For
some years I have been following the campaign that men
are trying to carry on in France against Jews with
increasing surprise and disgust. To me it has the
appearance of a monstrosity. I mean something beyond
common sense and any idea of truth and justice, a
foolish and blind thing that would put us centuries
back, a thing that would end in the worst of all
abominations, a religious persecution, covering all
countries with blood. And I wish to speak out.
In the
first place, what is the accusation against Jews? For
what are they blamed? Many persons, even friends of
mine, say that they can't endure them, that they can't
touch their hands without feeling their flesh creep with
repugnance; it is a physical horror, the repulsion of
one race for another, of the white man against the
yellow man, of the red man against the black man.
I
will not inquire whether there does not enter into this
repugnance the distant anger of the Christian against
the Jew who crucified his God, a whole secular
inheritance of contempt and vengeance. After all,
physical disgust is a good reason, the only reason even,
for there is no answering people who say to you: "I hate
them because I hate them, because the very sight of
their noses puts me beside myself, because all my flesh
revolts at feeling that they are different and opposed
to me."
But
really this reason of the hostility of one race against
another is not enough. Let us turn back then to the
depths of the woods; let us begin again the savage war
of kind against kind; let us devour each other because
we do not utter the same cry, and because our hair grows
differently. The aim of civilization is precisely to do
away with this savage need of falling upon our fellow
man when he is not exactly like us. In the course of the
ages the history of nations is nothing but a lesson of
mutual tolerance, so that the ultimate dream is to lead
them back to universal brotherhood, to confound them all
in one common affection, in order to spare them all as
much as possible of our common suffering.
photo: À Mrs. J. Fraenkel
Sympathique souvenir. Paris, 12 janv. 1901. Emile Zola
(autograph).
From the NYPL
Digital Gallery. |
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And in our day
to hate and to bite one another because our skulls are
not constructed in exactly the same fashion begins to be
considered the most monstrous of follies. I come to the
serious accusation, which is above all a social one, and
I sum up the indictment. I mark out the main lines in
it. The Jews are accused of being a nation within the
nation, of leading the life of a religious caste by
themselves, and of being thus, without regard to
boundaries, a sort of international sect, without a real
country, capable some day, if they triumph, of seizing
upon the world. The Jews marry among themselves,
preserve very strict family bonds amid the modern
laxity, sustain and encourage each other, and show in
their isolation an extraordinary power of resistance and
of slow conquest. But above all they are a practical and
shrewd race; they have in their blood a desire for gain,
a love for money, a wonderful business sense, which in
less than a century have gathered into their hands
enormous fortunes, and which seem to assure them of the
royalty at a time when money is king.
And
all that is true. Only when the statement of fact is
made it must be explained. What must be added is that
the Jews, such as they are
today, are our handiwork, the product of our
1,800 years of imbecile persecution. They were enclosed
in infamous quarters like lepers, and there is nothing
astonishing in their living apart, preserving all their
traditions, drawing closer the family bond, and
remaining the conquered in the land of the conquerors.
They have been struck, insulted, overwhelmed with
injustice and violence, and there is nothing astonishing
in their preserving in their hearts, even unconsciously,
the hope of a distant requital, the will to resist, to
preserve themselves, and to conquer. Above all, the
field of money, which was despised, was contemptuously
abandoned to them, making of them socially traders and
usurers, and there is nothing astonishing in the fact
that, when the reign of brute force gave way to the
reign of intelligence and labor, they should have been
found masters of capital, with their brains quickened
and trained by centuries of heredity, ready to rule. And
now,
today, in terror before this work of our
blindness, trembling at the sight of what the sectarian
rage of the middle ages has made of the Jews, you can
devise nothing better than to go back to the year 1000,
to take up again persecution, to preach again the holy
war, that the Jews may be pursued, despoiled, huddled
together with rage in their souls, treated like a
conquered people amid a conquering people. Really, you
are intelligent fellows and have a fine conception of
society!
What!
There are more than two hundred millions of you
Catholics, there are hardly five million Jews, and yet
you tremble, you call in the police, you make a fearful
noise in your alarm, as if swarms of plunderers had
alighted on the country. There is courage for you!
It
seems to me that the conditions of the struggle can be
accepted. In the domain of business why not be as
intelligent and as strong as they are? During the month
that I frequented the Stock Exchange in order to get
some idea of what it meant, a Catholic banker said to
me, speaking of the Jews: "Oh, sir, they are superior to
us, they will always beat us." If that were true it
would be really humiliating. But why should it be true?
Even if the gift does exist, labor and intelligence are
capable of everything, all the same. I know some
Christians who are very distinguished Jews. The field is
free, and if they have had centuries in which to love
money and to learn to earn it, all we have to do is to
follow them into this field, to acquire their qualities,
and to defeat them with their own arms. Yes, indeed, to
stop insulting them uselessly, and to overcome them by
becoming superior to them. Nothing can be more simple;
it is the very law of life.
What
a proud satisfaction must be theirs at the cry of
distress you utter! That a small minority should make
needful such a warlike display! Every morning you
thunder at them, you sound the alarm in despair, as if
the city were in danger of being taken by storm. To
listen to you we should
reestablish the Ghetto. We should have again the
Jews' quarter, and close it at night with chains. This
quarantine in our free and open cities would be a
delightful thing. I understand why they should not be
moved, and should continue to triumph in all our money
markets. For insult is the legendary arrow that turns
around and puts out the eye of the wicked bowman. Keep
on persecuting them if you wish them to keep on
conquering.
