Coming back from antiquity and the Greeks to modern times in America, let us express the hope that all forms of race prejudice and persecution will soon cease forever. It is a truth well known of all intelligent men that racial prejudice against the Jew has not completely vanished from the minds and hearts of Gentiles; that political freedom in an enlightened age has not brought with it full religious tolerance and social recognition; that the Jew enjoys the freedom of the letter, but is still under the ban of the spirit. It is not necessary to go to Russia to prove this contention. In 1896, Adolf von Sonnenthal, the greatest of modern actors, who has covered the Austrian stage with glory, celebrated the fortieth anniversary of his entrance into theatrical life. The City Council of Vienna refused to extend him the freedom of the city, because he was a Jew. In 1906, Madame Bernhardt, the most marvelous living woman, while acting in Canada, was insulted by having spoiled eggs thrown upon the stage amidst shouts of "Down with the Jewess!" This outrage called forth a letter of apology, which appeared in public print, from Sir Wilfred Laurier, Prime Minister of the Dominion. In the summer of 1907, the sister of Senator Isidor Rayner, of Maryland, was refused admission to an Atlantic City hotel because she was a Jewess. Be it remembered that these several acts of prejudice and persecution did not happen in the Middle Ages, or under the government of the Romanoffs. Two of them occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century, beneath the flags of two of the freest and most civilized nations of the globe. What have Americans to say of the exclusion of a virtuous, refined, intelligent sister of a great American senator from an American hotel for no other reason than that she was a Jewess; that is, that she was of the same race with the Savior of mankind?
There is certainly no place for religious intolerance and race prejudice beneath our flag. Fake and hypocritical our religion, if while professing faith in Jesus we continue to persecute those for whom He prayed! In vain did Washington, marching in Liberty's vanguard, "lead Freedom's eaglets to their feast"; in vain the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution at Philadelphia, a hundred years ago; in vain the bonfires and orations of the nation's natal day, if our boasted liberties are to exist in theory, but not in practice, in fancy, but not in fact!
Let no persecutor of the Jew lay the unction to his soul that he is justified by the tragedy of Golgotha; for he who persecutes in the name of religion is a spiritual barbarian, an intellectual savage. Let this same persecutor not make the mistake of supposing that the Jews are wholly responsible for the persecution that has been heaped upon them. Before he falls into the foolish blunder of such a supposition, let him ponder the testimony of several Gentile experts upon the subject. Let him read "The Scattered Nation," a brilliant lecture on the Jew by the late Zebulon Vance, of North Carolina, in which occurs this sentence: "If the Jew is a bad job, in all honesty we should contemplate him as the handiwork of our own civilization." Let him find Shakespearean confirmation of this statement in "The Merchant of Venice," Act III, Scene i. If the Jew-baiter objects that this is the imagination of a poet, let us then point him to the testimony of a great historian and statesman to prove to him that the Gentile is in great measure responsible for the causes that have produced Jewish persecution.
In the British House of Commons, on April 17, 1873, a bill for the removal of the disabilities of the Jews was the subject of parliamentary discussion. Lord Macaulay took part in the debate and spoke as follows:
The honorable member for Oldham tells us that the Jews are naturally a mean race, a money-getting race; that they are averse to all honorable callings; that they neither sow nor reap; that they have neither flocks nor herds; that usury is the only pursuit for which they are fit; that they are destitute of all elevated and amiable sentiments.
Such, sir, has in every age been the reasoning of bigots. They never fail to plead in justification of persecution the vices which persecution has engendered. England has been legally a home to the Jews less than half a century, and we revile them because they do not feel for England more than a half patriotism.
We treat them as slaves, and wonder that they do not regard us as brethren. We drive them to mean occupations, and then reproach them for not embracing honorable professions. We long forbade them to possess land, and we complain that they chiefly occupy themselves in trade. We shut them out from all the paths of ambition, and then we despise them for taking refuge in avarice.
During many ages we have, in our dealings with them, abused our immense superiority of force, and then we are disgusted because they have recourse to that cunning which to the natural and universal defence of the weak against the violence of the strong. But were they always a mere money-changing, money-getting, money-hoarding race? Nobody knows better than my honorable friend, the member for the University of Oxford, that there is nothing in their national character which unfits them for the highest duties of citizens.
He knows that, in the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and art were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched hut stood on what was afterwards the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets.
What nation ever contended more manfully against overwhelming odds for its independence and religion? What nation ever, in its last agonies, gave such signal proofs of what may be accomplished by a brave despair? And if, in the course of many centuries, the depressed descendants of warriors and sages have degenerated from the qualities of their fathers; if, while excluded from the blessings of law and bowed down under the yoke of slavery, they have contracted some of the vices of outlaws and slaves, shall we consider this is a matter of reproach to them? Shall we not rather consider it as a matter of shame and remorse to ourselves? Let us do justice to them. Let us open to them the door of the House of Commons. Let us open to them every career in which ability and energy can be displayed. Till we have done this, let us not presume to say that there is no genius among the countrymen of Isaiah, no heroism among the descendants of the Maccabees.