Ernst von Wolzogen, “Principles, and personal experience, of the Jewish Question”1 (1933)

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The former General Superintendent² Dr. Ketzler called attention in 1930 to quite forgotten late Roman evidence regarding the aversion of the Western world to the Jews. A contemporary of Stilicho,³ the Roman senator Claudius Rutilius Namatianus,⁴ still a pagan, undertook a coastal voyage in 416 to Galilee in order to ascertain if his landed property there had suffered damage through the invasion of the Gothic troops of Alarich.⁵ He described this voyage in verse under the title De reditu suo and the manuscript has been preserved in some Roman archive. This Namatianus had leased one of his properties to a Jew. And he describes, partly with moral indignation, partly with malicious scorn, how he was received and treated by this lessee. The orthodox Pharisee did not let him take part in a kosher meal but had a meal cooked really badly specially for him and handed a steep bill to him for this hospitality. Besides this, he raised a loud racket about the improper water usage of the senator and his travel companions. And on the Sabbath he did not deign to do any service for his guest. Namatianus laughs thoroughly at the Jewish god who, after the strenuous work of creation of six days, is himself exhausted and must therefore rest for a day. He traces the cold-heartedness that struck him in all Jews to the senselessly strict prescriptions of the Sabbath holiday. He writes that the Jew treated him and his companions as cattle whereas the ridiculous arrogance and the blind obedience to prescriptions of religious law that had long become senseless appeared to him and the Romans as unworthy of human beings. At the end of his observations he breaks into the complaint,

Oh, if only Judaea had never been subjugated by the wars of Pompeius⁶ and the military force of Titus!⁷ Now from out of the broken breeding ground of pestilence creeps the contagion so much more widely and the conquered nation burdens their conquerors.

This groan of Namantianus relates to the fact that already in his time the Jews were felt to be blood-suckers in the dying Roman Empire. They had taken control everywhere of the financial business and brokerage, they constituted a state within the state and transferred their taxes to the secret leaders in Jerusalem more punctually than the state taxes to the Roman financial ministry. The former financial wealth of Rome had flowed mostly into their pockets. And Jerusalem was, along with Alexandria, the biggest stock-exchange of the world of that time. We see therefore from this eloquent document that, already at the time of Alarich, the aversion of the Aryan world to Jewry was the same as that today and had the same reasons. What has appeared recently is only the disastrous influence that they have exercised through the press for some hundred years.

Of course, whether Europe would have been preserved from the Jewish pestilence if Titus had not destroyed Jerusalem and had driven the inhabitants out may justifiably be doubted. The Jews tend even today to maintain that only with the diaspora were they forced to the exclusive occupation with trade and usury because the cruel hard-heartedness of their host nations had denied them the acquisition of land, naturalization in the cities, and equality in mechanical and intellectual activities. But in reality the entire history of Jewry, even that written by themselves, shows that, from the most ancient times, they were only exploiters of the work of others, parasites, vexatious appropriators of foreign cultural works, traders and speculators. Under the late Roman emperors they enjoyed the greatest freedom, indeed even privilege. They had ample opportunity to develop their intellectual gifts in creative activities in the centuries up to the Christianisation under Constantine, if they were inclined to do so. But they preferred the predatory business activities. They had a second favourable opportunity to live freely in mediaeval Spain, especially under the Moorish rule. And there they succeeded in crystallising out of themselves a sort of noble race, the so-called Sephardim. Their scientifically disposed minds showed a special preference for medicine, mathematics, philosophy and, later, also for poetry and music.⁸ We may gladly grant them the fame that in these fields they have accomplished competent works, in individual cases even outstanding ones, and for some centuries offered to the West perhaps the best doctors. But it would have indeed been a wonder if affluence and peace had not brought forth scholars and artists even in an intellectually active nation of traders. Art and science flourish always in times of peace and affluence. If the original nomad and desert bandit develops, once he becomes sedentary, into traders and usurers and finally, under careful greenhouse cultivation, also brings forth forms alien to their nature such as philosophers and poets that is not more surprising than if the descendants of long series of generations of farmers, soldiers, handicraftsmen and tradesmen in peaceful times also strike out of their mould and begin to engage in arts and sciences. That the Jews in all circumstances, even if their state had not been destroyed, would have spread over the world as traders is due to the fact that to them even today sedentary life is little valued. They indeed gather in a mass where there is a good business to be made and leave the place as soon as they have plundered it. One may just recall the mass immigration of Galician Jews into Vienna at the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire and the mass emigration of the same Jews to Berlin and Paris when the German inflation and the collapse of the French frank offered new shining opportunities to fish in troubled waters. Where there is no business to be made the average Jew will not stay long – nor even the most enthusiastic Zionist in the praised land of their ancestors newly gifted by the grace of England.

