Jews and Jew-Baiters

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 8, 1882

Jews and Jew-Baiters.

PREJUDICES often survive the reason for their existence, like some ill weeds that grow again after they have been uprooted. In the Middle Ages, the Jews were believed to be an accursed race of deicides. The guilt of Herod and the chief priests of Pilate's time was supposed to have diffused itself, by a transfer and transmission understood only by the speculative theologian, to the whole Jewish race. It was, therefore, considered most meritorious and well-pleasing to God to make their lives as wretched as possible, in atonement for the suffering of Christ. According to law, distinctive badges were worn by these heirs of perdition, that nobody might mistake them for Christians, and they were required to dwell in separate quarters, that they might not by any chance associate with so-called Christians—an arrangement which, no doubt, saved the Jews from a great deal of bad company.

In some countries, laws were made to keep them from increasing; in others, they were occasionally thinned out by persecution and massacre. When any great drought or other scourge befell a nation, the anger of Heaven was appeased by a crusade against the Jews, who were banished or put to death for the sins of high-priest Ananias, as in like manner the Puritans in Boston sought to turn away the wrath of God, disclosed in Philip's War, by fresh severities against the Quakers. There was not much encouragement to people situated as the Jews were to keep visible property, and hence they came to be dealers in money—the financiers of Europe; and since the Jew was destined to perdition anyhow,—damned ex officio, he alone in England was permitted to receive usury for his money.

To justify all this outrage, prejudice easily invented charges against the Jews more injurious than that of taking exorbitant interest. It would have been wonderful, indeed, if the Jew, badgered, beaten, and banished from land to land, did not in turn lay up a store of hatred on his own side that would now and then break out in words and acts. But the wildest stories were set a-going, of children carried off by Jews to be circumcised and even to be crucified. It was under the stimulus of such slanders that, at the close of the thirteenth century, the Jews, after suffering outrage and robbery, were exiled from England, many of them being plundered and pitched into the sea on their passage to the Continent by mariners zealous to promote Christianity.

Not all of Christendom has come out of barbarism yet. There are regions where the Jews still suffer from the folly and fanaticism of their neighbors. In Russia to-day, as in England five hundred years ago, the irresponsible despotism and blind fanaticism that bear so heavily upon the Jews seek to justify themselves by recounting wrongs, real and imaginary, wrought by the Jew. But all the rest of Christendom has long since found out that the simple remedy for all the wrongs, real or imaginary, wrought by the Jews is the admission of Jews to stand before the law on the same level with other human beings. The Jews are not worse than other people. The rascally Jew is not more villainous than the rascally Christian. The race furnishes, by all account, a larger proportion of eminent men than any other. Dr. Guthrie, the Scotch divine, was accustomed to say that the best brains of modern times were in the heads of Jews. Those who cling tenaciously to a prejudice against the Jewish race will none the less follow the political lead of Disraeli, or the theological leadership of Neander, or admire the philosophy of Spinoza and of Moses Mendelssohn, the poetry of Heine, the music of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and in a hundred ways will come under the influence of the Jewish intellect, which plays so large a part in human thought and human affairs.

The greatest paradox of history is the fact that Christendom reveres more than all other literature that which came from the pen of Jews, believing that to them was given a closer communion with God than to other people, while the same Christendom is ready to believe all slanders against the race that gave birth to that greatest of ancient poets—the author of the book of Job, as well as to Isaiah, to Daniel, to John, and to Paul—not to mention a name more deeply reverenced than all. It is never safe to accept the account given of the downtrodden by those who oppress them. Oppression no doubt degrades the oppressed, as it certainly does the oppressor, but it will not do to take the word of the tyrant for the character of the slave under his heel.—The Century.