ukrainian, and
Russian nobility, eager to obtain industries and develop
commerce, proffered refuge to the Jews escaping Western
European and Byzantine persecution and created an
environment in which a new social structure developed,
the shtetl civilization, a fully articulated nation within a
nation.
A rich store of early Polish legends exists, persistent
despite having been regarded as next to blasphemous by
churchmen and as bourgeois Zionist [!] propaganda by
the Soviets. The very creation of the Polish nation is
attributed in these folk tales to a legendary Jew, Abraham
Prokownik. The Polans were the mightiest of several
Slavonic tribes who formed an alliance around the year
962. Concluding that they needed a king capable of
creating a viable state, the "Slav backwoodsmen" elected
Abraham to that office. "Abraham, with unwonted
modesty, resigned the crown, in favor of a peasant named
Piast, who thus became the founder of the historic Piast
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dynasty which ruled Poland from circa 962 to 1370."14
The culturally and economically underdeveloped Silesian
region eagerly welcomed Judaic craftsmen and merchants
of all sorts from Germany, Armenia and Khazaria. The
Jews were granted extraordinary privileges. The Jewish
towns, large and small, became bustling craft centers and
trading posts from which the people of the surrounding
hinterlands obtained local and imported products. Fairs
were regularly held in which farm products, timber,
products manufactured in the towns and in rural cottage
industries and imported wares were exchanged. The local
trade centers were integrated into a free market network
which spanned across the borders of the regional fiefs of
the noblemen. The metal working acumen of the Jews
provided them with the obligation of minting coins for
most of the rulers of central Europe, a discipline that
remained in Judaic hands over many centuries. Polish
silver coins of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries bear
Polish inscriptions in Hebrew lettering.
"These coins are the final evidence for the spreading of
the Hebrew script from Khazaria to the neighboring
Slavonic countries. The use of these coins was not related
to any question of religion. They were minted because
many of the Polish people were more used to this type of
script than to the Roman script, not considering that it
was particularly Jewish."15
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A bridge across the Bian River in Kaifeng during the Northern Song
period (960-1127). Kiafeng, then called Bianjing or Bianling, was China's
capital, and a very active commercial center. A substantial Judaic
community of up to 3000 persons flourished in the city into the twentieth
century. It appears that sometime after the Khazar empire was destroyed,
the Jews lost contact with the West.
From an embroidered reproduction of a famous scroll painting, Riverside
Scene at Clear and Bright Festival Time, by Zhang Zeduan, 12th century.
Among the Jews there were those who served the nobility
as physicians, managers of estates, accountants, tax
collectors, and bankers; but by far the vast majority were
blacksmiths, gold- and silver-smiths, jewelers, millers,
tailors, millwrights, bakers, tanners, textile
manufacturers, candlestick makers and most other skilled
trades; they were scribes who wrote letters for the
essentially illiterate indigenous populace; they ran the
inns at which merchant/travelers found respite; they were
the carters who brought the local goods to market and
ranged abroad for goods produced in neighboring shtetls
and from other countries; they were bards, itinerant story
tellers, and troupes of actors and musicians.
Among these artisans and entrepreneurs were the Judaic
glassworkers. After its appearance across the Caucasus,
the art spread up the Volga, Dan, Dnieper, Dniester and
Danube river routes coincident with the advance of
Judaic/Khazar civilization. By 1964 Russian archaeologists
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had confirmed eleven glassworking sites in Kievan
Khazaria "notably at Kiev, Cernogov, Kolodjajin,
Kostroma, Novgorod and others.16 All the sites lie along
established Judaic/Khazar trade routes
From Kiev and its outlying towns the art advanced to
Novgorod and finally into Silesia (Poland). The Khazars
had penetrated northwest to Grodno. Lithuania, the Slavic
city in which a Judaic glassworks was established in the
late ninth or early tenth century. Documentation of that
event is contained in the famous Judaic libraries
assembled by the Jewish Barons Gunzberg and Polakoff.
Both libraries were confiscated by the Bolsheviks and
stored away in the Hermitage in Leningrad.17
The glassmakers continued to operate in the region after
the defeat of the Khazar state. The Silesian barons
enticed the glassmakers with forest privileges and sundry
other inducements to encourage the immigration of these
artisans into their fiefs. One of the oldest was uncovered
at Wolin, dating to the first half of the tenth century.
That facility was followed by others at Opole, Niemeza Sl.
Wroclaw, Kruswica, Miedzyrzecz Wielkapolski.
The region's economy prospered, and the position of the
Jews was solidified by King Boleslav the Pious, with a
charter in 1264; it became the model for securing Jewish
freedom of opportunity and security from molestation.
How is it, therefore, that so many hundreds of years of
the advance of civilization into central Europe is virtually
absent from modern historiography?
The final obliteration of this glorious history was
perpetrated in Stalinist Russia.
