“Antisemitism—its history and causes as seen … by a Jew” April 1944 – Special Issue titled “I Hate You”

ANTISEMITISM – its history and causes as seen… by a Jew
April 1944 – Special Issue  “I Hate You”

We reproduce below the thirty-third article from the special issue “I hate you” published in April 1944. 

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“ANTISEMITISM: Its history and causes” as seen… by a Jew

In 1894, a 420-page octavo volume entitled L’Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes (Antisemitism, its history and its causes), by Bernard Lazare [1865–1903], a Jewish author of great renown, was published in Paris by the publisher Léon Chailley, 8, rue Saint-Joseph.”

This volume is now impossible to find and the quotes published from it are often very incomplete, which is why we thought it useful to take as a collaborator to this notebook the Jew Bernard Lazare by reproducing in full the greater part of the first chapter of his book, Anti-Semitism:

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If we want to write a complete history of anti-Semitism — not forgetting any of the manifestations of this sentiment, following its various phases and modifications — we must undertake the history of Israel from its dispersion, or, to put it better, from the time of its expansion outside the territory of Palestine.

Wherever the Jews, ceasing to be a nation ready to defend its freedom and independence, have settled, everywhere anti-Semitism has developed, or rather, anti-Judaism, for anti-Semitism is a poorly chosen word, which only had its reason for being in our time, when it was desired to broaden this struggle between the Jew and the Christian peoples, and to give it a philosophy as well as a more metaphysical than material reason.

If this hostility, this very repugnance, had been exercised towards the Jews only in one time and one country, it would be easy to disentangle the limited causes of these angers; but this race has, on the contrary, been the target of hatred from all the peoples among whom it has established itself. Therefore, since the enemies of the Jews belonged to the most diverse races, lived in countries very far apart from one another, were governed by different laws, ruled by opposing principles, did not have the same morals or customs, and were animated by dissimilar spirits that did not allow them to judge all things equally, the general causes of anti-Semitism must always have resided in Israel itself and not among those who fought against it.

This is not to claim that the persecutors of the Israelis always had the right on their side, nor that they did not indulge in all the excesses that intense hatred entails, but to establish as a principle that the Jews caused — at least in part — their own suffering.

Given the unanimity of antisemitic manifestations, it is difficult to accept—as has been all too readily done—that they were simply due to a religious war, and the struggles against the Jews should not be seen as a struggle between polytheism and monotheism, or between the Trinity and Jehovah. Polytheistic peoples, like Christian peoples, fought not against the doctrine of the One God, but against the Jew.

What virtues or vices earned the Jews this universal enmity? Why was he, in turn, and equally, mistreated and hated by the Alexandrians and the Romans, by the Persians and the Arabs, by the Turks and by the Christian nations? Because everywhere, and even to this day, the Jew has been an unsociable being.

Why is he unsociable? Because he was exclusive, and his exclusivism was both political and religious, or to put it better, he clung to his politico-religious cult, to his law.

If we consider conquered peoples in history, we see them submitting to the laws of the victors while retaining their faith and beliefs. They could do so easily because, among them, the separation was very clear between religious doctrines bestowed by the gods and civil laws issued by legislators—laws that could be modified according to circumstances without the reformers incurring anathema or theological execration: what man had done, man could undo. Thus, the vanquished rose up against the conquerors out of patriotism, driven by nothing but the desire to reclaim their land and regain their freedom. Apart from these national uprisings, they rarely demanded to be exempt from general laws; if they protested, it was against specific provisions that placed them in a position of inferiority vis-à-vis their rulers. And, in the history of Roman conquests, we see the conquered bowing before Rome when Rome strictly imposed upon them the legislation that governed the empire.

For the Jewish people, the case was very different. Indeed, as Spinoza already pointed out, “the laws revealed by God to Moses were nothing other than the laws of the particular government of the Hebrews.” Moses, prophet and legislator, conferred upon his judicial and governmental provisions the same virtue as upon his religious precepts, that is to say, revelation. Yahweh not only told the Hebrews, “You shall believe only in the One God and you shall not worship idols,” but he also prescribed rules of hygiene and morality for them; not only did he himself assign them the territory where the sacrifices were to be performed, meticulously, but he also determined the methods by which this territory would be administered. Each of the given laws, whether agrarian, civil, prophylactic, theological or moral, benefited from the same authority and had the same sanction, so that these different codes formed a single whole, a rigorous bundle from which nothing could be deviated under penalty of sacrilege.

