A subject can from time to time fall prey to a very harmful ambiguity just through its name. The natural and justified content of the Jewish question is involuntarily or even deliberately obscured if the incorrect double meaning of the term Jew' is falsely used to characterize the Jewish question as indicating one of the Jewish religion, that is, as a subject present on account of the Mosaic religion. From the Christian Middle Ages the custom has rooted itself among us of thinking in the first place of a religious difference. In this way did the term Jew' become falsely, and almost exclusively, an indication of religion, and the designation of a race or rather of a racial tribe which is hostile to the modern cultured nations became an incidental matter. That sort of enlightenment which in the 18th century directed itself principally against religious limitations and placed no value on racial characteristics has similarly contributed to the fact that in the Jews only the incidental matter, instead of the main matter, was taken into consideration. Precisely the educated had thereby become accustomed, in the most recent times, to think only of the religious labelling among the Jews. Now, since religionistic, that is, essentially superstitious, dogmas have in a positive way become increasingly insignificant from the standpoint of higher education, the fruit of this religious enlightenment has consisted, in general, in the fact of no longer taking the religion into account in the religious Jew and of considering him accordingly as if he were entirely what we are, but with the irremovable difference that he was born into one religion and we, however, into another religion and are likewise labelled by it. Even the Jews themselves have upto the present day striven for ways of putting down every criticism and every conduct against them as if it were a matter of religious differences and prejudices and as if they were different from other peoples only through their religion.
But the lower class and the usual bourgeoisie have let their natural instincts and sentiments be deceived neither by the priests nor by the religious educators. They have always seen in the Jew something which was, no matter for what reason, not reconcilable with their own kind. The baptized Jew, thus the Evangelical or Catholic Jew, was and is considered by them, where they correctly understand their aversion to the Jewish type, always as essentially a Jew. This naturally grown feeling and this judgement based on immediate impressions was however misled originally by the priestly leaders and then by an inadequate religious instruction. The priests have taught the people falsely to imagine that it may not suffer the Jews on account of their deviant religion. The religious educators however, and among them indeed the Jewish or those directed by a Jewish way of thought, have provided to that falsification of the matter the equally falsifying counterpart. They have, in accordance with the priests, represented every aversion and measure against the Jews as something which had to do only with the Jewish religion and have accordingly made it a necessity, for the sake of religious tolerance, of suffering the Jew as he really is with all his characteristics and of considering other peoples equally. In this way the people and the nations have forgotten to understand their own feelings and experience correctly and to deal in a correct way with their opposition to the Jewry. Even the higher born classes which otherwise wish to know what origin and blood have to signify, have fallen prey to that obscuring of the racial and national consciousness and have accustomed themselves to disguising their natural aversion to the Jews in the form of a protest against a religious form.
However, the basic understanding which sees in the Jew not a religion but a racial tribe is already breaking through decisively. Only, it is still, to a certain degree, distorted by the mixture of religion in it. But it lies in the interest of a noble mankind, thus of a true humanity and culture, that this obscurantism of religion, which has up to now covered and protected the worst characteristics of the Jews with its darkness, be fully removed so that the Jew may be revealed to us in his natural and inalienable constitution. Then the cultural characteristics developed from the racial nature can also be understood and measured; indeed even the religion will then get, not merely as a mirror of some characteristics, but independently, an evaluation which indeed diverges very much from that which the priests on the one hand and the religious instructors on the oilier have made popular in terms of ways of judgement. It is however neither feasible nor beneficial to substitute, regularly and everywhere, a name with an old, well-known ring to it with a new way of characterisation. One may therefore say in brief--when one means the race--Jew', and not, rather, Semite'. The Jews are a definite small tribe of the Semitic race and not this entire race itself, to which, for example, once even the Phoenicians, remembered from destroyed Carthage, belonged. Arab-Bedouins are not of Jewish origin, but indeed Semites. The Jews are, on the other hand, the most vicious minting of the entire Semitic race into a nationality especially dangerous to nations. The expression "Semitic" is among the Jews easily glossed over, and even the Jews are pleased more with it than with the name of generally familiar significance and popular understandability.