The Distortion of History
Pre-Soviet Russian sources were unequivocal regarding
the advanced status of Judaic/Khazar civilization and the
beneficial influence it exercised on the evolution of the
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Russian nation. In 1798 Miranovich cited documents
which recorded the ninth-century activity of a substantial
and thriving Judaic/Khazar community in Kiev, documents
which disappeared during the Soviet period. The
documents detailed the seminal role of the Khazars in the
development of commerce and particularly in the
importing of big fish, caviar and salt, exchanged for furs
and other products of the aboriginal Rus and other
northern tribes.18 The earliest Soviet Russian histories
likewise credited both the Khazars and the Jews with
playing a seminal part in pre-Russian and proto-Russian
development. Typical of the early Soviet historical
renditions is that of the Professor Artamonov, whose book
expounded on the progressive cultural influence the Jews
had exerted upon the uncultivated Northmen. Artamonov
expanded on the Jewish role in propelling the tiny village
of Kiev into the great commercial and administrative
center which subsequently became the capital of Russia.
Artamonov presented this history at a session of the
Department of History and Philosophy at the USSR
Academy of Sciences in 1952. He was subjected to a
vicious attack in Pravda:
"The idealization of the Khazar kingdom reflects a
manifest survival of the defective lies of the bourgeois
historians who belittled the indigenous development of
the Russian people. The erroneousness of the concept is
evident. Such a conception cannot be accepted by Soviet
historiography."1`9
A shameful campaign of calumny against Artamonov
ensued. His magnum opus, History of the Khazars,
apparently in preparation when Pravda and the Stalinists
struck, was not published until ten years later. It was an
adulterated version which carried a recantation in its final
section which amounted to a denial of all that went before
- and indeed of the author's life-work:
"The majority [of the Khazars] merged with other peoples
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and the minority, settling in Itil, lost its nationality and
turned into a parasitic class with a Jewish coloration...
From the Itil Khazars the Russians took nothing. Thus
also by the way the militant Khazar Judaism was treated
by other peoples connected with it: the Magyars, Bulgars,
Pechangs, Alans, and Polovians. These insignificant
eastern elements in Rus culture which were passed down
by the Khazars... did not penetrate into the heart of
Russian culture, but remained on the surface and were of
small significance."
Another Russian historian, Krachovski, suffered similar
abuse. In 1939 Krachovski reviewed the documents of Ibn
Fadlan, written by that Arab traveler about an extended
sojourn in Atil (Itil), one of the major Khazar cities at the
delta of the Volga River. "In one part," Fadlan reported,
"live Muslims and in the other part the Khazar king and
his entourage. The Khazars and their king are all Jews,
the Slavs (as-Sakaliba) and their neighbors obey the
Khazar king submissively." The mere mention of such
historical documents was deemed by the Soviet hierarchy
as the fulminations of a renegade flouting the party line.
The remnants of even greater and more significant city of
Sarkal, the main fortress and headquarters of the Khazar
nation, have since been demolished. Russian diffidence
regarding Khazar historiography came painfully into
evidence when investigation into the site gave way to
callous industrialization. Little protest and no effort at
preservation or rescue was made when a dam was built
and the entire city was inundated. "The famous fortress
and priceless archaeological site... was submerged in the
Timslansk reservoir, adjoining the Volga-Dan Canal."20
The "idealization of the Khazars' was condemned and the
"autochthonous Slavic tribes" (Great Russians) were
extolled as "the real creators of the Russian State
structure and culture." This rendition of history was
formally rendered obligatory at the Thirteenth
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International Congress of Historians held in Moscow in
1970. The historians who had written on Khazar history
were required to write retractions of their "spurious claim"
that the Russians had built upon the foundation laid by
the Khazars and to admit that the Jewish religion had
corrupted the Khazar elite by turning them to parasitic
trade and enrichment. The doctrine was termed the
"Solution of the Khazar Problem."
Russian ethnography was welded to "Soviet Patriotism," a
euphemism for the Stalinist party line. The position had
to be adhered to by all who wished to avoid the Siberian
Gulag. It had an equally disastrous effect upon
archaeological research; an archaeologist's reports had to
conform to Stalinist doctrine.
How strange and patently ironic is the opposite, no less
vehemently vindictive tack taken by American rightwingers,
one of whom lamented that communism was the
creation of Judaized Khazars, "for the Babylonian Talmud
had taught them to accept authoritarian dictation on
everything from their immorality to their trade practices,"
and that the insidious Khazar subversives had "infiltrated
the Democratic party and were in high positions in the
American, British, and French governments."
It was not only the ethnocentric Stalinist doctrines which
reduced the Khazars to a "small parasitic group of
bourgeois decadents" who contributed so little to Russian
culture and history that they are hardly worth
mentioning. There are a number of pan-Arabic renditions
which aim at proving that the Jews stem from a nation of
10,000,000 Asian Tatars to substantiate the argument
that since modern Jews did not originate in the Kingdom
of Judah they were not Semites and had no inherent
claim to Israel.21
This view found support in the United Nations. Sir Abdul
Rahman, representing India, opposed the partition of
Palestine, arguing that Zionist claims to a homeland were
Page 19 of 21
Untitled 24 2006 1 12 21 51 11:51 AM
invalid because its proponents were racially unqualified.
He argued that the Jew's claim of returning to the land of
their ancestors cannot be made by people of the Turco-
Finn race who had converted to Judaism about 690 A.D.
22
The Jews have become inured to being the butt of
extremists from the right, the left, and the center. They
are regularly condemned with the same breath for being
usurious capitalists and radical communists; for adopting
worldly atheism, and otherworldly orthodoxy; for being
endogamous and internationalists.
It is evident that Khazar historiography has suffered the
same obfuscation as has affected that of the Jews.