Persecution, really you have got no further than that.
You still cling to the fine idea that people can be
suppressed by persecution. Why, the contrary is true. No
cause has grown great that was not watered with the
blood of its martyrs. If there are still Jews, it's your
fault. They would have disappeared, they would have
melted away, if they had not been forced to defend
themselves, to form groups apart, to hold obstinately to
their race. And even nowadays their greatest power comes
from you, who make it felt by exaggerating it. You can
create dangers after all by shouting out every morning
that they exist. If you steadily hold out to the people
a scarecrow, you end by bringing into existence a real
monster. Don't speak of them any more and they will no
longer exist. The day that the Jew is no more than a man
like the rest of us, he becomes our brother. And the
right policy is marked out clearly, absolutely opposed
to what you are doing. Open wide your arms, put into
force socially the equality recognized by the law, take
in the Jews, absorb them, and confuse them with the rest
of us. Acquire their good qualities since they have
them, put an end to race wars by mingling the races.
Urge into marriage and leave to the children the case of
reconciling the parents. That alone is the work of
utility, of humanity, and liberty.
The
anti-Semitic agitation in countries where it really
means something is never any more than the weapon of a
political party, or the result of a serious economic
situation. But in France where it is not true that the
Jews as men wish to persuade us, are absolute masters of
power and of money, the anti-semitic agitation is
nothing but a fad, with no root in the people. It
required in order to create the appearance of a
movement, which at bottom is nothing but noise, the
passion of a few muddle brains in which is struggling a
misguided sectarian Catholicism that attacks even the
Rothschilds through a literary sophism, as the
descendants of the Judas who gave up and crucified his
God. And I will add that the need of some grounds for
making a noise, the desire of being read, and of
obtaining resounding notoriety, have not been strangers
to this lighting and public heaping up of auto da fès,
whose flames are purely theatrical.
And
what a lamentable defeat in consequence, after so many
long months, so many injuries, denunciations, Jews
pilloried daily as thieves and assassins, Christians
even made into Jews when they were to be attacked, the
whole Jewish world chased, insulted, condemned, and
nothing to show but noise, rude words, a display of low
passion, but not an act, not the sign of riotous crowd,
not a cracked skull, not a broken window! What a
good-natured, wise, and decent people our ordinary
Frenchmen must be not to listen to these daily appeals
for a civil war, to preserve their reason amid these
abominable incitements, this daily demand for Jewish
blood. It is no longer on a priest that the newspaper
breakfasts each morning, but on a Jew, the fattest and
most florid that can be found. A breakfast as poor as
the other, and certainly as stupid. And of all this
there remains only the hideousness of the work, the most
senseless and execrable that can be done, and luckily,
too, the most useless, since the
passersby in the street do not even turn their
heads for it, but leave the madmen to struggle like
devils in befouled holy water fonts.
The
strange thing is that they pretend that they are engaged
in an indispensable and holy task. Poor people, how I
pity them if they are sincere. What a frightful account
they will leave of themselves; the mass of error,
falsehood, angry envy, exaggerated madness that they
heap up day by day. If ever a critic steps into this mud
hole he will recoil with horror on seeing that there was
in it only religious passion and unbalanced
intelligence. They will be nailed to the pillory of
history like social malefactors whose crimes came to
naught, only on account of the strange blindness with
which they were committed.
That
is what astounds me constantly, that such a renewal of
fanaticism, such an attempt to bring on a religious war
should have occurred in our time, in our great Paris,
amid our good people, and that in a period of democracy,
of universal tolerance, when there is a great movement
everywhere toward equality, fraternity, and justice. We
have come to the point of destroying boundaries, of
dreaming of a community of peoples, of calling together
Congresses of religions, in order that priests of all
sects may embrace of feeling that we are all brothers in
suffering, of wishing to save ourselves all from the
misery of living by raising one altar to human pity, and
here there is a handful of madmen, of idiots, or of
intriguers who cry out to us every morning, "Let us kill
the Jews, let us devour the Jews, let us massacre,
exterminate, and go back to the stake and the dragonnades." They have chosen their time well; nothing
could exceed the stupidity of this, were it not so
abominable.
That
there is a painful excess of riches in the hands of some
Jews, is certainly true, but the same excessive
accumulation exists also among some Catholics and some
Protestants. To make use of a revolt of the people by
making it serve a religious passion, to throw the Jew of
all men as a prey to the complaints of the disinherited
under the
pretence that the man of money is being thrown to
them is the mark of a hypocritical and lying socialism
that must be denounced and branded.
If
some day the law of labor is formulated, is rearranged
in the interests of truth and of happiness, it will
redeem all humanity, and it will matter little whether a
man is a Jew or a Christian, for the accounts to be
given will be the same and so will be likewise the new
rights and the new duties. Oh, that human unity, in
which we all should try to believe if we wish to have
the courage to live and to preserve in the struggle some
hope inn our heart: that is the still confused cry which
little by little is making its way, becoming clear, and
rising from all peoples, yearning for truth, justice,
and peace. Let us put aside our hatreds, let us love
each other in our towns and across our frontiers, let us
strive to combine all races into one finally happy
family, and granting that it may need thousands of years
let us believe all the same in the final realization of
love, and beginning at least by loving each other as
much as the wretchedness of the present time will permit
us, and let us leave madmen and wicked men to go back to
the barbarity of the forests, they who believe that
justice can be done by the knife. Let Jesus tell his
exasperated disciples that he pardoned the Jews, and
that they are human beings.
EMILE
ZOLA. |