A Jewish question will exist even if all Jews turn their back on their religion and were converted to one of the ruling churches among us, or if all religion were already destroyed. Indeed I maintain that, in these cases, the opposition between us and the Jews would make itself felt as a still more pressing need than it is already the case without this. It has always been precisely the baptized Jews who have penetrated without hindrance most widely into all the channels of society and of the political life of the community. They have, as it were, provided themselves with a passport and pushed their tribe forward to where the religious Jews could not follow them. Even in our legislation, but especially in our administration, still many doors do not stand open to the religious Jews into which the mere racial Jew who has sold his religion can enter freely. A similar situation as with regard to the baptized Jews is brought about as soon as all state-citizenly rights and opportunities are accessible to the religious Jews. Thereupon they advance like those who have converted to Christianity on all paths of social and political life, and their impact on the nation in which they live becomes in this way perceptible. This happens even though there does not exist a situation in which, apart from the state, even the society has set the religious Jews as fully equal. For example, the influence of the religious sects is precisely so much more powerful in North America since they are subordinated by the administration to much that is considered by the legislation as having been made independent of religion. I therefore return to the supposition that there are nothing but mere racial Jews and no religious Jews any more, and, from all that the facts might teach us up to now as well as from the nature of the matter itself, I conclude that, if there were no longer anything but merely racial Jews and indeed no religious Jews at all, then the mosaic laying-out of our racial foundation with the fragments of that small nation which was once existent would make the Jewish question only a more burning one. The mosaic in the panelling of our modern cultured nations or, in other words, the sprinkling of racial Jewry in the joints and folds of our national accommodations must, the more complete it becomes, lead so much more to a rebound. It is impossible that a close contact may take place without the knowledge becoming clear how incompatible with our best instincts the inoculation of the characteristics of the Jewish race into our condition is.
Henceforth the Jewish question lies much less behind us than before us. With regard to religion it has, to be sure, rather been a fact of the past; with regard to race, however, it is a very important subject of the present and the future. Imaginations of an extra-terrestrial realm of the beyond and of supernatural influences are the stuff of religions. Where reality is seen in its truth and without the veil of the imagination, there this chief constituent of religion recedes into the background and it loses the significance of the differences and oppositions which are attached to mere imaginations. What however does not pale but, on the contrary, emerges into a fresher natural colour is the physical and intellectual character of the peoples from which even those false religious imaginations were produced and received their character. In this sense even the religions receive an instructive significance as the embodiments of character qualities and dispositions. In this sense even the question of the religious Jewry is reduced at first into a smaller and cruder half and waits for its better answer in combination with the racial question.
If, in what follows, I speak without any further ado of the Jews', I use this terminology in its natural sense, thus, meaning origin and race. Among the total Jewish characteristics, religion or the aptitude for certain religions is only one component which, in relation to the remaining, cannot even amount to a tenth. The reformed Jew who modernises his own religion and seeks to remove the coarsest superstitions from it, or indeed the Spinozistic Jew who seeks to translate his religion into a philosophical one, or finally the Jew giving himself out as atheistic and without religion who would like to affect so-called science--all these varieties in fact effect nothing that principally limits, let alone offsets, their racial characteristics. On the contrary, they transfer all that they borrow from the mind of other peoples into their original unchangeable way of thought. In the main they are Jews like the others, and their emergence from coarse superstition makes their purchase of moral characteristics even more visible and effective. It is however a matter of moral attributes when the communication and the coexistence with other peoples come into question. The entire man, and not some religious confession, is what plays a role in social communal life. The total racial characteristics now reveal themselves in the conduct and must be studied both in the historical total conduct and in the activity of the individual. The characters of the peoples are recognized from the life-course of the peoples, just as the individual character from the life-course of the individual. The types of animal characters are represented in the habits and customs of the different animal species. The habits and customs of the human race are the corresponding ones, albeit on a higher level. The natural scientific way of observation is therefore displayed even here. At least it is sufficient for the bare foundations and is to be supplemented by an investigation which takes account of the influences proper to culture. But, since culture itself is only a creation from natural bases, everything remains connected, and, exactly as the original natural instincts are formed, so also do the cultural products which mature from them turn out. These natural associations linked to the animal characteristics extend upto that which one could call the ideals. The chosen, self-seeking people has also a corresponding ideal, or rather an idol. It wishes to see all peoples made a serving subject for its chosen self-interest and has conducted itself everywhere and at all times in accordance with the standard of this goal. But I do not have to anticipate here; the racial characteristics will be revealed piece by piece in the course of our survey. They will indeed be united, even systematised, into a uniform and inwardly logical character portrait. For the time being, however, it is not this innermost but the externally tangible, actual and immediate quality which we have to look around for.
