“That’s different. It’s not about brains and attainments. I can’t make you see. I suppose it’s Christianity.”
“What is Christianity? You think Christianity is favourable to women? On the contrary. It is the Christian countries that have produced the prostitute and the most vile estimations of women in the world. It is only in Christian countries that I find the detestable spectacle of men who will go straight from association with loose women into the society of innocent girls. That I find unthinkable...... With Jews womanhood has always been sacred. And there can be no doubt that we owe our persistence as a race largely to our laws of protection for women; all women. Moreover in the older Hebrew civilisation women stood very high. You may read this. To-day there is a very significant Jewish wit which says that women make the best wives and mothers in the world.”
“There you are. No Englishman would make a joke like that.”
“Because he is a hypocrite.”
“No. He may, as you say, think one thing and say another; but long long ago he had a jog. It was Christianity. Something happened. Christ was the first man to see women as individuals.”
“You speak easily of Christianity. There is no Christianity in the world. It has never been imagined, save in the brain of a Tolstoy. And he has shown that if the principles of Christianity were applied, civilisation as we know it would at once come to an end.”
“There may not be much Christianity. But Christianity has made a difference. It has not given things to women that were not there before. Nothing can do that. But it has shed a light on them which the best women run away from. Never imagine I am speaking of myself. I’m as much a man as a woman. That’s why I can’t help seeing things. But I’m not really interested. Not inside myself. Now look here. You prefer Englishwomen to Jewesses. I can’t bear Jewesses, not because they are not really like other women, but because they reflect the limitations of the Jewish male. They talk and think the Jewish man’s idea of them. It has nothing to do with them as individuals. But they are waiting for the light to go up.”
“I speak always of these assimilated and half-assimilated English Jewesses. Certainly to me they are most inimical.”
“More so than the Germans?”
“In a different way. They have here less social disabilities. But they are most absolutely terre-à-terre.”