Read the Book

Background

 Samuel Roth was a Jew, proud of his Jewish-ness, who owned a bookshop on West Eighth Street, New York. He was fleeced, conned and generally swindled by his own kind and must have lost most, if not all, of his most prized and dear possession - money. Whatever happened to the writer of this book, it changed his point of view completely. He became a rabid anti-Semite and in this book his efforts are directed at exposing the chicanery, vindictiveness and the generally unsavory character of his race.  This 163 page booklet contains the most virulent and damning written attacks that his brethren have ever been subjected to.
The following are extracts from "Jews Must Live":
 
 

Dear Herbert:-
I want you to learn of these things out of the overflowing of my pen, and know my feelings as if you had heard my own voice uttering them.  I would not want the tongues of others, strangers or pretenders to my friendship, to touch this story with the sour whimsy of gossip.  In any other voice but my own it must sound incredible and ugly that I should have taken this attitude towards our people. But it is not incredible because, as you see by my vouching for it, it is true.  And nothing can be entirely without beauty that has lived so close to the fire which consumes. ......

People will say to you: It is obvious that Roth is deplorably blinded by what has happened to him.  He apparently got mixed up with a set of ruthless Jews. They fleeced him.  And he is ungallantly throwing the onus on the whole Jewish people.  Which is unjust and unfair.
If it was not for what the Jews did to me, it is possible that I might never have come to this pass, for they lifted me bodily out of the set life of a Jew of forty and carried me here on their own shoulders.  Does this impair my case against them?  I do not think so.  How, I ask you, have messages like this been brought to the world before?  How have people been awakened   before, to those strange and terrible visions which have catapulted mankind into what it describes itself today?  Would my plea seem more authentic if I presented it in the guise of a series of statistical studies proving what a hideous swamp the Jews have made of Western Civilization?  Would it better establish my sincerity if, like one of the minor prophets in Israel, I began my vision with the words And the Lord appeared to me and said?
Is there any need to tell you what a lovely, fearful and proud thing my Jewishness has been to me all my Life? ......

We lived in those days in what the Jews call mockingly the Olem Hatoi, the world of illusion, as distinguished from the Olem Hazai, the real world, of which they speak with awe and reverence.  We looked upon ourselves as free Jews, princes of the world's most precious blood, descendants of the warrior-man Ben Cochba, and of the warrior-princes the Maccabees. ......

As Jews we were the living embodiment of the vision incarnate.  Everything said against us was so much evil slander inspired by envy, disappointment, and an unreasoning hatred - Jew-hatred.  Jew-hatred differed from every other hatred in the world because it was altogether inspired by lies.  About that there could possibly be no question.
In that spirit I wrote and published two books:  Europe (Liveright,1919) and Now and Forever (McBride, 1925). ......

But even in the blindness of my racial self-love I was observing things.  In Now and Forever I pried a surgical knife into the anatomy of the God of Israel.  I noticed the earthiness and unloveliness of Jewish women.  I pricked the bubble of the theory that Jesus was a man of peace.  I regretted that the Zionists had not had the fundamental decency to remain faithful - in spite of alluring British promises - to their pre-war pledges to Turkey.  And I suggested that I would probably live to see Jews roasted alive on Fifth Avenue.  My book was none the less a passionate defence of the Jews against their enemies. ......
 
 

But what sort of speech is this from a Jew, you are probably asking yourself, by this time?  I can see the question half-glimmering in your eyes.  My answer must be steel set in granite.  The dew of compassion has entirely dried up in my bowls.  I am myself a Jew, I know it.  But I am a Jew who has been brought to the point where he so loathes his people that he thinks in terms of their destruction.  No, it has not escaped me that the destruction of Israel would mean my own end, too.  I would not want to survive in a world without Jews.  Yet, by God, I don't know how I shall ever again contentedly live with them: I pray for my own effacement as fervently as I pray for theirs. ......