Account must be taken not merely of the obliteration of
traces of Judaic and/or Khazar contributions by the
Byzantines and their lackeys, the Rus and the Magyars,
but of the swath of destruction wreaked by the Mongols
as they swept through the region shortly after the
Byzantines obliterated the Khazar state. The Crusaders
likewise ravaged through the East, employing the cross to
capture treasure and territory. The Inquisition wrought its
havoc upon history, and the hierarchy of the reformation
was no less intent upon deleting references to positive
contributions to civilization by the Jews. Truth must be
culled out from between the distortions of the
promulgators of a wholly Arabic Near-East, and by the
rabid McCarthyites and their successors. The process was
epitomized by the Nazis, whose professed intent was to
wipe out the Jews along with their history. Last, but not
the least, were the abject Stalinist conformists who were
required to substitute Russian nationalism for scientific
objectivity. The latter were the most destructive of Khazar
history, for most of the relics of that history lie within
Russia's borders, and recovery is affected by a doctrine
that persists despite the passage of its promulgator.
Notes
Page 20 of 21
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1. See HHF Fact paper 3: The Silk Route; A Judaic Odyssey. Fact
Papers 3 and 23 are largely digests of chapters 8 and 10 in Samuel
Kurinsky, The Glassmakers; an Odyssey of the Jews,
Hippocrene Books, 1991., in which a more extensive Bibliography
and references is provided.
2. C. De Boor, ed. Theophanis Chronographia, 1963, p. 357; M. J. De
Geoje, ed. Ibn al-Faqih, Compendium Libri Kitab al-Boldan, 1885, p.
271.
3. D. M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars, Princeton Un.
Press, 1954. P. 160.
4. Abba Eban, My People, Behrman House, 1984, p. 149.
5. This and many other references to glassmaking sites established
along the route of the Jews and Khazars made by archaeologists
deKowna, Trudnovskaya, Abdurazakov, Bezborodov and
Zadneprovskij, and other researchers are to be found in The
Glassmakers; op cit., Ch. 10.
6. Maria Dekowna "Remarques sur les Methodes d'Examen de Perles
de Verre du Haut Moyen Age Trouvees en Pologne," Bulletin of the
Fourth International Congress on Glass, 1967, p. 151.
7. Al-Musadi, Muruf al-Dhabad ("Meadows of Gold" [and Golden
Stones]) II; Musudi Les Prairies d'Or, text and translation C. Barbier
de Meynard and Pavet de Courteille, 9 vols. Paris, 1861\1877, 2:
9-12, 15, 18-25; 3:61-65.
8. Martin Gilbert, Atlas of Jewish History, Dorset Press, 1969.
9. Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe,; The Khazar Empire and its
Heritage, Hutchinson, London, 1976, p.27.
10. Koestler, idem.
11. D. M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars, Princeton U.
Press, 1964, pp ix-x.
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12. A. Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus and his World, Oxford U .
Press, 1973, p. 508.
13. Abba Eban, My People, Behrman House, 1968, p 150.
14. Koestler, ibid.
15. Koestler, ibid., p. 62, quoting from Poliak, The History of the Jewish
Kingdom in Europe, in Hebrew, 1951.
16. DeKowna, Ibid, p.122.
17. David Bezborodko, An Insider's View of Jewish Pioneering in the
Glassmaking Industry, Gefen Publications, Jerusalem 1987, p.63..
18. Ya. Miranovich, Zapiski o Malorosii, (Notes on Little Russia, i.e.,
Ukrainia), 1789, reprinted in Regestry I Nadpisi, St. Petersburg,
1913, no. 2450. Cited by David D. Weinryb, "The Khazars, an
Annotated Bibliography," in Studies in Bibliography and Booklore,
vol. XI, 1976, p. 57.
19. Pravda, as quoted in the New York Times, Jan. 12, 1952.
20. Arthur Koestler, Ibid., p.85.
21. Alush Naji, Al-Masira Ila Filastin (The Journey to Palestine), 1964; Al
Nashashibi, Nasir al-Din, Tadh-karat 'Awda (Return Ticket), 1962
claims that such European Jews as Ben-Gurion, Ben-Zvi, Dizengorff
and Sharrett were Khazars.
22. U N Special Committee on Palestine, Report to the General
Assembly, vol. 2, 1947

Jews and the “Religious Persecution” Cry

No intelligent Jew in the United States ever was asinine enough to declare that the Jewish Question is a religious question and that investigation of that question in these articles constituted "religious persecution." But it is apparently all that remains for the "Gentile fronts" to shout about. From what can be learned of them they are for the most part men of no religion themselves and they use the term "religious persecution" as a red rag which they think will stir people into action. It is curious how the cry of "religious persecution" is used to evoke the spirit of persecution against the alleged persecutors. Neither directly nor by implication is it held in these articles that the Jewish Question is a religious question. On the contrary, supported by the highest Jewish authorities, it is firmly stated that the Jewish Question is one of race and nationality.
