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221 pages, Paperback
First published January 10, 1995
Art and science — this is your gentile world, a lovely and ingenious world. Kaleidoscopic, graceful, bewilderingly seductive, a world, at its best, of lovely apparitions, banners, struggles, triumphs, gallantries, nobles gestures and conventions.Samuel is particularly penetrating on the Gentile and Jewish worldviews, and the perennial conflict between them. It's worth remembering that this conflict is extremely old, older than the Christian-Muslim conflict, and even than Christianity itself. The thread has continued from Antiochus III (3rd century BC), through Caligula, Vespasian and Titus, Hadrian and Simon Bar Kokhba, the Middle Ages, WWII... As Samuel suggests, there seem to be deep conflicting substrata in the Gentile and Jewish identities, always at odds. The age-old enmity between "Rome and Judea," as Nietzsche called it. It's a important topic and is rarely addressed with such frankness. As a Gentile myself (and admirer of European culture) I found his critique of Gentile patterns of life to be uncomfortably accurate and stimulating.
The most concise and lucid exposition of the Jews' opinion of our race is Maurice Samuel's You Gentiles (New York, 1924; recently reprinted). The author, a learned and courageous Jew, undertook to explain frankly the inherent and biological differences between his race and our own, and to indicate, as courteously as possible, the reasons for the Jews' great superiority. His work merely confirms and elucidates the tenor of all Jewish writing for Jews, and is remarkable only in that it was written for goyim.
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As Maurice Samuel (whom I cite in preference to other Jewish sources because he wrote in English and without circumlocution) points out, religious Jews always think of their god as a Big Jew, the praeterhuman representative of the Jewish People, while the atheists worship the collectivity without imagining a supernatural symbol of the race.
"Kill the Jews, the Christ-killers," does indeed ring strange these days. But does "a damn good dose of lead for the Jewish Bolsheviks" sound very remote?
we…have produced an overwhelming number of revolutionaries and socialists and iconoclasts of the true prophetic type (…)
We have joined your capitalistic world in deliberate emulation and rivalry: yet Jewish socialism and Jewish socialists are the banner bearers of the world's "armies of liberation." Three or four million modernized Jews, a ludicrously small number, have given to the world's iconoclastic force its chief impetus and by far its largest individual contribution. America and England put together, with their almost two hundred millions, have not played that role in world iconoclasm which a handful of Jews have played…The occasional in you [revolutionary agitation against the established order of things] is the dominant in us.