The Jewish question does not limit itself to a people; it is a question of nations. It concerns society still more than the state; it has to be answered from an international perspective. On the whole, Germany, Austria, Russia, France, indeed even England and North America, as the most influential cultured states, are more or less involved. But the limit is not here. Wherever the chosen nomadising people have penetrated, there is for the society a Jewish question which comes to consciousness increasingly clearly and correctly with the progress of history and enlightenment. This manifold ramification however does not exclude the fact that there may be a focus in some place. At present this focus is clearly Germany. The political centre of this Reich is a city for many generations strongly pervaded by the Jewish element. What however makes Berlin today the focus of the Jewish question is moreover the fact that the politics favored from there since the sixties and still more in the seventies has helped the Jews not merely to the surface but to a mastery previously unheard of. The reaction has set in. The German population has aroused itself and one has found it accordingly good, even in the leading circles, to permit the popular and national reaction and to consider once again--with attempts at restrictions--the field in which one had let the Jewry proliferate in politics and society. It is, in the meanwhile, easier to drive out the Jews than to invite these guests once again to one's own table. The society will have a hard task even merely to reestablish the disturbed balance and, in this way, to protect the health of the life of the people and nations once again.
The Jews have recently played their most powerful role in an era whose predominant characteristic has been a rising social corruption. To be sure, corruption has not been lacking even otherwise and in other places, sometimes in a smaller, at others in a higher measure; but what we have directly experienced in the decades of the Bismarckian era has also crossed the usual measure of depravity so much that it will receive even in this context an outstanding place in history. The war era which began with the sixties in Germany has undergone an internal decomposition of loyalty and confidence which has undermined all conditions disastrously and made even private communication increasingly more uncertain. The commercial lies and deception which are otherwise only a component of the situation and are indeed gladly hidden have now become the predominant rule and consider it to be superfluous to hold themselves, along with their manners, in the background. Shame has been put away in a manifold manner and the snub of better ways of conduct is a satisfaction which the worst elements may openly permit themselves. The society has been so crippled by the moral poison in many places that it can no longer stir its limbs to a counter-move. To speak of the loyalty of man with regard to man as something which must be present to some degree so that a society and a communal life may exist in the long run even just reasonably--and of a loyalty in commerce as an indispensable means of binding--that today is to call forth a mockery of the facts, and indeed of both the private facts and the public. The bad elements of the society will come forward and say: we know, even without that, how to form a communal system together. But this is wrong. It is only the old customs which even now, in spite of the means of disintegration, hold up something and restrain the corruption in its spread to a certain degree.
What, now, has been the role of the Jews in this corruption? Are they the founders of this decay? Are they the bearers of the corruption which has spread itself so extremely in the last generations in our society? Where the Jews are in the foreground,there is the most corruption. This is a basic fact of all cultural history and all cultural geography. One could, according to this characteristic, draw a map, extend it over the countries, indeed over the entire world, and in this way even derive the profile of history, in that one made the mixture of populations with Jews in the different centuries and millennia its measure. One would, in this way, obtain an entire atlas of corruption. From this, however, it docs not follow that the Jews had the power everywhere to make by themselves the condition of corruption which in each case comes into question. To presuppose something like this, however, would mean to over evaluate their capacities, which even in the bad do not reveal themselves as significant or indeed original. The Jew creeps after the general corruption which he finds or scents somewhere in order to do with it as he does with everything--that is, in order to exploit it for himself and his chosen, self-seeking, mostly commercial, goals and for his own sort of corruption. The Jew is, according to this, in his most proper place where he can become the parasite of a corruption already present or manifesting itself. Where he feels in his manner most at home in the flesh of the peoples, there one may indeed watch if it is still healthy. Where estates, classes or groups complain of disadvantaging by the Jewry not merely the Jewish customs and decay of morals will be responsible for it along with their own corruption, but the closer investigation will often also show that, in the realm of those elements, something is not in order which offers the Jew the lever to conduct its existence especially there.