The reasons for the aversion of almost all peoples of the entire world against Jewry are of different sorts. Among the Aryan peoples it is based primarily in a blood hostility. The most recent scientific research has indeed demonstrated that the Aryan and Jewish corpuscles repel one another in a polarized way. From this perhaps is the inborn repugnance in all Aryans who are still racially conscious to some degree, which however is not expressed against all members of the Semitic race but only against the specifically Jewish type with a negroid element as is especially frequent among the Ashkenazim, the eastern Jews. This racial instinct can therefore perhaps be fully inactive with regard to such Jews who have already for generations willingly accepted Western intellectual culture and as a result of that have more or less obliterated the external stamp of the Jewish soul.

The aversion to Jewry for religious reasons, which operated in a very essential manner in the Jewish persecutions of the Middle Ages, is today hardly of significance. The Christian churches themselves have indeed taken care to see that the consciousness of the essential difference between the Jewish tribal god Jehova and the creator of Nature and the loving father of all human children taught by Jesus became increasingly weak. The acknowledgement of the Old Testament as ‘Holy Scripture’ even for the Christians, the opinion that Jesus was the Messiah promised by the Israelite prophets finally produced the sheer grotesque belief that we had to see in the Jews the worthy fathers of Christianity. Inwardly we regretted the obduracy not only of the contemporary members of the chosen people who did not wish to be redeemed by their divinely chosen Saviour; we became, and are still, eager Jewish missionaries who believe that we can change the Jewish spirit through baptism and win them over to our character!

This false belief operated totally catastrophically in English Puritanism. The English Puritans returned in sinister enthusiasm to the ‘old covenant’, worshipped Jehova and considered it the highest honour to be the descendants of the two tribes of Israel that had disappeared without a trace that, according to the legend, were cast away on the British Isles. They felt themselves also conveniently obliged to fulfil the command of Jehova which meant they had to ‘devour’ all the nations and exercise loyalty and faith, justice and love of one’s neighbour only with regard to one’s own religious comrades. Only in recent times has the knowledge become the property of all mankind that Jesus the Galilean – whether he was pure Jewish blood or not – stood from the start in his entire thought and feeling in sheerest opposition to Judaism. Indeed, he is, according to a rabbinical legend, the son of a Jewish hairdresser in Jerusalem and a Roman, therefore perhaps Aryan, officer who later became a captain in Capernaum. (This would explain the friendship between Jesus and the house of this captain evidenced by the evangelists.)