The causes of anti-Semitism lie in the very deepest recesses of human nature.  They are like pebbles at the bottom of a very deep stream.  But the waters of the stream are clear and I have no difficulty making them out.
The first cause of Jew-hatred goes back to the nature of Jewish leadership, a black veil on the conscience of the race.  The second goes back to the nature of the people itself, and it is an evil no less foul.  The first appears to be an evil without remedy.  But the second does not seem to me impossible to deal with.
Beginning with the Lord God of Israel himself, it was the successive leaders of Israel who one by one foregathered and guided the tragic career of the Jews - tragic to the Jews and no less tragic to the neighbouring nations who have suffered them.  But we must have been a pretty horrible people to start with.  Our major vice of old, as of today, is parasitism.  We are a people of vultures living on the labour and the good nature of the rest of the world.
But, despite our faults, we would not have done so much damage to the world if it had not been for our genius of evil leadership.
Granted our parasitism.  But Parasitism is a virtue as well as an evil. ......

The shame of Israel comes not of our being the bankers and the old clothes men of the world.  It comes, rather, of the stupendous hypocrisy and cruelty imposed on us by our fatal leadership, and by us on the rest of the world. ......

If it were true, as the Jews claim, that the gentiles lay violent hands on them purely out of prejudice against their religion, out of envy of their superior commercial genius, how would the Jews ever get into a civilized country to begin with?  Have not Jews been admitted from time immemorial, freely, kindly, almost happily by every nation at whose gates they have knocked for admittance?  The story of the Jews, as they have themselves written it out, has always gone out ahead of them, to spread through the foreign people and evoke in their minds curiosity and pity.  Have the Jews ever had to petition a country for admission - the first time? ......

Apion, in his vicious and lying arguments against the Jews, tried to spread the infamy that the Jews were leprous and instead of running away from Egypt, were really kicked out of it.  Apion was probably as greater liar as any Alexandrian rabbi of his day.
There is no reason to believe that the Jews were any less healthy than the other wanderers in the wildernesses of Asia and Africa who had the hygienic sagacity to fine comb their hair at least once every other week.  But I remember, in this connection, Franz Oppenheimer's brilliant theory concerning the formation of states.  In the beginning, he argues, there are two kinds of communities from which the state is evolved: the peaceful, uncharted tillers of the soil who may be compared collectively to the passive female organ; and the bands of  wandering marauders whose only means of living is to fall on one or more of these peaceful settlements, enslave them and commercialize their talents and labours.  This second type of community he compared to  the male.  When these two meet, and one penetrates the other, the theory goes on, conception takes place, and there is a blessed event - the birth of a new state.  The Jewish nation certainly constitutes a community such as Franz Oppenheimer designates the male organ.  The organ is constantly at work and may be depended on for services in and out of time.  But there is a grave difficulty.  The organ is diseased.  The disease is a sort of moral gonorrhoea known as Judaism, and seems to be, alas, incurable.  The results of such mating, as any good doctor will tell you, are invariably treacherous and unhealthy.  If you are in doubt take a look at any Jew-ridden country in Europe.  If you need to be further convinced, take a look at what's happening in America.
 
 

I was born in (N)ustcha, a village on the river Strippa, where Austria Poland relinquished her nationals to the lesser tender mercies of the Russian Empire.  As well as I can remember, we were one of less than a dozen Jewish families in the environs. ......

I had just passed my third year when my father deposited me in the home of an aunt of mine in Zborow, further down the river, because, he said, there was nothing left that he could teach me. ....In Zborow, where my father brought me to continue my Hebrew education, the Jewish religion prevailed, among the Jews, in its most orthodox form.  The town was one of the oldest in Poland, its market place one of the busiest.  To a stranger, come upon this scene of petty and virulent barter, the impression must have been that he was in a Jewish town.  Behind the stalls, fiercely vying to outdo one another, brown-beared, peak-capped men and bewigged, red-shawled women, raged to and fro.  Yet Zborow was not a Jewish town.  More than seventy percent of its inhabitants were Slavonic Poles.  The Jews formed much less than a third of the population.
Why then, you might ask, this decided predominance in the general appearance of things, since even in the matter of property  ownership the Jews were in a humble minority?  The simplest answer is that the appearance of things in this world is usually illusory, and we Jews have always been past-masters in the arts of illusion.  We have learned to dominate the landscape of any country by the very singular process of electing ourselves to do all the grouping.
More than a century before I was imposed on the scene, the old wooden synagogue that stood in the midst of the marketplace in Zborow had been reared. ......

