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.