The bad as well as the good participate in the making of opportunities for the expansion of the Jews and of the Jewish influence. It is not only the corruption of other peoples which spurs the Jew on to add to his own, and to make an advantageous business for himself in this way, but it is unfortunately also the modern social freedom and the modern human rights which the Jew knows to turn to his profit. The great French Revolution, still the only significant awakening, in the sense of general human rights and corresponding freedom, has with its consequences become the point of departure of a far-reaching emancipation of the Jews. Although, in comparison with it, the entire 1 9th century has borne the stamp of a reaction, its, in the narrow sense, civic effects have, however, precisely succeeded in the midst of the other reactions. The social civic accomplishments, that is, therefore, the commercial and political rights of those propertied classes which one has grown accustomed to call the bourgeoisie, have in fact remained secured and come more and more to power in the different countries. Now, in this field also lies the domain of the Jewry. The latter have capitalized on the freedom and the better human rights, as they have on everything, in the sense of commercial uninhibitedness. They have exploited the measure of freedom which was available for the expansion of their commercial rule. They have used for their part that measure of equality which was realized in the sense of a propertied bourgeoisie to bring to power the chosenness of their tribe and to carry out the social enslavement to the utmost. Thus they have increased the lack of freedom under the appearance of freedom and inequality under the appearance of equality.
Where it is a question of the civic equal rights of the different elements of the population, the Jews have, as diversely as their ubiquitously scattered groups may have begun, always had a vanguard which consisted of people of their tribe and had the special task of advertising freedom and legal equality. These people could never have been fully serious with the issue of better human rights; for they had in mind, in fact, only the rights for the Jews. Regardless of this striving which basically distracts from the chief matter--and is indeed hostile to it--individual Jews however have conducted themselves and had to conduct themselves thereby in such a way that they effected even some real opposition to the condition of lack of freedom. In this way indeed have the Jews, earlier, been able to achieve some liberal popularity, and precisely this circumstance has extraordinarily favoured the expansion of their influence. 1 wish--instead of going immediately into the political Judaising of the party system--to recall here only some preludes in literature. Borne and Heine conducted, each in his own way--the former more with serious would-be affectations, the latter more with unrestrained fiction and poetry, and farcically--their opposition to the political situation of Germany. The lack of tasteful composure, indeed even of taste, was thereby an endowment of the Jewish tribe, and the secret baptism of both writers only sealed this deficiency further. They were even proper Jews who sought to sell their religion therewith, but, since this business did not turn out according to expectation, made the hindrances which the state and the society decided for them their form of war. 1 come back to these two persons in the question of the capacity of the Jews for science and art. Here I wished to have recalled only that they represent those types and those ways of conduct through which the Jewry have found even outside their circle a certain resonance, indeed have obtained among the educated strata, at least partially and temporarily, a certain measure of Sympathy.
What the Jews have conducted in certain times in the political opposition has been in their mind their own need for emancipation. In this way they have themselves become, through the state of affairs, coagents of those who concerned themselves really with universal freedom, or even comrades of those who, like the propertied classes, had in view, under the motto of freedom, only rights which preferably empowered their special class. From this is explained the strong mixture of all liberal and radical parties with Jewish elements, indeed with Jewish spokesmen. From this is explained also how the remaining society has been able occasionally to leap over its natural aversion to the race and its morality and to attribute for a time something better to the Jews. The Jews commended themselves through the eagerness with which they took to commercial undertakings and seized the commercial side of political affairs. They showed themselves quite characteristically as agents, that is, they were not actors in the sense of a significant action, but traders and commercial middle-men, as if it were a question of the network of agents in a insurance institution. They could play other roles that they wanted--but always such a sort of agent-network was the kernel of their activity. In literature they carried on trade with the political and social ideas which were set up by others. In the party-service they peddled the precepts and found a buyer for the programme which was started by others. Where they themselves attained to a function as political persons, for instance to a representative function, there they made themselves the negotiators and got round the political rights of the society, as if they were stocks and bonds on an money-changer's table. But they exchanged and changed only in such a way that they thereby made only a good business, and, so long as their own interest offered a more serious opposition to the real considerations of freedom of the society, their conduct was still actually in accord with them. On this accord was based their social development in the most recent times. Insofar as they have really served under the flag of freedom, no matter for what motives and in what way, this actual usefulness of theirs for the remaining peoples has served as a commendation for them among the latter. Even among us, the society has for a long time let itself be taken in by this Jewish freedom service. But disappointment followed soon enough. The decades from 1 860 to 1 880 have shown a contrary picture and the Jews themselves as the most zealous agents and euphemists of the lack of political freedom. The Jews have ruined all liberal parties to whose neck they clung, from common Liberalism to the so-called Social Democracy.