There is no religious persecution of the Jews in the United States, unless the agitation of the various humane societies for the abolition of "kosher killing" may be considered as such-the method of slaughtering animals for food which is needlessly cruel. But even this objection can only with difficulty be stretched into interference with "the religion of the Jews." The Jewish method of slaughter as now practiced is not commanded in the Old Testament but in the Talmud, and is, therefore, not religious in the authoritative sense, but traditional. Moreover, there is positive evidence that modern methods achieve the Jewish purpose (the disposal of the blood of the carcass) much better than does the Jewish method. This is the only instance where even remotely the religion of the Jews has been touched.
The fact is that while there is no "religious persecution". Of the Jews, there is very much real religious persecution by the Jews. That is one of the outstanding characteristics of organized Jewish life in the United States, its active, unceasing, powerful and virulent attacks upon any and all forms of Christianity which may chance to come to public notice. Now and again we hear of outbreaks of sectarian bigotry between Catholics and Protestants, but these are not to be compared with the steady, relentless, alert, anti-Christian activity of the Jewish organizations. There are doctrinal disputes within the Christian Churches, but none that challenge the basis of Christianity itself; organized Judaism, however, is not content with doctrinal disputation, but enlists its vast commercial and political power against everything that it regards as, in its own words, "Christological manifestations."
No President of the United States has yet dared to take his inaugural oath on the open pages of the New Testament -the Jews would denounce him. Various governors of American states, having used the word "Christian" in their Thanksgiving proclamations, have been obliged to teach Americanism in our cities because it held that Christianity and good citizenship were synonymous!
No public man in America has ever given public evidence of his Christian faith without rebuke from the Jews. Not only do the Jews disagree with Christian teaching- which is their right and no one questions it-but they excise it on demand of the Jews. Everything that would remind the child in school that he is living in the midst of a Christian civilization, in a nation declared by its Supreme Court to be founded on the Christian principles, has been ordered out of the public schools on Jewish demand. In a nation and at a time when a minority of Jews can print every year a record of the apologies they have extorted from public officials for "having inadvertently used the term 'Christian'," it is desirable that this charge of "religious persecution" should be placed where it belongs.
The Jew glories in religious persecution as the American glories in patriotism. Religious prejudice is the Jews' chief expression of their own patriotism. It is the only well-organized, active and successful form of religious prejudice in the country because they have succeeded in pulling off the gigantic trick of making not their own attitude, but any opposition to it, bear the stigma of "prejudice" and "persecution." That is why the Jew uses these terms so frequently. He wants to label the other fellow first. That is why any investigation of the Jewish Question is so wickedly advertised as anti-Semitism -the Jew knows the advantage of labeling the other man.
This theme "religious persecution," will not be found anywhere within the whole range of the Jewish Question, except on the Jewish side. There is, in the United States, a religious prejudice, but it is strictly Yiddish. If the Christian population bothered one-hundredth-thousandth part as much about Jewish religion as the Jews bother about Christian observances, the whole fabric of Talmudic teaching would be consumed in the bright light to which general attention would bring it, the bright light from which it has always been concealed. Sheer analysis in the interest of mental health would compel the Jewish people to abandon the darkness which holds them now. Jewish Talmudism owes its existence today to the indifference with which it is regarded. This is the far Opposite extreme of ' religious persecution."
Religious prejudice is just as unpleasant to write about as it is to experience in any other way. It is totally contrary to the genius of the American and the Anglo-Saxon. We have always regarded religion as a matter of conscience. To believe as he will is part of every man's fundamental liberty. Holding these hereditary principles, one chooses to study that active stream of influence in America which is known as the Jewish stream, and immediately upon doing so, one finds himself classed with the bigots and torturers of other times.
It is time to show that the cry of "bigot" is raised mostly by bigots. There is a religious prejudice in this country, there is, indeed, a religious persecution, there is a forcible shoving aside of the religious liberties of a majority of the people, and this prejudice and persecution and use of force is Jewish and nothing but Jewish. A study of history and of contemporary Jewish journalism shows that Jewish prejudice and persecution is a continuous phenomenon wherever the Jews have obtained power, and that in neither action nor word has any disability placed upon the Jew equalled the disabilities he has placed and still contemplates placing upon non-Jews. There is no Christian church that the Jews have not repeatedly attacked.
If there is in the world any extra-ecclesiastical undertaking by Catholics which has won the undivided approval of the entire Christian world it is the Passion Play of Oberammergau Yet in a volume entitled "A Rabbi's Impressions of the Oberammergau Passion Play," Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf, of Philadelphia, has stigmatized that noble production as reeking with falsehoods and vicious anti-Semitism. In the rabbi's eyes, of course, it is, for to him the entire Christian tradition is a poisonous lie. The whole fabric of Christian truth, especially as it concerns the person of Christ is "the hallucinations of emotional men and hysterical women." "Thus," says the rabbi, "was invented that cruel story, that has caused more misery, more innocent suffering, than any other work of fiction in the range of the whole world's literature." And thus the simple peasants of Oberammergau, presenting the Catholic faith in reverent pageant, are labeled anti-Semites.
These are not isolated instances. When the Methodist Church put on the great pageant entitled "The Wayfarer,'' Rabbi Stephen S. Wise (American Zionist leader when this original was published, and one of the most active political leaders of Zionist Jewry in the United Nations; Ed.) played critic and made the solemn and silly statement that had he been a South Sea Islander (instead of the itinerant platform performer which he is) his first impulse, after seeing "the Wayfarer," would have been to rush out into the street and kill at least three Jews. It says a great deal, perhaps, for the channel in which Rabbi Wise's impulses run, but the tens of thousands of Methodists who saw "The Wayfarer:' will not be inclined to attribute such a criticism to the spirit of tolerance which Rabbi Wise so zealously counsels the Christians to observe.
