The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

The charge of ‘separateness’, a staple accusation directed against religious Jews, was neatly transferred to revolutionaries and became tantamount to treason. The fact that the Jews were notoriously literate, studious not just in the Talmud (which had once functioned as the same text of satire and subversion in Christian demonologies) but also now in secular disciplines, with a strong presence in journalism and political and philosophical literature, only intensified this police paranoia. Where once their esoteric religious texts had been the scripture of subversion, now it was their immersion in, and propagation of, anarchism and socialism that marked them out as enemies of Mother Russia and the world beyond. Brafman pointed to the international meddling of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, ostensibly to protect Jews from persecution, but actually to act as the institutional front for the international conspiracy, as the most obvious proof of his argument.