Garbanzo Toons: Living with Jews

Saturday, July 09, 2005

Living with Jews

The following essay is by Olive Schreiner. My rabbi included it in his weekly email message a couple of weeks ago. It's an interesting piece. I've heard some of these thoughts expressed before, but not as well as they are here. Is everything in this essay true? I don't know. It's well worth thinking about though. From what I could gather in my quick web-based research of her life, Olive Schreiner wasn't Jewish.

Indeed it is difficult for all other nations of the world to live in the
presence of the Jews. It is irritating and most uncomfortable. The Jews
embarrass the world as they have done things which are beyond the
imaginable. They have become moral strangers since the day their forefather
Abraham introduced the world to high ethical standards and to the fear of
Heaven. They brought the world the Ten Commandments which many nations
prefer to defy. They violated the rules of history by staying alive, totally
at odds with common sense and historical evidence. They outlived all their
former enemies, including vast empires such as the Romans and the Greeks.
They angered the world with their return to their homeland after 2000 years
of exile and after the murder of six million of their brothers and sisters.
They aggravated mankind by building, in the wink of an eye, a democratic
State which others were not able to create in even hundreds of years. They
built living monuments such as the duty to be holy and the privilege to
serve one's fellow men. They had their hands in every human progressive
endeavor, whether in science, medicine, psychology or any other discipline,
while totally out of proportion to their actual numbers. They gave the world
the Bible and even their "savior". Jews taught the world not to accept the
world as it is but to transform it, yet only a few nations wanted to listen.
Moreover, the Jews introduced the world to one God, yet only a minority
wanted to draw the moral consequences. So the nations of the world realize
that they would have been lost without the Jews. And while their
subconscious tries to remind them of how much of Western civilization is
framed in terms of concepts first articulated by the Jews, they do anything
to suppress it. They deny that Jews remind them of a higher purpose of life
and the need to be honorable, and do anything to escape its consequences. It
is simply too much to handle for them, too embarrassing to admit, and above
all too difficult to live by. So the nations of the world decided once again
to go out of its way in order to find a stick to hit the Jews. The goal: to
prove that Jews are as immoral and guilty of massacre and genocide as some
of themselves are. All this in order to hide and justify their own failure
to even protest when six million Jews were brought to the slaughterhouses of
Auschwitz and Dachau; so as to wipe out the moral conscience of which the
Jews remind them. And they found a stick. Nothing could be more gratifying
for them than to find the Jews into a struggle with another people (who are
completely terrorized by their own leaders) against whom the Jews, against
their best wishes, have to defend themselves in order to survive.
With great satisfaction, the world allows and initiates the rewriting of
history so as to fuel the rage of yet another people against the Jews. This
in spite of the fact that the nations understand very well that peace
between the parties could have come a long time ago, if only the Jews would
have had a fair chance. Instead, they happily jumped on the wagon of hate so
as to justify their jealousy of the Jews and their incompetence to deal with
their own moral issues. When Jews look at the bizarre play, taking place in
The Hague, they can only smile as this artificial game once more proves how
the world paradoxically admits the Jews uniqueness. It is in their need to
undermine the Jews that they actually raise them. The study of history of
Europe during the past centuries teaches us one uniform lesson: That the
nations which received and in any way dealt fairly and mercifully with the
Jew have prospered; and that the nations that have tortured and oppressed
him have written out their own curse.