The Episcopal Church also has felt the attack of the Jews. Recently (June, 1921: Ed.) the Jewish Press raised a clamor that the Episcopal Church was not competent to seek to interfere with it. It is not religious tolerance in the midst of religious difference, but religious attack that they preach and practice. The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and other Christian festivals, and their opposition to certain patriotic songs, shows the venom and directness of that attack. One parallel between the Protocols and the real hopes of the Jews is written in the common Jewish prophecy that Christianity is doomed to perish. It will perish, to all intents and purposes, by becoming Judaism. Jewish intolerance today, yesterday and in every age of history where Jews were able to exert influence or power, is indisputable except among people who do not know the record. Jewish intolerance in the past is a matter of history; for the future it is a matter of Jewish prophecy. One of the strongest causes militating against the full Americanization of several millions of Jews in this country is their belief-instilled in them by their religious authorities-that they are "chosen," that this land is theirs, that the inhabitants are idolators, that the day is coming when the Jews will be supreme.
How can they otherwise act than in agreement with such declarations? The supercilious attitude adopted by the Jews toward the stock that made America is merely a foreshadowing of what would be the complete attitude if power and influence made it possible. Bolshevism, which began with the destruction of the class that contained all the promise of a better Russia, is an exact parallel for the attitude that is adopted in this courts regarding the original stock.
Are Jews a Nation
No Gentile knows how many Jews there are in the United States- The figures are the exclusive property of the Jewish authorities. The government of the United States can provide statistics on almost every matter pertaining to the population of the country, but whenever it has attempted in a systematic way to get information about the Jews who are constantly entering the country, and the number now resident here, the Jewish lobby at Washington steps in and stops it. The Jews conceal their strength because Jewish influence at the Capitol has been strong enough to win on all matters affecting Jewish interests, at all times. Immigration into the United States became a business 40 years ago-a strictly Jewish business. There is a perfect organization which overcomes the numerous objections which arise against the admission of known revolutionary Jews, European Jews are potential revolutionaries. America has not been called "The Jews' Country" in the smaller nations of Europe for nothing, and the alarming increase in Jewish immigration brings the question to public attention again. A national conviction is forming upon the subject, for it is apparent that the strictly Jewish business of getting Jews into the United States moves like are army which, having done duty in Europe for the subjugation of that continent, has transferred itself to America. Jewish secret societies in America are the principal aides in this long stampede to America. They are able to "arrange" the passport work, they "arrange" avoidance of the health regulations. The laws of the country are set aside in open contempt. The Jewish immigrants can come from anywhere and are coming from anywhere; their first glimpse of life here shows a Jewish control as potent and complete as it is in Russia. They see officials of Jewish secret societies override officials of the United States Immigration Bureau; why should they not behave as if they own the United States ? No wonder that they literally beat down the walls and gates with all the eclat of a victorious invasion. It is an invasion, nothing less, and it is inspired and helped by influences within the United States. When it is not secret it is thinly cloaked with sentiment "these people are fleeing from persecution."
After the tide of Jewish invasion into the United States; in the 1880 's became too wide for anyone to ignore the dangers, the census authorities asked Congress for permission to classify people by "race" a well as by "country of birth." The strongest opposition was led in Congress by the Jews, principally by Simon Guggenheim and Julian WV. Mack. Hearings had to be ordered to know what elements were comprising the population; whether the United States was an Anglo-Saxon, Semitic, Latin nation, or what. The Jewish opposition to the hearings disclosed four matters very clearly: (1) the Jew is opposed to any restrictive legislation against his entrance into a country; (2) the Jew is opposed to any racial classification of himself after he has entered a country; (3) the Jewish argument to the Gentile authorities is that the Jew represents religion and not race; (4) the Jew has one view to present to the Gentiles, and another which he cherishes among his own people, on this question of Race. When Americans disregarded as untenable the argument of "religion, not race," the Jewish spokesmen were able to fall hack on the fact that their powerful organizations did not want certain things and would not have certain things -argument or no argument, commission or no commission. The Jewish lobbyists had their way. There is no enumeration of Jews in the United States. There are classifications for all other races and nations, but none for the Jew. None of the other races made objection, but the Jew is not distinguished at all. What is the result today? If you ask the government of the United States how many Frenchmen there are in the country, it can give you the figures. If you ask for the number of Poles, it is there. If you ask for the number of Africans, it is known. Down a long list you may make your inquiries, you will find that the government knows. But ask the government of the United States how many Jews are in the country-and it cannot tell; there are no records.
Race or Religion?
What have the Jews themselves to say about "race or religion ?" The following quotations put the reader in possession of information regarding the Jew's own thought of himself as a member of a separate people, quite aside from the consideration of his religion. Leo N. Levi, President of B'nai B'rith, 1900-1904:
"The distinctive character of the Jew does not arise solely from his religion. It is true that his race and religion are indissolubly connected, but whatever be the cause of this junction of the race idea with the religion, it is very certain that the religion alone does not constitute the people. A believer in the Jewish faith does not by reason of that fact become a Jew. On the other hand, however, a Jew by birth remains a Jew, even though he abjures his religion."