The age in question has been among us one of the undisturbed blooming of something which one must call not merely Jewish influence any longer but, already, Jewish rule. With this rule, to be sure, the Hebrews have forfeited once again in the entire society which stands on free and national soil everything which had earlier brought them some favour and consideration with regard to their characteristics. But this exposure does not yet cast them off immediately from their usurpations. It is clear therefore how even this influence which has risen to mastery has called forth a social counter-movement of a strength such as has not occurred among us for decades. A century ago, not only did Lessing come in with his play for tolerance for the Jews but he even found since then sufficient approval with this Jewish tendentious Nathan, upto the middle of our century. Precisely because his play had apparently as a goal the quite ordinary, that is, religious toleration, insofar as it is caused by a departure from the coarsest superstition, and made the remaining Jewish glorification inconspicuous behind that, it found approval not only in the Jewish society. Where one wished enlightenment and freedom, there one found it right also to disregard prejudices, which were represented as merely rooted in superstition. But since the Jew has had opportunity to manifest himself along with his character in a quite different way from that which Lessing's Jewish-related--or rather, as good as Jewish--pen wished to make apparent, the prestige of that half-Enlightenment into which our good natured German national nature sympathetically dreamed itself has fallen away from the tangible reality. We know now that we have to preserve our ideals from all-sided legal toleration as pearls which one does not throw everywhere with impunity. Thus the knowledge has indeed arrived late, but so much more penetratingly. The Jews themselves act in a perceptibly frightened manner. They act as if it were a questioning with them regarding their Mosaic dogmas. They assume the appearance as if the pieces of their religion should be decisive for the conduct of the remaining society against them. They hide the reason well known to them. They give themselves--insofar as it is possible at all--the appearance of knowing nothing of race or indeed of racial harmfulness, and suppress in their defences the points of political and social complaint. They have the feeling of having betrayed the remaining world all too strongly in the last generation, and they would like to see everything silent and silenced away, indeed they would like most of all that one did not speak of them as Jews at all. But they do not succeed any more with this tactic since the peoples have begun to orientate themselves with regard to them in a so-called naturalistic way. Among us, the political role which the Jews have played as a result of the latest corruption buried then moral credibility. While the Jews earlier had a share, through their participation in the freedom movements, in a lenient judgement of their Otherwise unpopular characteristics, they have now forfeited, through their participation in works of falsification of freedom, every claim to the concession of milder circumstances and have fallen victim to a public Judgement which has matured within the society from the bottom upwards in a natural way in view of the tangible facts and which has announced itself with a corresponding insistence.
In order to completely survey and appropriately measure what has been ruined in the decades in question with the aid of the Jews one must estimate two things. First, the press in recent times has become increasingly more an instrument of politics, and indeed not merely that of the parties, which it always was, but also that of the government. Secondly, the Jews are predominantly the owners of the newspapers and other general journals through which the public, mostly without noticing it, is led and educated. This ownership of the press is an almost exclusive one in the field of the so-called Liberal or also radical organs, but is also predominant in the Conservative press. The complaint that the press is in the hands of the Jews is repeated in different countries. Germany and Austria, in this context, stand at the top and to them is equally linked Prance with its Jewry centralised in Paris and its newspaper and journalism literature infiltrated by Jews. The newspapers are an article of possession, not to mention a sort of stocks and bonds. They are, however, not mi rely on the whole possessed and handled in a Jewish way, but they are || i, in the details of their individual services, a counterpart of buying ind selling. The literary profession is moreover one of the most dependent and mechanical. It demands in its dependence much discarding and denial of the better humanity. It is therefore not merely its free accessibility through which it has, in comparison to other professions, attracted the lews from the start. This race has practiced this profession from the start II ;i mass because it suited most its bad constitution and its base requirements. In addition, the Jew always draws the Jew, and the Jewish owner ill newspapers and journals could also conduct their business in the most unrestrained way with Jewish editors, correspondents, and colleagues. In hct, the trade in those wares which form the contents of the newspapers is not an all too honest one and must therefore work on the Jewish competition like a magnet. There are thereby around 95 per cent lies and distortions to be brought to the people, and the remaining 5 per cent are also easily acquired and need in no way to be of special uprightness. A business conduct of such a sort has a specific attraction for people of the Jewish tribe. The pieces of silver are earned here too in an easy way. One therefore speaks no longer only of the fact that precisely the freedom and the accessibility of the journalistic profession have drawn the Jews in there. This race would have turned to this profession out of preference even if from the start still many other opportunities had stood open to them. Here the statement is confirmed that corruption is a magnet which attracts the Jew.
