The Jews
by Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo
Monday, 19 April 2004, 0 0
"Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can
deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable
and the most remarkable race which has appeared in the world."
Winston Churchill (1)
**
"The Jew is that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the
everlasting fire, and has illumined with it the entire world. He is the
religious source, spring, and fountain out of which all the rest of the
peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religions."
Leo Tolstoy (2)
**
"It was in vain that we locked them up for several hundred years behind
the walls of the Ghetto. No sooner were their prison gates unbarred,
then they easily caught up with us, even on those paths which we opened
up without their aid."
A. A. Leroy Beaulieu (3)
**
"The Jew gave us the Outside and the Inside – our outlook and our inner
life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without
being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our
best words, in fact – new, adventure surprise, unique, individual,
person, vocation, time, history, future, freedom, progress, spirit, faith
hope, justice - are the gifts of the Jews."
Thomas Cahill (4)
**
"One of the gifts of the Jewish culture to Christianity is that it has
taught Christians to think like Jews, and any modern man who has not
learned to think as though he were a Jew can hardly be said to have
learned to think at all."
William Rees-Mogg (5)
**
"It is certain that in certain parts of the world we can see a peculiar
people, separated from the other peoples of the world and this is
called the Jewish people…. This people is not only of remarkable antiquity
but has also lasted for a singularly long time… For where as the people
of Greece and Italy, of Sparta, Athens and Rome and others who came so
much later have perished so long ago, these still exist, despite the
efforts of so many powerful kings who have tried a hundred times to wipe
them out, as their historians testify, and as can easily be judged by
the natural order of things over such a long spell of years. They have
always been preserved, however, and their preservation was foretold… My
encounter with this people amazes me…."
Blaise Pascal (6)
**
"The Jewish vision became the prototype for many similar grand designs
for humanity, both divine and man made. The Jews, therefore, stand at
the center of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a
purpose."
Paul Johnson (7)
**
"As long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in
righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration as to the people who had the
sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest."
Matthew Arnold (8)
**
Indeed it is difficult for all other nations of the world to live in
the presence of the Jews. It is irritating and most uncomfortable.
The Jews embarrass the world as they have done things which are beyond
the imaginable. They have become moral strangers since the day their
forefather Abraham introduced the world to high ethical standards and to
the fear of Heaven. They brought the world the Ten Commandments, which
many nations prefer to defy. They violated the rules of history by
staying alive, totally at odds with common sense and historical evidence.
They outlived all their former enemies, including vast empires such as
the Romans and the Greeks. They angered the world with their return to
their homeland after 2,000 years of exile and after the murder of six
million of their brothers and sisters. They aggravated mankind by
building, in the wink of an eye, a democratic State the likes of which others
were not able to create in even hundreds of years. They built living
monuments such as the duty to be holy and the privilege to serve one's
fellow men. They had their hands in every human progressive endeavor,
whether in science, medicine, psychology or any other discipline, while
totally out of proportion to their actual numbers. They gave the world
the Bible and even their "savior".
Jews taught the world not to accept the world as it is, but to
transform it, yet only a few nations wanted to listen. Moreover, the Jews
introduced the world to one God, yet only a minority wanted to draw the
moral conclusions.
So the nations of the world realize that they would have been lost
without the Jews. And while their subconscious tries to remind them of how
much of Western civilization is framed in terms of concepts first
articulated by the Jews, they do anything to suppress it. They deny that
Jews remind them of a higher purpose of life and the need to be honorable,
and do anything to escape its consequences. It is simply too much to
handle for them, too embarrassing to admit, and above all, too difficult
to live by.
So the nations of the world decided once again to go out of their way
in order to find a stick to hit the Jews. The goal: to prove that Jews
are as immoral and guilty of massacre and genocide as some of themselves
are. All this in order to hide and justify their own failure to even
protest when six million Jews were brought to the slaughterhouses of
Auschwitz and Dachau; so as to wipe out the moral conscience of which the
Jews remind them. And they found a stick.
Nothing could be more gratifying for them than to find the Jews in a
struggle with another people (who are completely terrorized by their own
leaders), against whom the Jews, against their best wishes, have to
defend themselves in order to survive. With great satisfaction, the world
allows and initiates the rewriting of history so as to fuel the rage of
yet another people against the Jews. This, in spite of the fact that
the nations understand very well that peace between the parties could
have come a long time ago, if only the Jews would have had a fair chance.
Instead, they happily jumped on the wagon of hate, so as to justify
their jealousy of the Jews and their incompetence to deal with their own
moral issues.
When Jews look at the bizarre play, they can only smile as this
artificial game once more proves how the world paradoxically admits the Jews'
uniqueness. It is in their need to undermine the Jews that they
actually raise them.
**
"The study of history of Europe during the past centuries teaches us
one uniform lesson: That the nations which received and in any way dealt
fairly and mercifully with the Jew have prospered; and that the nations
that have tortured and oppressed him have written out their own curse."
Olive Schreiner (9)
**
"If there is any honour in all the world that I should like, it would
be to be an honorary Jewish citizen."
A. L. Rowse (10)
**
Footnotes*
(1) Quoted by Geoffry Wheatcroft in The Contrversy of Zion,
Sinclair-Stevensohn, London, 1996, X1.
(2) Leo Tolstoy, Quoted by Chief Rabbi J. H. Hertz in A Book of
Jewish Thought, Oxford University Press, 1966, p.135.
(3) Anatole Leroy Beaulieu, French historian. Israel among the
nations, p.162. 1893; Ibid, p.174.
(4) Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews, Doubleday, New York,
1998, p. 240-41.
(5) William Rees Mogg, The Times, quoted by Chief Rabbi Jonathan
Sacks, Radical Then, Radical Now, Harper Collins, London, 2000,
p 4.
(6) Pascal, Pensees, translation by A. J. Krailsheimer, Penquin,
Harmondsworth, 1968, p. 171, 176-77.
(7) Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, Weindenfeld &
Nicolsohn, London, 1987, p 2.
(8) Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, Smith, Elder, London,
1876, p 58
(9) Olive Schreiner, South African novelist, quoted by Chief Rabbi J.
H. Hertz, A Book of Jewish Thought, Oxford University Press,
1966, p. 177, 180; Ibid., p. 180.
(10) A.L. Rowse, Historians I Have Known, Duckworth, London,
1995.
* All of the above quoted authors are Gentiles.