OLD MALIGNMENTS OF THE CHOSEN PEOPLE.
The Long-Existent Prejudice Against the
Jew Is Explained by a Leading
Rabbi of New York.
No other race has been so vilified as the Jew. Hatred for Hebrews has been endemic in Europe since the Dark Ages, and even to-day in France and Germany the anti-Semitic movements have considerable strength. How can this be? Is the feeling a survival of anger at a race which rejected Jesus? Or is it based on desperate hostility toward a race which can succeed in business where a Gentile fails?
The Rev. Dr. S. Schulman, of the Temple Beth-El, New York City, in a recent sermon sought to answer these questions. Part of his discourse we quote:
We are the victims of the world's literature, of its prevailing creed, and the popular judgment. The greatest master in the world's literature, seeking a type that on account of peculiar conditions and circumstances could stand for cruel hatred and implacable revenge, deliberately changed the contents of a story and made Shylock the Jew the embodiment of inhuman revenge.
The poet must have felt that if ever in a human soul there could arise such unyielding hate as he desired to portray it might, in a sense, be justified in one whose heart rankled with the memories of ages of persecution and unjust hatred to which his race had been subjected.
Here was one, the poet seemed to say, who could well execute the villainies he had been taught. He therefore produced a character dramatically consistent, but at the same time he did an everlasting injury to the Jew, because he produced a character altogether historically untrue. The Jew is anything but vindictive; he forgets injuries readily; that is why he is so optimistic; he has a horror of shedding blood, and whatever vices the Jew may be capable of, the one of ferocious cruelty cannot be saddled upon him.
Nevertheless, the word Shylock has become in English speech synonymous with everything that is bad. This injustice in literature will persist until some great genius possessing the broad-mindedness of a Lessing and the dramatic power of a Shakespeare shall arise among English-speaking people and create an English Nathan the Wise.
The Western world's creed centers in an event which, strictly speaking, belongs to the same category as that of the killing of Socrates, the burning of Giordano Bruno, and of Servetus. Thus, classic Greek, Catholic, and Protestant were all equally guilty of sacrificing the best of their time. The progress of mankind has, sad to say, often been purchased by the martyrdom of some of the noblest men that walked on earth.
Yet it is the Jewish people that have been singled out to be held up to the world as Deicides, and every child at the time when the soul is most receptive is inoculated with an antipathy against every living Jew because of an event that took place nineteen hundred years ago.
It is therefore no wonder that the world is prejudiced against the Jew.