The same rabbinical legend emphasizes most strongly that the hatred of the orthodox against the young rabbi Jeshua ben Jusuf, who, during his long sojourn in Egypt, sat at the feet of the Jewish religious philosopher Philo of Alexandria⁹ and there filled his mind with Platonic ideas, and therefore records that this renegade half-Jew had defiantly set himself beyond the strict prescriptions that strictly forbade the entry of bastards into the inner sanctuary of the Temple. What the raging hatred of the Pharisees conceived against the bold Galilean – who called them the children of the Devil – seems to me to have greater probability than the desperate efforts of our modern wild Aryans who would like make Galileans Gauls and cannot imagine the carpenter’s son from Nazareth other than as blue-eyed and with blond locks. Then necessarily even Gautama Buddha, who raged against the Indian pantheon, must have been a descendant of the Atlanteans! I mean that one can proceed very well without such violent constructions, by simply explaining the personality of Jesus as a good fortune or as a divine act of mercy that granted to the Jewish people a religious genius. It cannot at all appear as a wonder that a race that brought forth so many passionate and even poetically gifted preachers of atonement and prophets finally gave birth to a religious revolutionary.

As such, Jesus had naturally to come to the understanding that the Pharisaic orthodoxy had nothing to do with real religion. Even the knowledge that the pure teaching of Jesus was disastrously falsified by Paul, and especially through his smuggling in of the Jewish concept of sin, has become the common possession of all thinking and perceptive Christians only in recent times. Even if now the most ingenuous church-going Christians hardly hate Jewry because their forefathers killed the Saviour on the cross, all really religious men, no matter if they belong to a church or not, must reject the Yahweh religion for the simple reason that it educates its adherents to the exploitation and destruction of all other nations.

The present-day liberal Jews declare with great decisiveness, and presumably also through sincere conviction, that in their conscience they no longer feel bound to the Mosaic law and its Talmudic interpretation. That may indeed be believed of them; the cultivated Reform Jew of today has in fact not read the Schulchan Aruch and the Talmud, and perhaps does not even understand Hebrew any longer. But unknown to himself his thought and feeling move even today on the tracks that were laid out to their forefathers. It is still only a few Jews who have lived with our Aryan concept of honour, especially our entire attitude to God and our fellowmen, to such a degree that it has become as natural to them as to us.

We always shake our head in uncomprehending astonishment when even Jews who are intellectually and morally superior Jews and who, as doubtlessly honourable men, enjoy the respect of their host peoples, take into their protection Jewish criminals of the worst sort and confront our justified moral indignation with the accusation of anti-Semitic persecution.

The crudest cases of this sort are indeed still in recent memory so that one does not need to go into them in greater detail. We were told that we should take as a model this unconditional support of blood brothers ‘through thick and thin’. But we are fully incapable of doing that. Our conception of honour and justice forbids us to turn black into white in order to help a racial comrade out of difficulty. And when a criminal of our blood receives his punishment we say with satisfaction that he deserved it. We are just to the point of weakness, for we have, for example, let the Aryan Social Democrat Crispien¹⁰ declare in the German parliament that he does not recognize any fatherland that is called Germany without throwing him out of the window! One may evaluate our concept of honour, our conception of noble humanity, our categorical imperative, in whatever way one wishes but it is essentially different from the Jewish conception, in most cases even directly opposed to it.

A third reason – in present-day Germany decidedly the most important – for the rejection of the Jews is their presumption of bringing not only the economy but also the entire cultural affairs of our nation under its sway. Anti-Semitism has simply become a defensive weapon. Ever since press freedom was declared to nr constitutional, the Jewish intelligentsia rushed to the newspaper industry and their money enabled them to establish daily newspapers, weekly and monthly journals and to provide a circulation for these that exceeded by far the circulation figures of the German publications. From that time on, thus for the last two decades of the previous century, the influence of the Jewish spirit has become considerable. The mass of harmless German readers did not notice anything. They believed what was written and allowed themselves to be blinded and dazed by the skilled presentation. They learned to laugh at what they had once respected. They became ever more unsure in their natural instincts. Indeed, they learned even to think, to a certain degree, in a Jewish manner! Only a few Germans had worried thoughts about the fact that increasingly more teaching positions in sciences were occupied by Jewish lecturers, increasingly more stages directed by Jews, the commercial mediation between artists and the public, the publishing houses, the art trade increasingly fell into Jewish hands. The innocent people shrugged their shoulders: ‘Well, why not! They are an intelligent people, they present much to minds occupied with the sciences, excellent musicians, actors, singers, directors, conductors, and even very remarkable poets and brilliant writers. And if they take part in the competition with German gifts only sheer envy could deny them their success.’ The speculation on the inborn German love of justice succeeded brilliantly: Already in 1906 a Dr. [Moritz] Goldstein declared, in a questionnaire in Kunstwart¹¹ that intellectual Jewry felt called to take over the administration of German cultural matters.12 That meant therefore: the tame Germans may write poetry, compose, paint, sculpt, think and invent as much as they want, but insofar as there is a business to be made of their intellectual products the Jew would make it. That is indeed his right for the German does not understand anything about business. And with this decision at least the entire German readership happily gave itself up to the Jewish and Jewish-influenced newspapers.

