FROM Jewish France

During the first half of the nineteenth century, European Jews won many new guarantees of legal and political equality, largely as a result of political liberalism and the growing secularization of European society. In western Europe especially, it almost seemed that centuries of anti-Semitism would be brought to an end through the quiet assimilation of Jews into mainstream national cultures. However, in the final quarter of the century, a new and very virulent form of anti-Semitism emerged, threatening Jewish communities'fragile political and social gains.

In France as elsewhere, Jews served as scapegoats for deep-seated cultural anxieties stimulated by the political instability of the Third Republic, as well as the massive social and economic changes generated by French industrialization. During the Dreyfus affair, French anti-Semites were rallied to the cause by Pdouard Drumont (1844-1917), the editor of La Libre parole ("The Free Word"), a conservative antiSemitic journal, and the founder of the French Anti-Semitic League. Drumont's Jewish France, published in 1885, enjoyed immense popularity: at least onehundred andfifty thousand copies were sold within two years ofitsfirst appearance and it remained in print long into the twentieth century. As the following excerpt from his work demonstrates, Drumont's anti-Semitism took the form of an argument that "old France" was being "conquered" by an alien and parasitic Jewish culture.

The only one who has benefitted from the Revolution [of 1789] is the Jew. Every-thing comes from the Jew; everything returns to the Jew.

We have here a veritable conquest, an entire nation returned to serfdom by a minute but cohesive minority, just as the Saxons were forced into serfdom by William the Conqueror's 60,000 Normans.

The methods are different, the result is the same. One can recognize all the characteristics of a conquest: an entire population working for another population, which appropriates, through a vast system of financial exploitation, all of the profits of the other. Immense Jewish fortunes, castles, Jewish townhouses, are not the fruit of any actual labor, of any production: they are the booty taken from an enslaved race by a dominant race.

It is certain, for example, that the Rothschild family, whose French branch alone possesses a declared fortune of three billion [francs], did not have that money when it arrived in France; it has invented nothing, it has discovered no mine, it has tilled no ground. It has therefore appropriated these three billion francs from the French without giving them anything in exchange.

All Jewish fortunes have been built up in the same manner, through an appropriation of the work of others. Today, thanks to the Jew, money-to which the Christian world attached only a secondary importance and assigned only a subordinate rolehas become all powerful. Capitalist power concentrated in a tiny number of hands governs at will the entire economic life of the people, enslaves their labor, and feasts on iniquitous profits acquired without labor.

These problems, familiar to all thinking Europeans, are all but unknown in France. The reason is simple, The Jew Lassalle himself has noted how slender are the intellectual foundations of the bourgeoisie, whose opinions are fabricated by the newspapers.* * *

Now, since almost all newspapers and A organs of publicity in France are in the hands of Jews or belong to them indirectly, it is not surprising that the significance and the scope of the immense anti-Semitic movement that has begun to organize itself everywhere is being carefully hidden from us.

In any case, it seems to me interesting and useful to describe the successive phases of this Jewish Conquest, to indicate how, little by little, as a result of Jewish activities, old France has been dissolved, broken up, how its unselfish, happy, loving people has been replaced by a hateful people, hungry for gold and soon to be dying of hunger.

Thanks to the Jews' cunning exploitation of the principles of '89, France was collapsing into dissolution. Jews had monopolized all of the public wealth, had invaded everything, except the army. The representatives of the old [French] families, whether noble or bourgeois, had divided themselves into two camps. Some gave themselves up to pleasure, and were corrupted by the Jewish prostitutes they had taken as mistresses or were ruined by the horse-sellers and money-lenders, also Jews, who aided the prostitutes. The others obeyed the attraction exercised over the Aryan race by the infinite, the Hindu Nirvana, Odin's paradise. They became almost uninterested in contemporary life, they lost themselves in ecstasy, they barely had one foot still planted in the real world.

If the Semites could have been patient for a few years they would have achieved their goal. Jules Simon, one of the few truly wise men they count among their ranks* * *, told them exactly what they needed to do: quietly take over the earth and let the Aryans migrate up to heaven.