Graetz, the historian of the Jews, whose monumental work is one of the standard authorities, says that the history of the Jews, even since they lost the Jewish State, "still possesses a national character; it is by no means merely a creed or church history." Moses Hess, one of the historic figures through whom the whole Jewish Program has flowed down from its ancient sources to its modern agents, wrote a book entitled "Rome and Jerusalem" in which he stated the whole matter with clearness and force:
"The Jews are something more than mere 'followers of a religion,' namely, they are a race, a brotherhood, a nation." (p. 71) ... A Jew belongs to his race and consequently also to Judaism, in spite of the fact that he or his ancestors have become apostates." (pp. 97-98) ... Every Jew is, whether he likes it or not, solidly united with the entire nation." (p. 163) ... Jewish religion is, above all, Jewish patriotism." (p. 61).
Louis D. Brandeis, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and world leader of the Zionist movement, wrote in his book "Zionism and the American Jews,"-
"Despite the meditations of pundits or the decrees of councils, our own instinct and acts, and those of others, have defined for us the term 'Jew'."
Rabbi Morris Joseph, sometime of the West London Synagogue of British Jews, writes in his book "Israel a Nation,"-
"Israel is assuredly a great nation .... Israel is recognized as a nation by those who see it; no one could possibly mistake it for a sect. To deny Jewish nationality you must deny the existence of the Jew."
The Jewish barrister, Bertram B. Benas, writes in "Zionism-the National Jewish Movement,"-
"The Jewish entity is essentially the entity of a People."
Leon Simon, a brilliant and impressive Jewish scholar and writer, makes an important study of the question of "religion and nationality," in his volume, "Studies in Jewish Nationalism." He makes out a case for the proposition that the religion of the Jews is Nationalism, and that Nationalism is an integral part of their religion:
"The Messianic Age means for the Jew not merely the establishment of peace on earth and good will to men, but the universal recognition of the Jew and his God (p. 14). "Judaism has no message of salvation for the individual soul, as Christianity has; all its ideas are bound up with the existence of the Jewish nation." (p. 20). "The idea that Jews are a religious sect, precisely parallel to Catholics and Protestants, is nonsense." (p. 34).
Arthur D. Lewis, a Jewish writer, in his "The Jews a Nation," also bases nationality on the racial element:
"The Jews were originally a nation, and have retained more than most nations one of the elements of nationality-namely, the race element; this may be proved, of course, by the common-sense test of their distinguishability. You can more easily see that a Jew is a Jew than that an Englishman is an Englishman."
The idea that the Jews comprise a nation is the most common idea of all-among Jews. Not only a nation with a past, but a nation with a future. More than that-not only a nation, but a Super-Nation. We can go still further on the authority of Jewish statements: we can say that the future form of the Jewish Nation will be a kingdom.
Elkan N. Adler says:
"No serious politician today doubts that our people have a political future."
This future political definiteness and power was in the mind of Moses Hess when he wrote in 1862-mark the date !-in the preface of his "Rome and Jerusalem," these words:
"No nation can be indifferent to the fact that in the coming European struggle for liberty, if may have another people as its friend or foe."
Hess, complaining of the inequalities visited upon the Jews, was saying that what the individual Jew could not get because he was a Jew, the Jewish Nation would be able to get because it would be a nation. He warns the Gentile nations to be careful, because in that "coming struggle" there would be another nation in the list, the Jewish Nation, which could be the friend or foe of any it chose. Dr. Israel Friedlaender says:
"It is enough for us to know that the Jews have always felt themselves as a separate race, sharply marked off from the rest of mankind."
As to the problems of the Jewish Nation, there is plenty of Jewish testimony to the fact that the influence of Americanism is harmful to Jewish life; that is, they are in antagonism, like two opposite ideas. And that Zionism is the modern rallying point for Jewish nationalism. The actual beliefs of the most active and influential part of Jewry in America are demonstrated in a work published by the Zionist Organization of America, "Guide to Zionism,"
"The name of their national religion, Judaism, is derived from their national designation. An unreligous Jew is still a Jew, and he can with difficulty escape his allegiance only by repudiating the name of Jew." (p. 5).
Jewry nowhere subscribes in the persons of its greatest teachers and its most authoritative representatives to the theory that the Jew is only "a brother of the faith." Often he is not of the faith at all, but he is still a Jew. The "religion, not race" argument exposes the double minds of those political leaders who, instead of straightforwardly meeting the Jewish Question, endeavor to turn all inquiry aside by an impressive confusion of the Gentile mind. There are two Jewish Programs in the world - one which it is intended the Gentiles should see, and one which is exclusively for the Jews. In determining which is the real program, it is a safe course to adopt the one that is made to succeed. It is the program sponsored by the so called Zionists which is succeeding. That is the program whose sponsors stand for the racial and national separateness of the Jews. Regardless of what may be said to the Gentiles for the purpose of hindering or modifying their action, there is no question of what the Jew thinks of himself: he thinks of himself as belonging to a People, united to that people by ties of blood which no amount of credal change can weaken, heir of that People's past and agent of that People's political future. He belongs to a race; he belongs to a nation. He seeks a kingdom to come on this earth, a kingdom which shall be over all kingdoms, with Jerusalem the ruling city of the world. That desire of the Jewish nation may be fulfilled; and the relationships between Jewish nationalism and the nationalism of the peoples among whom the Jews dwell are pointers to the potential victory.