I may perhaps bring in, for example, my personal experiences in this context. I came from Weimar to Berlin at the beginning of the eighties unsuspectingly, that is, from the incense-filled church of classical tradition and from the magical circle of the living personality of Liszt.¹² But hardly had I achieved my first modest successes as a humorous writer and dramatist than I saw myself trapped by the Jewish cultural administrators ruling even at that time. I soon moved in almost exclusively Jewish circles. I was not seldom the sole Gentile in the company of prominent oriental persons. I did not think there was anything bad in that. Only, I thought afterwards that I did not wish in any case to enter into a friendly relationship with any of these many witty and amiable foreign men. Then, in 1901, I unfortunately allowed myself to be tempted to realise in Germany the idea of the small stage, of the artistic music hall, brought by Aryans, the French cabaretists, the Dane Holder Drachmann,¹³ the Swede Sven Scholander¹⁴ and the Germans Bierbaum¹⁵ and Wedekind.¹⁶ In 1920 I had acquired the necessary distance from the miserable experiences of 1901-1905 to be able to represent them in my memoirs not only truthfully but already with the wistful smile of self-irony. These memoirs appeared under the title ‘How I killed myself’ in Westermann’s monthly journal. But since they lasted until the Überbrettl cabaret period, delegates of the Jewish cultural community demanded of the publisher the immediate stop of further publication and intensified this demand with the threat that in case of refusal to do so all Jewish subscribers would stop subscribing to the monthly journal. The publisher did not allow himself to be intimidated and the monthly journals prosper today more strongly than ever before. But henceforth almost all German stages remained closed to me – and indeed not only those managed by Jews. Naturally also all my other artistic undertakings as well as my books were maliciously criticized or fully ignored by the entire Jewish-influenced press. And why was that? Because I had made clear in the case of the establishment of my own theatres how well Jewry is able to lay their cuckoo eggs in our German nest. The first Jew that I employed in my undertaking soon brought a racial comrade with him and, before I knew it, my secretary and my office assistant were the sole Aryans in the entire undertaking! So long as a large crowd of Jews earned highly from my affairs the Jewish press trumpeted my fame full-throatedly all over the country. The few German artists that I dared to employ, to save face, were thrashed or at best tolerated with a shrug of the shoulders. Before the end of a year my playwrights were no longer called Dehmel,¹⁷ Liliencron,¹⁸ Bierbaum, Falke,¹⁹ Thoma,²⁰ Wedekind but Leipziger, Krakauer, Warschauer and so on. How that could happen, how they paralysed my will and demeaned my name as a signpost for a purely Jewish business, one may read in my memoirs, which later appeared as the first volume of a five-volume edition of selections of my works at Westermann Publishers in Braunschweig. But I had, already before the composition of the memoirs, tried to shape my experiences with the Jewish cultural politics in a literary form, but then left the work lie because I did not find any artistically satisfactory conclusion. Only in 1923 did I take up the manuscript again and attempted to salvage those successful humorous-satirical chapters that dealt with my experiences by appending them to a newly invented story with a political background. That was not a happy idea, for the secret league of the valuable opposition of the German aristocracy against Wilhelm II with allusions to the Eulenburg affair²¹ (whose real background was at that time still unknown to me) did not agree with the playful cockiness from my cabaret period. The book appeared under the title Sem, der Mitbürger at the Brunnen Publishing House in Berlin. The editor of the Central Verein Zeitung newspaper for defence against anti-Semitism, Fritz Engel, went into a frenzy about that. He referred me urgently to the public prosecutor, and if he were to refuse, to a psychiatrist.