What is true in general of the press, insofar as this is an instrument of money and makes the latter a Moloch to which all higher interests fall a victim, is true in still higher measure when and where the press comes into a situation corresponding to their talents. Two things belong to corruption, that is, demand and supply, therefore an active part which corrupts and a passive which lets itself be corrupted or offers itself to corrupt conduct. There must be people and funds to buy; then it will become clear where and how many saleable wares are present. I already noted above that it is false in a world-historical as well as in a particular case to consider the Jews as the sole causers of the corruption of peoples. What the Jews create really independently of corruption is only a part of that which they, in connection with other corruption, increase through their serviceability and raise to a colossal degree. So is it now also with their operation of the press. They run this their most personal and most profitable domain according to the opportunity, and, to speak in a national economic way, according to the condition of the market. If, in the political market, there is, in any historical phase, an especially lively desire for corrupt press service, a veritable race will arise in order to meet the profitable demand with an extensive supply. The Israeli people will thereby win the palm or, to speak less metaphorically, the principal profit. It will be prepared for everything; for their slave-service to rigid authority, moreover, is indeed even a primordial component of the Jewish constitution, even as primordial as the unscrupulous attractive force towards the gold and silver of the Egyptians.
If no state-directing politicians, are present with whom the Jews have been involved or occupied, the phenomenon of the Jews bearing the leading tone in almost the entire press would be impossible. We have had such an era in which our world fell prey, so to say, to the Jewish wit, and the latter is distinguished more by contemptibleness than really by sharp or indeed fine understanding. We have had a Jewish era with the appearance of Liberalism and one could be happy that one has in the meantime got free of this phenomenon. The public reaction is still a lesser evil than the hidden one. Even Conservatism with all its defects and limitations is more bearable, if it follows its nature and also enters against the Jews in its own way, than where it was forced into that situation alien to it in which the coquetry with the Jews was part of the standard politics. The use of the Jewish press, as an inoculation machinery as it were, in order to make predominant in the society and in the nation what should everywhere appear as public opinion--this use of the Jewish press was, in view of the closely connected chain of the press Jewry, to be sure very comfortable. Even the press corps of the Jews stand always in preparedness of the command to set forth for every matter and against every matter, for the appropriate pay, without inquiring about right or wrong. But if something which in itself is favourable to the Jewry is further added to the pay and the bonuses, the Israelites are, even without a special Alliance Israelite, already instinctively and immediately a union and a chain which develops its entire twining and winding strength in the direction in which one lets it conduct, in this way, even the businesses of their own race.
Well-known is the vile manner in which the Jewish or half-Jewish writers take care to speak of the historical events which relate to Christianity. There, not a single positive judgement is to be encountered but only a vile baseness is visible. I shall show this more closely in the discussion of religion. I shall recall here only that the Jews in their superficiality turn most gladly to the Christian priests. These are the original rivals of the hereditary theocracy and precisely because the Jews themselves basically want the same thing, that is, an intellectual rule into which the worldly state is dissolved, they turn against the younger and competing offspring of their own theocratic conception in the most biting manner. Moreover, they know that only the levelling down of everything to which they could here and there affix ideal instincts levels the ground for the excavated Jewish view. Thus it has been a special pleasure for them to be able to draw against the Christian priests in the so-called Kulturkampf, not really to champion a better doctrine but simply to rub against competitors whose closed organisation most disputed the entry of the Jews into the popular circles. In the conflicts of the police-compelled authority of the state with the conscience police of the Roman Church, and in the battle of the twofold rights in which the medieval tradition renewed itself, the Jewish so-called Liberal press--but not merely this but, in all shades of the press as well as in the official newspapers, Jewry in general--worked most vigorously in secular politicality. In this genre it has been able to let itself go in an uninhibited way; for hereby it found itself indeed to a certain degree still in its element of popularity--at least of that popularity which is to be sought in the Protestant population and thus also predominates in Germany. One has announced the political faux-pas which thought to advance against the Roman spirituality with mere police laws, through political advertisement, as a Kulturkampf, and the Jews have not failed to bring to bear here their experience in advertisement in order to attribute to this politics and to themselves a powerful cultural action. Yet those are failed incidental pieces. Let us turn to the fields in which a legislation of greater interest and of a significance penetrating into the life of the society has progressed.