The Policy of “Misrepresentation”
To these exposures of the "religion, not race," arguments, the Jews have complained that they are being misrepresented. It is their usual complaint. They are always being "misrepresented" and "persecuted" except when they are being praised for what they are not. If the Jews were fully understood by the Gentiles, if the Christian churches, for example, were freed from their delusion that the Jews are Old Testament people, and if the churches really knew what Talmudic religion is, the "misrepresentation" would be still stronger. The downfall of Russia was prepared by a long and deliberate program of misrepresentation of the Russian people, through the Jewish world press and Jewish diplomatic service. The name of Poland has been drawn (December, 1920: Ed.) in filth through the press of the United States under Jewish instigation; a vilification of Poland whose sole crime was that she wished to save herself from the Jews. But whenever a hand has been raised to prevent the Jews overrunning the people and secretly securing the control of the major instruments of life, the Jews have raised the cry of "misrepresentation." They never meet the question outright. False denials, pleas for sympathy, and a base campaign for smearing others with their own crimes, and an unworthy attempt to link others with them in their fall, constitute their whole method of defense. And a concentration of all the political, economic, legal weapons at their command are flung at the head of the outspoken critic of the Jew who persists in defending his right to national existence free from Jewish infiltration, influence and control.
The policy of "misrepresentation" succeeds because there is a feeling strongly entrenched in Gentiles that somehow the Jews are the "chosen people," and that it is dangerous to oppose them in anything; whoever opposes the Jew is damned. "The fear of the Jews" is a very real element in life. It is just as real among the Jews as among non-Jews. The Jew himself is bound in fear to his people, and he exercises the fear of the curse throughout the sphere of religion -"I will curse them that curse thee." It remains to be proved, however, that opposition to the destructive tendencies of Jewish influences all along the principal avenues of life is a "cursing" of the Jews. If the Jews were really Old Testament people (which they are not), if they were really conscious of a "mission" for the blessing of all the nations, the very things in which they offend would automatically disappear. If the Jew is being "attacked" it is not because he is a Jew but because he is the source and life of certain tendencies and influences which, if they are not checked, mean the destruction of moral society. The only real misrepresentation in society is regarded as the Jews' privilege.
Disraeli Portrays the Jews
Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield and Prime Minister of Great Britain, was a Jew and gloried in it. He wrote many books, in a number of which he discussed his people in an effort to set them in a proper light. The British Government was not then so Jewish as it has since become, and Disraeli was easily one of the greatest figures in it. In his book, "Coningsby," there appears a Jewish character named Sidonia, in whose personality and through whose utterances, Disraeli sought to present the Jew as he would like the world to see him. Yet here is the International Jew, full dress; he is the Protocolist, too, wrapped in mystery, a man whose fingers sweep all the strings of human motive, and who controls the chief of the brutal forces-Money. If a non-Jew had written a Sidonia, so truthfully showing the racial history and characteristics of the Jews, he would have been subjected to that terrific pressure which the Jews apply to every truth teller about themselves. Disraeli caused his Jewish hero, Sidonia, to remark: "The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes," and even more illuminating lines by Disraeli which half compel the thought that, after all, he was writing to warn the world of Jewish ambition for power:
"You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do not greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews. That mysterious Russian Diplomacy which so alarms western Europe is organized and principally carried on by Jews. That mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing in Germany, and which will be, in fact, a second and greater Reformation, and of which so little is yet known in England, is entirely developing under the auspices of Jews."
Just how the Jews work to break down the established order of things, by means of ideas, as the Protocols claim, is shown in a conversation of Sidonia:
"The Tories lose an important election at a critical moment; 'tis the Jews come forward to vote against them. The Church is alarmed at the scheme of a latitudinarian university, and learns with relief that funds are not forthcoming for its establishment; a Jew immediately advances and endows it."
If these words had been written by a non-Jew, the cry of "anti-Semitism" would ring through the land. Yet Sidonia adds: "And every generation they (the Jews) must become more powerful and dangerous to the society that is hostile to them." "Latitudinarianism" is the doctrine of the Protocols in a word. It is the break-up by means of a welter of so-called "liberal" ideas which construct nothing themselves, but have the power to destroy the established order. Several generations have passed since Disraeli's words were written. The Jew still regards every form of non-Jewish society as hostile to him. They have become more powerful and more dangerous. Those who would measure the danger-look around !
The Jew says that the Protocols are inventions. Is Benjamin Disraeli an invention? Was this Jewish Prime Minister of Great Britain misrepresenting his people ? He showed that in Russia, the very country where the Jews of his time complained they were least free, the Jews were in control. He showed that the Jews knew the technique of revolution, foretelling in his book the revolution that shortly broke out in Germany. How did he foreknow it? Because that revolution was developing under the auspices of Jews, and, though it was then true that "so little is yet known in England," Disraeli the Jew knew it, and knew it to be Jewish in origin and development and purpose. One point is clear; Disraeli told the truth. He presented his people before the world with correctness. He described Jewish power, Jewish purpose and Jewish method with a certainty of touch that betokens more than knowledge _ he shows racial sympathy and understanding. Why did he do it? Disraeli the flamboyant, most oriental of courtiers and suave of politicians, with a Seen financial ability Was it that typically racial boastfulness, that dangerous, aggressive conceit in which the Jew gives up most of his secrets? No matter; he is the one man who told the truth about the Jews without being accused of "misrepresenting" the Jews.