I may interpret this paroxysm as a sure proof of the fact that I had hit the mark with my mockery of the Jewish character, which was nevertheless good-humored and strictly truthful. As is well-known, only Jews may permit themselves to mock Jews. And I had indeed gone too far in representing a prominent Jew as rather dim-witted. Consequently I was punished with death. The German literary historian Soergel²² took over almost word for word Engel’s judgement, without knowing the work, and recorded it forever in his Deutsche Literaturgeschichte.²³

Thereafter the boycott screw was tightened even further. The director of a south German city theatre, who had accepted a new play of mine, was quite publicly threatened that the press would ruin him if he dared to perform my play. All booksellers were forbidden to place my books in their windows. And it was even reported to me by an acquaintance that he had asked for a book of mine in a German shop, whereupon the owner sharply winked at him and only when the other customers had left the shop did he confess to him in whispers that he indeed wished to sell him the book but had to request him not to speak of it to anybody else because otherwise his competitor on the same street would certainly report him to the Jews and would ruin his business. When I report these things to respectable Jews they shake their heads in disbelief and assure me that they know nothing of such machinations. Maybe. But one who has any relationship with the Chawrusse²⁴ or the great Cabal, knows about it precisely – no matter whether he dwells in Berlin between Koch Street and Jerusalem Street or in New York or in Jaffa. – It is entirely the same in the case of politics: one must just ask which one of our people our enemies hate the most – it is the men who have understood them most deeply and who are therefore most to be feared. If the street boys shout Hep! Hep!, if wild Teutonicists declare without any hesitation that every man that they dislike is a Jew, and narrow-minded racial fanatics reject completely all Jewish accomplishments, that does not disturb their sleep; but woe to the incautious person who, through his own sharp observation, has recognized the true visage of Jewry and who attempts to use his knowledge to enlighten people!

I think that such a personal experience – and all who have dared to associate with our culture-administering Jews will have similar things to report – illustrates more glaringly the impossible situation than the most detailed observations could. We simply cannot tolerate any longer the presumption of these foreigners, who make up hardly one percent of our population, this violation of our mind. In the meantime, most of the Germans capable of thought have, thank God, perceived how remarkably stupid the phrase was that anti-Semitism is a cultural shame. The young Germany of today, with its new ideals and its fervent capacity for enthusiasm, will certainly proceed beyond this condition of self-defence and move to attack. Only when the Jew will never be a German citizen of Jewish faith but only a foreigner tolerated in a friendly manner would the poison fangs of anti-Semitism be broken, then one can let the guests of a foreign race ply their trades peacefully and utilize their many-sided gifts.

For, if they then misuse their freedom to harm our economy through usury and cut-throat competition or morally undermine our intellectual disposition, then we would know how to make them harmless through expulsion. Those among them who no longer make a good business in the new conditions will soon look for other places of refuge, and that will perhaps include the worst and most dangerous elements among them. With a sifted Jewry there will perhaps be a rather middling income. It is possible that the German Jews will then develop into a better variety, such as the Sephardim once were in Spain, and that then the intellectual Germanisation would succeed more often than hitherto. In any case, the indispensable precondition for the solution of the Jewish Question remains that we stop feeling like besieged people in our own house threatened with starvation and gas poisoning, that we learn once again to exercise our proprietary rights as proud free people.