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is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.
Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith.
The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.
It was at this time that Jews, without any outside interference, began to think “that the difference between Jewry and the nations was fundamentally not one of creed and faith, but one of inner nature”
the need for an impartial, truthful treatment of Jewish history has recently become greater than it has ever been before.
The only direct, unadulterated consequence of nineteenth-century antisemitic movements was not Nazism but, on the contrary, Zionism, which, at least in its Western ideological form, was a kind of counterideology, the “answer” to antisemitism.
Intelligence in this country has enjoyed since 1947 “a more influential position in our government than Intelligence enjoys in any other government of the world,”
This book deals only with the strictly European colonial imperialism whose end came with the liquidation of British rule in India. It
For my purposes, the years from 1929 to 1941 and then again from 1945 down to 1953 are of central interest, and for these periods our sources are as scarce and of the same nature as they were in 1958 or even in 1949.
The truth is that the price of totalitarian rule was so high that in neither Germany nor Russia has it yet been paid in full.
The clearest sign that the Soviet Union can no longer be called totalitarian in the strict sense of the term is, of course, the amazingly swift and rich recovery of the arts during the last decade.
Furthermore, the very fact that members of the intellectual opposition can have a trial (though not an open one), can make themselves heard in the courtroom and count upon support outside it, do not confess to anything but plead not guilty, demonstrates that we deal here no longer with total domination.
how deep an impression this mainstay of Nazi ideology must have made on Stalin—the first indications of this had been in evidence ever since the Hitler-Stalin pact—partly, to be sure, because of its obvious propaganda value in Russia as in all of the satellite countries, where anti-Jewish feeling was widespread and anti-Jewish propaganda had always enjoyed great popularity,
wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.
Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth.
Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together.
aloofness without policy does not imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed.
In order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized.
just as antisemites understandably desire to escape responsibility for their deeds, so Jews, attacked and on the defensive, even more understandably do not wish under any circumstances to discuss their share of responsibility.
It is quite remarkable that the only two doctrines which at least attempt to explain the political significance of the antisemitic movement deny all specific Jewish responsibility and refuse to discuss matters in specific historical terms.
the very insecure position of truth in the world, for from “opinions comes persuasion and not from truth”
Thus, at the same time and in the same countries, emancipation meant equality and privileges, the destruction of the old Jewish community autonomy and the conscious preservation of the Jews as a separate group in society, the abolition of special restrictions and special rights and the extension of such rights to a growing group of individuals.
for the non-Jews a brand of liberal antisemitism which lumped Jews and nobility together and pretended that they were in some kind of financial alliance against the rising bourgeoisie.
The plausibility became even greater in the eighteenth century when most privileged Jews were given minor titles, and at the opening of the nineteenth century when wealthy Jews who had lost their ties with the Jewish communities looked for new social status and began to model themselves on the aristocracy.
especially in Prussia, happened to become the first class that produced an antisemitic ideology.
more the governments lost in power and prestige, the less attention was paid to the Jews. While the state played an ever narrower and emptier representative role,
Jews became the symbols of Society as such and the objects of hatred for all those whom society did not accept.
Since the Jewish question in its social aspect turned into a catalyst of social unrest, until finally a disintegrated society recrystallized
Discrimination, however, as well as attraction, were politically sterile. They neither produced a political movement against the Jews nor served in any way to protect them against their enemies. They did succeed, though, in poisoning the social atmosphere, in perverting all social intercourse between Jews and Gentiles, and had a definite effect on Jewish behavior.
seeming paradox had a solid basis in fact. What non-Jewish society demanded was that the newcomer be as “educated” as itself, and that, although he not behave like an “ordinary Jew,”
Never again did any social group accept Jews with a free mind and heart. It would be friendly with Jews either because it was excited by its own daring and “wickedness” or as a protest against making pariahs of fellow-citizens. But social pariahs the Jews did become wherever they had ceased to be political and civil outcasts.
The “exception Jews” of wealth felt like exceptions from the common destiny of the Jewish people and were recognized by the governments as exceptionally useful;
Judaism became a psychological quality and the Jewish question became an involved personal problem for every individual Jew.
The majority of assimilated Jews thus lived in a twilight of favor and misfortune and knew with certainty only that both success and failure were inextricably connected with the fact that they were Jews.
he knew also that Jews would have no better chances anywhere than in circles which pretended to be exclusive and to discriminate against them; for inasmuch as these circles of the few, together with the multitude, thought of Jewishness as a crime, this “crime” could be transformed at any moment into an attractive “vice.”
To do so, they had to transform the two basic elements of Jewish piety—the Messianic hope and the faith in Israel’s chosenness, and they deleted from Jewish prayerbooks the visions of an ultimate restoration of Zion, along with the pious anticipation of the day at the end of days when the segregation of the Jewish people from the nations of the earth
He fancied that race might give a social as well as political refuge against equalization.
The main point about the role of Jews in this fin-de-siècle society is that it was the antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair which opened society’s doors to Jews, and that it was the end of the Affair, or rather the discovery of Dreyfus’ innocence, that put an end to their social glory.
stupid victim of an ordinary frame-up, and the innocence of the Jews was established, social interest in Jews subsided as quickly as did political antisemitism.
miscarriage of justice could arouse such political passions and inspire such an endless succession of trials and retrials, not to speak of duels and fisticuffs.
The Panama scandal, which, in Drumont’s phrase, rendered the invisible visible, brought with it two revelations. First, it disclosed that the members of Parliament and civil servants had become businessmen. Secondly, it showed that the intermediaries between private enterprise (in this case, the company) and the machinery of the state were almost exclusively Jews.24 What was most surprising was that all these Jews who worked in such
The Jews could remain a separate group outside of society only so long as a more or less homogeneous and stable state machine had a use for them and was interested in protecting them.
IF IT is the common error of our time to imagine that propaganda can achieve all things and that a man can be talked into anything provided the talking is sufficiently loud and cunning, in that period it was commonly believed that the “voice of the people was the voice of God,”
left the courtroom alive. The cry, “Death to the Jews,” swept the country. In Lyon, Rennes, Nantes, Tours,
plain resistance against any change in the status
Thus closes the only episode in which the subterranean forces of the nineteenth century enter the full light of recorded history. The only visible result was that it gave birth to the Zionist movement—the only political answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism and the only ideology in which they have ever taken seriously a hostility that would place them in the center of world events.
Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism.
Power, according to Hobbes, is the accumulated control that permits the
individual to fix prices and regulate supply and demand in such a way that they contribute to his own advantage.
for the equality of men is based on the fact that each has by nature enough power to kill another.
