as published in HARPER’S WEEKLY for May 6, 1916
THE UNCONQUERABLE JEW
BY BENJAMIN DE CASSERES
THE Jew is the enigma of history. A giant shadow out of the East, the mystery and the problem of his destiny confront his own mind with a force as great as it strikes the minds of Christians and agnostics.
The evolution of the Jew is the romance of the races. He carries the Cross that he spurned on Calvary. and on his face is the dust of his humiliation; but to the mind’s eye he wears about his form something of the splendor of deniers. His toga is a winding-sheet, but he wears it proudly. His neck wrung for ages under the heel of hatred and bigotry, he emerges unconquered and is broken anew in the iron coils of circumstance. He challenges with a sneer on his lips the while his mind holds mystic parlance with his dream.
His dream! It is that that keeps him alive. He is a wanderer on the face of the earth who fingers perpetually the amulets of hope. He sees each race with its country, each religion with its hierarchy. Only the Hebrews are scattered to the four winds of heaven—cut, drawn and quartered, yet, like the ameba, they multiply by fission. A vague nostalgia keeps them alive, and above their heads is flaunted the mirage of Zion.
The Jew is an egotist—and in this lies his grandeur. He believes that he is of the race of Chosen People—that the Eternal has elected his race to be its mouthpiece. The Hebrews believe that a special divinity watches over them, that their terrible God is trying them. testing the metal and fibers of their nature, and that they will somehow, through the grace of Jehovah. cross the threshold of the New Jerusalem to the fanfare of the acclaiming servitors of the Only God. To them, their history is the epic of the ages. An outrage against one is an affront to all. If you attack a Jew you attack his race. He is of the elan of God, and when you scoff at him you scoff at the soul of the race.
Despised, degraded, shackled, outlawed, he has fashioned for a weapon of revenge a cudgel of gold dug out. of the earth. The world is today in pawn to him. He has studied the weaknesses of his adversaries and measured his thrift and, acquisitiveness against their needs. He knows in his heart of hearts that his Christian conquerors are at bottom things of earth like himself, and that the dynasties of power in this world are dynasties fed from money-bags, that the joists of authority, whether it be at the Vatican or the Quirinal, are mortared with lucre. He knows that more men pray to the Dollar than to God.
Proud, humble. calculating, thrifty, dreaming, the Jew wanders up and down the ages preyed upon by the beasts of religious fanaticism and preying like a beast in turn. Rejecting the Cross, he, by a fine irony, has been transfixed to it since his rejection. Dreaming of Zion. lie erects his tent in Paris, London and New York, where he sits throned in a lustrous martyrdom. Driven out of the temple. he rules from the market-place. He is unconquerable and indissoluble. His blood is intellectual, and his intellect has bloody intents.