From the feudal Conservative side, those laws which have been decreed among us since the sixties in the sense of national economic free movement are characterized principally as Jewish privileges. It means, however, granting the Jews too much honour if one sets their mind as the same as that from which similar laws arise throughout the world. Basically, the Jew is never for universal freedom, but always desirous of monopoly. The chosen people want finally to have also chosen rights. It is far different to satisfy oneself with equality. Hardly did they have emancipation than the expansion of their social network became an insufferable mastery and the appeal for the "emancipation of the Jews" the counterpart of that generously disposed freedom emerging from the mentality of equality. This change in situation occurs that the Jews, by virtue of their special aptitudes, misuse the freedoms and know to turn them into the opposite of what would correspond to the spirit of an equal and free legislation. Thus liberality in itself is a good thing, but the civilised nomadic life a bad one. The former requires the settling in the right place, the latter is established on grazing and exploitation in that it only seeks opportunities to appropriate with slighter effort what it itself has not worked for. National economic liberality is not a principle of peddling. It should serve to establish the settled form of life in the right places, but not to sanction the fluctuations of the Jewry as exemplary for other Peoples.
Another example of legislation good in itself is that part of the freedom of business and contract which is called tax-freedom, and of the degeneration of which to freedom of usury precisely the Jews provide the basest example and the one considered the worst by the people. Now, I do not have to argue here that all such national economic freedoms are something inadequate and are misused, even without Jews, for the exploitation of the economically weaker, so long as positive social energies and institutions are lacking among them which secure the balance of the economic forces or indeed create a political opportunity for offering resistance to the exploitation. But I can perhaps point to the fact that one would not indeed find usury among the Jews if it were merely the general economic natural laws according to which the tax businesses are formed. Refined exploitation of others' difficulties is not a natural and normal trading business. Morally healthy trade is based on other considerations and avoids that field. The Jew however finds himself by virtue of his peculiarity precisely drawn there where these corrupt businesses arc to be made, whether the corruption of economic life which allures him to exploitation has its basis now in the general conditions or in personal neglect. Even here one may not forget that the Jews practice corruption which they indeed increase but which, however, they have not created alone. If the light-footed Junker, whether he be now an officer or an owner of property, falls into the usury-net of the Jew, this bad process is not the sole work of the Jew. If, on the other hand, everything were in order, the usurious Jewish credit would not be used. For healthy economic credit and even for mere consumption-loans whose return payment is expected in a proper way, other credit opportunities would have long been organised of an economically trustworthy sort, if the concerned elements and groups had taken it more seriously along with their economy from the outset. The natural meaning of usury is not that of crossing over certain percentages which are fixed by a law. This fixing is for the modern and universal trade only a powerless affectation. True usury has at all times and in all places, independently of arbitrary statutes, consisted in the exploiting of difficulty in a refined way, in the setting a price for personal need or discomfort, and in the loading of the possible risk with an enormous premium. This refinement however extends far beyond the interest business and operates in the formation of all relations of economic dependence where, on the one side, economic weakness and, on the other side, a mentality is present which seeks to enrich itself like a beast of prey from the injuries of neighbours. If the Jews here play a preferred role it is proved even through this that the national economic natural laws of supply and demand provide their final balance only in connection with moral pre-requirements.
Why is the Jewry relatively far richer than the other social groups? The Jews themselves answer: on account of greater industriousness and economising. But that is only the old tale which they have learnt by listening to all elements unjustly rich. I therefore answer simply: it is the greater and more uninhibited instinct of appropriation which allowed the Jews to suck up money from all channels of mankind. The economic freedom is therefore for them only a means in order to exercise their unscrupulous exploitative villainy. The doctrines of equally free economy and of corresponding economic human rights, as they were formulated in a humanely well-disposed way by the Scots Hume and Smith, are used by the Jews only in order to head for their own monopoly. The Jews have dealt with the doctrines of economic freedom precisely as with the ideas of the Revolution. They have used both at first, then falsified, and finally, when they found themselves in possession of the part of freedom pleasant to them, indeed betrayed them every time. Even in the already somewhat degenerate form which one calls Manchcstcrism, those doctrines of economic freedom are still too noble for the Jews. The Manchesterian doctrine of parties which one, on the Conservative side, confuses deliberately and falsely with the Jewry, is only a party-related degeneration of those better accomplishments of humane theory. It accepts freedom of trade but ignores the equality which was directive in those achievements of knowledge. They transform economic freedom into a freedom of the propertied class. But the Jews have not yet come to the end of their desires with this degeneration. They wish to see basically a freedom of the Jews, that is a Jewish monopoly, made out of the freedom.