Morning, noon and night, Jews held festive, strangely joyous prayer meetings before the screened Ark of the Covenant in the heart of the synagogue.  A Jew prays a little more frequently than a Christian and a little less frequently than a Mussulman.  But the Jewish form of prayer differs both in heart and in outline from any other species of prayer in the world.  The difference is the difference between one approach to God and another.  Mohammedans and Christians humble themselves before their deities. The Christian in church.  The Mohammedan wherever he may happen to be when the muezzin announces the hour of prayer.  The Jew has everything very carefully arranged.  God belongs in the synagogue.  He, the Jew, belongs in the marketplace.  God has only one business.  It is to look after the prosperity of Israel.  The Jew walks briskly into his synagogue three times a day, at set hours, to remind God of his important business.
The Jews formed only a fraction of the population of Zborow.  But by virtue of their sensitiveness to their inherent worth, they regarded themselves as its natural masters.  Concerning their superiority over the rest of the population of the town, there could be no question  in their minds.  It was all very simple.  They were Jews.  And the goyims were only goyim. ......

The numerical superiority of the goyim was an accident unworthy of being given a second thought.  Their superiority in legal possessions - ha, that was the real rub!  What the goyim had was only a temporary possession which the stupid law of the gentiles was attempting to make permanent.  Were not they, the Jews, God's chosen?  Did not God mean in the very beginning that all the good things of the world should belong to his favourites?  It was a Jew's business to remember this at all times, especially in his dealings with goyim.  It was practically a moral obligation on the part of every conscientious Jew to fool and cheat the goy wherever and whenever possible.  The impression this arrangement made on me at that time was that the world had been created by God for the habitation and prosperity of Israel.  The rest of creation - cows, horses, nettles, oak trees, dung and goyim - were placed there for our, the Jews', convenience or inconvenience, depending on God's good humour for the time being. ......

The Jews pride themselves on their reluctance to proselytize.  They explain that this is a sign not only of religious exclusiveness, but of their good will towards the rest of the religions.  It is nothing of the sort.  The Jews do not proselytize because they are firmly convinced that they will eventually inherit the earth, and they want as few claimants as possible to this windfall. ......
 
 

Jews are constantly telling me what a grievous disadvantage they find themselves under in conducting their business because they happen to be Jews.  The word 'happen' is theirs, not mine.  They forget to make a very important distinction, which can only be made if you have been honest enough to observe it.  Being a Jew is a disadvantage only if you are a Jew doing business within the Jewish tradition.  But you can be a Jew who conducts his business honestly and decently.  I have met one or two such Jews in my life.  I have never known them to suffer of racial prejudice. ......

The average Jew displays his disposition  on his face, the result of his peculiar up-bringing on the principle : Leolom Tockach - always take. ......

What is this Jewish up-bringing!  To know it you have to enter and live in, a Jewish home  I only knew one Jewish home intimately, the one in which I was, so to say, reared and so I shall give you some inkling of it.  It was typical of all Jewish homes, rich and poor alike. ......