In reality, the Jew lived under the domination of a master, Yahweh, whom no one could defeat or fight, and he knew only one thing: the Law, that is to say the set of rules and prescriptions that Yahweh had one day wanted to give to Moses, the divine and excellent Law, suitable for leading those who would follow it to eternal happiness; a perfect law that only the Jewish people had received.

With such an idea of ​​his Torah, the Jew could hardly accept the laws of foreign peoples; at least, he could not think of having them applied to him; he could not abandon the divine, eternal, good and just laws, to follow human laws which are fatally tainted with obsolescence and imperfections. If only he could have kept civil ordinances separate from religious ordinances! But did not all of them have a sacred character, and did not the happiness of the Jewish nation depend on their total observance?

These civil laws, which were appropriate to a nation and not to communities, were not to be abandoned by the Jews when they entered into other peoples, because, although outside Jerusalem and the kingdom of Israel these laws no longer had any reason to exist, they were nonetheless, for all Hebrews, religious obligations which they had committed themselves to fulfilling by a pact with the Divinity.

Therefore, wherever the Jews established colonies, wherever they were transported, they demanded not only that they be allowed to practice their religion, but also that they not be subjected to the customs of the people among whom they were called to live, and that they be allowed to govern themselves by their own laws.

In Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Cyrenaica, they were able to act freely. They were not summoned to court on Saturdays; they were even allowed to have their own special courts and not be judged according to the laws of the empire; when the grain distributions fell on Saturdays, their share was reserved for the following day; they could be decurions, being exempt from practices contrary to their religion; they administered themselves as in Alexandria, having their leaders, their Senate, their ethnarch, not being subject to municipal authority.

Everywhere they wanted to remain Jewish, and everywhere they obtained privileges allowing them to found a state within a state. [FG : Why so?]

Thanks to these privileges, exemptions, and tax relief, they quickly found themselves in a better position than the citizens of the very cities in which they lived; they had greater ease in trading and enriching themselves, and thus they aroused jealousy and hatred.

Therefore, Israel’s attachment to its law was one of the primary causes of its disapproval, whether it reaped benefits and advantages from this very law that could provoke envy, or whether it boasted of the excellence of its Torah to consider itself above and apart from other peoples.

If only the Israelites had adhered to pure Mosaic law, there is no doubt that they could have, at some point in their history, modified this Mosaic law in such a way as to leave only the religious or metaphysical precepts; perhaps even, if they had not had the Bible as their sacred book, they would have merged into the nascent Church, which found its first followers among the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Jewish proselytes. One thing prevented this fusion and kept the Hebrews apart among the nations: the creation of the Talmud, the domination and authority of the scholars who taught a supposed tradition. But this influence of the scholars, to which we will return, also made the Jews the fierce, unsociable, and proud beings of whom Spinoza, who knew them well, could say: “It is not surprising that after being scattered for so many years, they have persisted without a government, since they have separated themselves from all other nations to such an extent that they have turned against themselves the hatred of all these peoples, not only because of their outward rites, contrary to the rites of other nations, but also through the sign of circumcision.”

Thus, the doctors said, man’s purpose on earth is the knowledge and practice of the Law, and it can only be fully practiced by turning away from laws that are not the true one. The Jew who followed these precepts isolated himself from the rest of men; he retreated behind the hedges that Ezra and the first scribes had erected around the Torah, then the Pharisees and the Talmudists, heirs of Ezra, deformers of the primitive mosaic and enemies of the prophets. He isolated himself not only by refusing to submit to the customs that established ties between the inhabitants of the lands where he settled, but also by rejecting all contact with those inhabitants themselves. To his unsociability, the Jew added exclusivism.

Without the law, without Israel to practice it, the world would not exist, God would bring it into nothingness; and the world will only know happiness when it is subject to the universal rule of this law, that is to say, to the rule of the Jews. Therefore, the Jewish people are the people chosen by God as the custodians of his will and desires; they are the only ones with whom the Divinity has made a pact; they are chosen by the Lord. When the serpent tempted Eve, the Talmud says, it corrupted her with its venom. Israel, by receiving the revelation at Sinai, delivered itself from evil; the other nations could not be healed. Thus, while each nation has its guardian angel and protective constellations, Israel is placed under the very eye of Jehovah; it is the Eternal One’s beloved son, the only one entitled to His love, His benevolence, His special protection, and other peoples are placed below the Hebrews; they are entitled only through mercy to divine munificence, since only the souls of the Jews descend from the first man. The blessings that are given to the nations actually belong to Israel.