The Jews never wanted to listen to this message: they preferred the Semite Gambetta to the Semite Simon. * * *they believed that [Gambetta] was going to help them get rid of Christ, whom they still hated just as much as they had on the day they crucified him. Freemasonry made its contribution, Jewish journals stirred up public opinion, gold was freely distributed, police superintendents were richly paid off, although they refused to make themselves guilty of a crime up to the last minute.

What happened?* * *The Aryan-provoked, troubled, wounded in his innate feelings of nobility and generosity-felt his blood rise to his face when he saw unfortunate old [monks] dragged from their cells by the dregs of the police. He took a while to deliberate, to gather his thoughts, to reflect.
"In the name of what principle are you acting?," he asked.
"In the name of the principal of liberty," replied in unison the newspapers of Porges, Reinach, Dreyfus, Eugene Mayer, Camille See, Naquet.
"And what does this principle consist of?"
"Of this: some Jew or another leaves Hamburg, Frankfurt, Vilna, or anyplace else, and he amasses a certain number of millions at the expense of the goyim [gentiles]. He can take his carriage out for a ride, his domicile is inviolable, unless a warrant is issued, and naturally it never is. On the other hand, a native Frenchman, a natural Frenchman, to use the words of Saint-Simon, gives away every-thing he owns to help the poor; he goes barefoot, he lives in a narrow, whitewashed cell that the servant of Rothschild's servant wouldn't want. He is the outlaw. He can be thrown out in the street like a dog.

The Aryan, roused from his slumbers, decides, not without reason, that once this so precious tolerance-talked about so much for the last hundred years-is interpreted in this way, it is better to strike back than be struck. He decides that it is more than time to wrest the country from such impatient masters. "Since the monk's rough robe is so annoying to your frock-coat, we'll give you back the yellow rag, my old Shem." Such was the upshot of [the Aryan's] meditations. It is from that moment that one can date the establishment of the first anti-Semitic-or, to be more precise, anti-Jewish-committee.

*The fatherland, in the sense that we attach to that word, has no meaning for the Semite. The Jew, to use the energetic expression of the Israelite Alliance, is characterized by an inexorable universalism.

I can see no reason for reproaching the Jews for thinking this way. What does the word "Fatherland" mean? Land of the fathers. One's feelings for the Fatherland are engraved in one's heart in the same way that a name carved in a tree is driven deeper into the bark with each passing year, so that the tree and the name eventually become one. You can't become a patriot through improvization; you are a- patriot in your blood, in your marrow.
Can the Semite, a perpetual nomad, ever experience such enduring impressions?
* * *the first requirement for adopting a new fatherland, is to renounce the old one. Now, the Jew has a fatherland he never renounces: Jerusalem, the holy and mysterious city Jerusalem. In triumph or persecution, joyous or sad, it serves as a link uniting all of those children who say every year at Rosh Hashanah: "next year in Jerusalem!"
Aside from Jerusalem, every other country, whether France, or Germany, or England, is only a residence for the Jew, any old place, a social agglomeration, in the midst of which he may find himself at home, whose interests he may even find it profitable to serve for the moment, but which he joins only as a free agent, as a temporary member.

To succeed in their attack against Christian civilization, the Jews of France had to use deceit, to lie, to disguise themselves as freethinkers. If they had said frankly: "We want to destroy that France of old, so glorious, so beautiful, and replace it with domination by a fistful of Hebrews from many lands," our fathers, less soft than ourselves, would not have let this happen. For a long time [the Jews] kept things vague, working with Freemasonry, hiding behind sonorous words: emancipation, enfranchisement, the struggle against superstition and the prejudices of another age.

*among the Jews, religious persecution takes on a particularly bitter character. For them, nothing has changed: they hate Christ as much in 1885 as they hated him at the time of Tiberius Augustus, and they heap the same outrages upon him. Whipping the crucifix on Good Friday, profaning the host, besmirching sacred images: such was the great joy of the medieval Jew, and such is his great joy today. Then, he attacked the bodies of children; today, he tries to get at their souls through atheist education. Then, he bled them; today, he poisons their minds: which is worse?

Despite everything, it is difficult to escape the influence of what one hears from morning to night, from the impression of the artificial intellectual climate created by the Jewish press, and even the best sometimes are subject, despite themselves, to what we have already named the prejudices of modernism.