The influence of Jewish elements and the embodiment of the Jewish way of thought has revealed itself therefore in the so-called Liberal legislation not in the case of the real freedoms--which serve even the interest of the Jewry--but in the substitution of these freedoms with monopoly pressure. Thus, for example, the free legal profession, by virtue of which the lawyer, like the dentist, conducts his profession as a professional business dependent on no official nomination, is a progress in the sense of greater freedom. For the public there arises in this way a free supply from which it has the choice. But, how, in our most recent parliamentary legislation, it was not the public whose interests were decisive, is proved by the compulsory court representation introduced first by it, that is, the advocates' right of summons and coercion, by virtue of which every litigant is required to let himself be represented by an advocate. This institution is a bad step backwards with regard to the freer and more popular spirit which still led the legislation originating from Friedrich II. In such a point in which it is a matter of business and of a practice summoned and compelled for the same, the Jew finds the introduction of the lack of freedom in finest order and most highly liberal. As a result, he legislates in this sense. Jewish representatives in the German Parliament have set in motion precisely such a sort of legislation lacking in freedom. It has a similar connection to the compulsory inoculation. The medical profession is perhaps, among all branches of teamed occupation, next to literature, taken up most strongly by Jews. The artificial acquisition of an amount of demand for medical services is a point of view whose activity has become increasingly more uninhibited. Considered in a social economic way, thus disregarding the faith in inoculation itself, the compulsory inoculation is always a means by which an involuntary custom is brought to the medical profession. Such a thing is more than a monopoly; it is a right of summons and coercion and less innocent than the medieval, which extended only to something like brewing and grinding, but not into our blood. It has been the Jews, however, even here, who have approved, through the entire press and through their people and comrades in the Parliament, the right of compulsion as self-evident, have forced the stamp of mere commercialism everywhere on the effort of the doctors, and made the taxation of society through the forcing of medical service a principle.
I could go further here into the harmful spirit devoid of freedom in which precisely the Jews have violated our most recent legislation. A surprising inadequacy and dependence of the representatives of other elements has allowed it to occur in legislative assemblies that individual Jews attained a decisive role in legislation and diis mishap has then embodied itself everywhere in the constitution of the laws. How, for example, would a Prussian guardianship ordinance have otherwise become possible in which the public supervision against exploitation of trust money and in general against lack of faith of the guardians was so reduced that it practically retained almost no effective security! Laissez-faire (to be sure, still veiled) commercial freedom, with the commitment of capitals to the, for all intents and purposes, almost arbitrary discretion of the guardians, is in fact everywhere an evil in the circumstances. But this is only an example of how the Jewish mass has penetrated into all our circumstances. Besides, the social influence of the Jews reaches indirectly much farther than it reveals itself at work, directly and personally, in the legislation. The Jews naturally do not act merely through people of their race, but push forward others who let themselves be led by them or in general join forces with them. The comrades and friends of the Jews then proceed in certain cases as hebraically as it is possible for them to do. Thus Berlin would have a long time ago forfeited its public loan-houses in favour of the businesses of Jewish security-loaners if the Jewish efforts to establish their will by an external and accidental decree of the state power, in this case in the administration of the affairs of the Reich capital which they rule, had not been preliminarily checked. The city of Berlin stands under the Jewish influence still more decisively than the state has ever--and even in the most recent worst phase--been exposed to it. From the east come to this city from the different neighbouring provinces ever newer Jewish elements and indeed of such a sort as is never in the remotest considered even among the Jews of the world as one of the better ones. Yet this leads to details which are not in place here. It is enough that the increase of the population centralisation in Berlin has brought with it also a disproportionate collection of Jewish elements. The measure of their influence would now be a disturbance of the balance even if this influence did not belong to the unsalutory ones. Thus, however, it is a double disturbance when it must be estimated not merely according to its range but also according to its quality. Such a disproportionate representation of their own interests cannot be permitted to be claimed, even by any other--better--foreign race, without a harming of the commonalty. But what it means to expose so many veins of the social body to the Jewish blood as has occurred up to now will first fully be revealed when we have investigated the characteristics which belong unchangeably to them.