The first thing the young Jew learns is that he is a Jew.  The second thing he learns is that being a Jew makes him different from the members of all the other peoples on the face of the earth.  Sanctity, because of the ever presence of the synagogue as a background, is inevitably part of his impression of his function as a Jew.  If the family in the midst of which he is reared has shed all of its religious feathers, then the sense of superiority takes the place of the feeling of sanctity.  The third thing he learns is that, as a member of a nation of priests, it is his business to make for himself a high place in the world, some position from which he will be able to compel the world to pay him tribute.
Most desirable for the young Jew, he is told impressively, is for him to become a member of one of the professions - to became a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, even a salesman or an agent.  To be compelled to go to work, to do manual labour for one's livelihood, is the very worse state the young Jew can fall to, something to make him fell really ashamed and humiliated.
This attitude of the Jews towards manual work is historic.  The Jewish apologists have a neat explanation for it.  In most of the countries of the Diaspora the Jews were not permitted to own land or to work on it.  Nor were they permitted to work for Christians.  And since Jewish merchants could give employment only to a fraction of the great number of young Jews, the rest had to turn for careers to salesmanship, money lending and the other promoting aspects of the trade.  This does not explain why Jews have never, like other peoples, gone into a wilderness and build up a land of their own.  Nor why in England, in the thirteenth century, under Edward I, they did not take advantage of the offer by which Edward promised to give them the very opportunities Jews had been crying for for centuries.
After imprisoning the whole Jewish population in his domain for criminal usury and debasing the coin of the realm, Edward, before releasing them, put into effect two new set of laws: the first made it illegal for a Jew in England to lend money at interest.  The second repealed all the standing laws which kept Jews from the normal pursuits of the kingdom.  Under these new statutes the Jews could even lease land for a period of fifteen years and work it.  Edward advanced this as a test of the Jew's sincerity when he claimed that all he wanted was an opportunity to work like other people.  If they proved their fitness to live like other people, the inference was that Edward would let them buy land outright and admit them to the higher privileges of citizenship.  Did the Jews take advantage of Edward's decree?  This way: To get around the laws against usury they invented such new methods of skinning the peasants and the nobles that the outcry against them became greater than ever, and Edward had to expel them to avert a civil war.  It is not recorded that one Jew took advantage of the new right to till the soil. ......

The Jew's feeling of superiority to manual labour has become second nature to him.  It has been inborn and inbred in him as carefully and painstakingly as the virtue of a life of useful labour are inbred in the lives of the children of the rest of the nations.
The Jewish boy's progress through school is observed with the most hawk like watchfulness. ......

Does poor Simon bring home bad marks from school?  He is continually warned, by parents and neighbours, that unless he shows decided improvement he will without doubt forfeit the support of his family in the direction of a career.  It is pointed out, with the most painful emphasis, that unless he picks up in his studies, he will sink into the horrible ignominy of having to work for his livelihood.  So deeply is impressed on the growing Jew that to have to work with his hands is the most awful humiliation of life, that, no matter what becomes of him, he inwardly determines that he will not submit to work ......

What becomes of the young Jews who cannot attain to one of the professions, have not the money with which to buy a news  stand or the mental resourcefulness to create a selling line?   Most of them remain on the street corners of their neighbourhoods and become the petty thieves, hold-up-men, strike-breakers, back store crapshooters, street corner mashers, dope peddlers and dope smugglers, white slave traffickers, kidnappers and petty racketeers of every peaceful community in America. ......
 
 

'Judaism is not a religion, but a misfortune', said Heine in one of his bitter moments.  He was thinking of his own unhappiness, however.  No one has as yet calculated the extent of its misfortune to the rest of the world. ......

The very genesis of the Jewish People is in religious intolerance.  They have lived by it.  And it seems to me to be a neat bit of historic justice that they will eventually themselves be destroyed by it. ......

Strictly speaking, of course, Judaism never was, and is not even today, a proselytizing religion.  But Judaism was the first religion in the world which divided everything into those things which are right and those things which are wrong.  And started all the mischief. ......

It was this conviction, that it was right and that all the other people in the world were wrong, that Christianity inherited in full from Judaism.  Once it found itself filled with the fury of intolerance, Christianity not only attacked the pagan world but its Jewish teachers as well. ......