Bernard LAZARE.

Francis Goumain Transcription.

FG’s notes:

1 – We cannot fully subscribe to the author’s diagnosis: it is clear that it is the Jews who made the Jewish books and not the Jewish books that made the Jews.

2 – We cannot understand how God could physically have chosen the Jews over the Aryans (nor could Epstein, Weinstein and Polanski).

3 – Regarding Bernard Lazare, it is amusing to note that it was he, and not Zola, who was the true author of the hit song about the Dreyfus affair: “J’accuse”. https://francearchives.gouv.fr/fr/pages_histoire/40045

“At the same time, Bernard Lazare made numerous approaches to influential figures. Aided by Lucien Herr, the librarian of the École Normale Supérieure, he drew young students from the École Normale Supérieure, including Charles Péguy, into the Dreyfusard struggle. Approached as early as 1895, Émile Zola was hesitant. He became convinced in 1897, when the second edition of *The Truth About the Dreyfus Affair* was published. Before Zola’s “J’accuse,” Bernard Lazare had written in it: “As for me, I accuse General Mercier, former Minister of War, of having failed in all his duties; I accuse him of having misled public opinion; I accuse him of having orchestrated an inexplicable campaign of slander against Captain Dreyfus in the press; I accuse him of having lied. I accuse General Mercier’s colleagues of not having prevented this injustice; I accuse them of having helped the Minister of War obstruct the defense; I accuse them of having done nothing to save a man they knew to be innocent.” See also Wikipedia:https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lazare

“It is a shock. Bernard Lazare devotes himself almost exclusively to this task; he publishes his first memoir, The Dreyfus Affair – A Judicial Error, in Belgium at the beginning of November 1896; in fact, it is a total reworking of the text that he had written at the request of Mathieu Dreyfus as early as the summer of 1895. Based on an article in L’Éclair dated September 15, 1896 revealing the illegality of the 1894 trial, Lazare dismantled the accusation point by point and demanded a review. This tactic was undoubtedly more in line with the wishes of the Dreyfus family because in its first version, he attacked the guilty parties, accusing them one after the other, and ended by launching into a litany of “J’accuse…!” which he gave, a little over two years later, to Émile Zola who would make it famous.accuse Zola of plagiarism…

 Additional sources:

Dr Eva Reichmann (1897 – 1998), Hostages of Civilisation A Study of the Social Causes of Antisemitism, 1945.

Le socialiste allemand Moïse Hess (1812-1875) – Rome et Jérusalem : la dernière question nationale, 1862.

The Russian doctor Leo Pinsker (1821-1891) – Autoémancipation ! Avertissement d’un Juif russe à ses frères,1882 (Self-Emancipation! A Russian Jew’s warning to his brothers, 1882).

The Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl (1869-1904) – Judenstaat, 1896.

Acknowledgements: the photocopy of this special issue was provided to us by Éditions de Cassandra (Revue Courrier du Continent) from Sierre in Switzerland, Case Postale 46, CH3960.

This much-appreciated gesture allows us to reconnect with the threads of our own history, a history from which efforts are being made to cut us off.

Cover of “I Hate You”, a 25×30 cm color album published in April 1944
Image: La Rochelle Museums of Art and History, Vincent Mariet

photographie – M0825_2014-0-291 – Alienor.org

In April 1944, using as its title an invective by Léon Blum addressed to the nationalist benches in the National Assembly, “I hate you!”, the editorial staff of the journal Cahiers Jaunes, which had become Revivre, published a special issue, more of a collective work, under the direction of Henry Coston, the last page of the work specifies: 

The final approval for this magazine was given on April 15, 1944, at the printing press of the Special Printing Office of the Central Press and Information Bureau. Maurice-Ivan Sicard was Director, Émile Bougère, Editorial Secretary, and Jehan Teisseire, Head of Photographic Services, the articles and documents in this publication were compiled by Henry COSTON, Director of the C.A.D., with the collaboration of Professor MONTANDON, Professor BERNARDINI, Jean DRAULT, Jacques PLONCARD, Gaston DENIZOT, VAUQUELIN, Paul LAFITE, F. REYSSEL, Henry MEUNIER, Jean VELLAVE, Jacques ROGÈRE, Claude WACOGNE, Jean BERTRAND, Nelly ROSTEAU, Robert JULLIEN-COURTINÉ, X. De TEYTOT and Philippe de NATTES.Our esteemed colleague MULLER, from Masonic Documents, has also provided various important documents concerning Judaism and Freemasonry.