"We will so wear out and exhaust the Gentiles by all this that they will be compelled to offer us an international authority, which by its position will enable us to absorb without disturbance all the governmental forces of the world and thus form a super-government ... We must so direct the education of Gentile society that its hands will drop in the weakness of discouragement in the face of any undertaking where initiative is needed." (The Fifth Protocol)
The Jewish Political Program
Theodor Herzl, one of the greatest of the Jews and founder of modern Zionism, was perhaps the farthest-seeing public exponent of the philosophy of Jewish existence that modern generations have known. He was never in doubt of the existence of the Jewish nation. He proclaimed its existence on every occasion. He said, "We are a people-One people." He clearly saw that what he called the Jewish Question was political. In his introduction to "The Jewish State" he says:
"I believe that I understand anti-Semitism, which is really a highly complex movement. I consider it from a Jewish standpoint, yet without fear or hatred. I believe that I can see what elements there are in it of vulgar sport, of common trade jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance and also of pretended defense. I think the Jewish Question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world-question to be discussed and controlled by the civilized nations of the world in council."
Not only did Herzl declare that the Jews formed a nation, but in relating the action of this Jewish nation to the world Herzl wrote:
"When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of the revolutionary party; when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse."
This view, which appears to be the true view in that it is the view which has been longest sustained in Jewish thought, is brought out also by Lord Eustace Percy, and re-published, apparently with approval, by the Canadian "Jewish Chronicle." It will repay careful reading.
"Liberalism and Nationalism, with a flourish of trumpets, threw open the doors of the ghetto and offered equal citizenship to the Jew. The Jew passed out into the Western World, saw the power and the glory of it, used it and enjoyed it, laid his hand indeed upon the nerve centers of its civilization, guided, directed and exploited it, and then -refused the offer .... Moreover-and this is a remarkable thing-the Europe of nationalism and liberalism, of scientific government and democratic equality is more intolerable to him than the old oppressions and persecutions of despotism .... In a world of completely organized territorial sovereignties he (the Jew) has only two possible cities of refuge: he must either pull down the pillars of the whole national state system or he must create a territorial sovereignty of his own. In this perhaps lies the explanation both of Jewish Bolshevism and of Zionism, for at this moment Eastern Jewry seems to hover uncertainly between the two. In Eastern Europe Bolshevism and Zionism often seem to grow side by side, just as Jewish influence molded Republican and Socialist thought throughout the nineteenth century, down to the Young Turk revolution in Constantinople hardly more than a decade ago-not because the Jew cares for the positive side of radical philosophy, not because he desires to be a partaker in Gentile nationalism or Gentile democracy, but because no existing Gentile system of government is ever anything but distasteful to him."
All that is true, and Jewish thinkers of the more fearless type always recognize it as true. The Jew against the Gentile scheme of things. He is, when he gives his tendencies full sway, a Republican as against the monarchy, a Socialist as against the republic, and a Bolshevist as against socialism.
What are the causes of this disruptive activity? First, his essential lack of democracy. Jewish nature is autocratic. Democracy is all right for the rest of the world, but the Jew wherever he is found forms an aristocracy of one sort or another. Democracy is merely a tool of a word which Jewish agitators use to raise themselves to the ordinary level in places where they are oppressed below it; but having reached the common level they immediately make efforts for special privileges, as being entitled to them- a process which the late Peace Conference (Versailles: Ed.) will remain the most startling example. The Jews today are the only people whose special and extraordinary privileges are written into the world's Treaty of Peace. (Original published in July, 1920: refer also to the present United Nations: Editor).
In all the explanations of anti-Jewish feeling which modern Jewish spokesmen make, these three alleged causes are commonly given-these three and no more: religious prejudice, economic jealousy, social antipathy. Whether the Jew knows it or not, every Gentile knows that on his side of the Jewish Question no religious prejudice exists. Economic jealousy may exist, at least to this extent, that his uniform success has exposed the Jew to much scrutiny. The finances of the world are in control of Jews; their decisions and their devices are themselves our economic law.
Economic jealousy may explain some of the anti-Jewish feeling; it cannot account for the presence of the Jewish Question except as the hidden causes of Jewish financial success may become a minor element of the larger problem. And as for social antipathy-there are many more undesirable Gentiles in the world than there are undesirable Jews, for the simple reason that there are many more Gentiles. None of the Jewish spokesmen mention the political cause, or if they come within suggestive distance of it, they limit it and localize it. The political element inheres in the fact that the Jews form a nation in the midst of the nations. It is not the fact that-the Jews remain a nation in the midst of the nations; it is the USE made of that inescapable status, which the world has found to be reprehensible. The nations have tried to reduce the Jews to unity with themselves, but destiny seems to have marked them out to continuous nationhood. Both the Jews and the World will have to accept that fact. The Jewish world program, and the political basis of anti-Jewish feeling which that program creates, is exposed by Jewish cosmopolitanism with regard to the world, and by Jewish nationalistic integrity with regard to themselves.