Judaism is today the only bar between the Jews and the world they love and would like to share with their neighbours.  Every synagogue we Jews build in Christian counties is a finger of scorn we point at our hosts, a sore finger we stick into their eyes, like the leering of a senile old woman who does all sorts of foul mischief before you, and feels safe in the knowledge that you will not lay hands on her to remove her, for fear of contamination.  It is as though we said to the gentiles:
' There is a right and there is a wrong.  The right is to be found only behind the doors of our synagogues, and there only.  Everything in your churches is spurious, as you should know of your own accord, for your very first churches were built by apostate Jews who knew only how to pervert the true religion which is ours'.
By publishing the ten commandments among nations, the Jews gave birth to religious intolerance. .......

The observances of the Jewish religion are as varied, as different in assembled virtues, and as full of crudities as any religion I have ever read about.  Certainly no other religion in the world has offered the world a spectacle as contradictory, as malicious, as full of the spirit of unreasonableness as the Jewish recital of the prayer  Kol Nidre  during Yom Kippur.  I suggest that if we are going to start tearing down this great fortress of Jewish religious prejudice and intolerance, Kol Nidre is perhaps the best starting point.
 
 

The Jew is a gypsy with a weakness for real estate.
The very first promise the Lord made to Abraham was a promise of land: the land already occupied and the lawful property of the peoples who had fertilized it.  Genesis and Exodus are crowded with specific references to the many peoples who lived in the land of promise before the birth of Abraham, and before its fierce invasion by the seed of Abraham under Joshua.  At no time in the narrative is the matter of the titles of these ancient proprietors of Canaan brought into question.  But the most microscopic study of the text reveals not even the hint of a plan by which, when the Jews were to possess the land, the title to it was to pass legitimately to them.  There was no offer made for outright purchase, such as Abraham himself had made for the burial ground of Machpelah.  No offer of a periodic lease either.  It was deemed sufficient to repeat the oral legend that the Lord had promised the land to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their posterity, forever. On this slender pretence (which reminds one of the extraordinary reasons given by Norman William to his home legislators for invading England) the Jews marched into Palestine, slaughtered most of its inhabitants, and proceeded to make a pigsty of the whole country.
Suppose the records of this first conquest of Israel were not as detailed and as indisputable as they are?  Would there not be an inclination on the part of the more civilized Jews of our day to dispute that it really happened?  Instead of adopting the story as sacred scripture, I conceive that Jews might even have advanced the theory that it was nothing but a false series of accusations, the ancient world's peculiar contribution in advance to anti-Semitism.  But the Jewish history, that to throw doubt on the Jewish conquest of Palestine would shake the world's belief in our very identity as a race and a nation.  That's why, instead of trying to deny the shameless story, the Jews are trying to re-enact it - in a more modern and more moderate setting.
I began by saying that we Jews have a weakness for real estate.  I mean real estate as distinguished from land.  People with a love of land are anxious to work it.  They have a passion not only to live on the soil but pierce it and fructify it.  But, as I have already shown, the Old Testament is a solemn testimony of the Jewish People's hatred of work - particularly agricultural.  In the wilderness, on their march to conquest, God had to practically rain food down on the Jews in order to keep them going.  A hundred times, under the reluctant leadership of Moses, who must have hated them bitterly, they refused to take another step forward.  And the Lord, in order to get them to go on, to save the sweet breath of the desert, was compelled to promise them that their labours would be at an end on reaching the Promised Land, where the cities were already built for them, the vineyards planted and ready to nourish them.
Jewish historians and apologists make a hue and cry about the Jews having been barred everywhere from the ownership of land, during the Middle Ages, and even in some countries in the modern world. ......

That is not true.  The Jews did not seize the opportunity offered by Edward I, to rend English land and till it.  Nor have they seized the opportunities in England and in America in our own time.  The reason why?  Jews know only one use for the ownership of land - or of anything.   Speculation. ......

That is only one of the reasons why the world is reluctant to permit Jews to owe property.  Civilized people attach a certain mild sanctity to the ownership of land - a sanctity the Jew can be dependent upon to violate every time.
So that when the Jewish apologist whines:
'If we had not been forbidden the ownership of land during the Middle Ages we would not today be a nation of idlers',  he lies in his throat.  We are a nation of idlers to begin with.  Our sole interest in land has always been in its speculative value as a turnover. ......