Classic Essays

A Real Case Against the Jews

This frank piece by the Jewish writer Marcus Eli Ravage constitutes a “revelation of the method” in that he fully expected most of his upper class readers to completely misread it as irony — as they do to this day.

by Marcus Eli Ravage

reprinted from The Century Magazine, January 1928

OF COURSE, YOU DO resent us. It is no good telling me you don’t. So let us not waste any time on denials and alibis. You know you do, and I know it, and we understand each other. To be sure, some of your best friends are Jews, and all that. I have heard that before once or twice, I think. And I know too, that you do not include me personally — “me” being any particular individual Jew — when you fling out at us in your wholesale fashion, because I am, well, so different, don’t you know, almost as good as one of yourselves. That little exemption does not, somehow, move me to gratitude; but never mind that now. It is the aggressive, climbing, pushing, materialistic sort you dislike — those, in a world, who remind you so much of your own up-and-coming brethren. We understand each other perfectly. I don’t hold it against you.

Bless my soul, I do not blame anybody for disliking anybody. The thing that intrigues me about this anti-Jewish business, as you play at it, you make such fantastic and transparent excuses, you seem to be suffering from self-consciousness so horribly, that if the performance were not so grotesque it would be irritating.

It is not as if you were amateurs: you have been at it for over fifteen centuries. Yet watching you and hearing your childish pretexts, one might get the impression that you did not know yourselves what it is all about. You resent us, but you cannot clearly say why. You think up a new excuse — a “reason” is what you call it — every other day. You have been piling up justification for yourself these many hundreds of years and each new invention is more laughable than the last and each new excuse contradicts and annihilates the last.

Not so many years ago I used to hear that we were money-grubbers and commercial materialists; now the complaint is being whispered around that no art and no profession is safe against Jewish invasion.

We are, if you are to be believed, at once clannish and exclusive, and unassimilable because we won’t intermarry with you, and we are also climbers and pushers and a menace to your racial integrity.

Our standard of living is so low that we create your slums and sweat industries, and so high that we crowd you out of your best residential sections. We shirk our patriotic duty in wartime because we are pacifists by nature and tradition, and we are the arch-plotters of universal wars and the chief beneficiaries of those wars (see “The protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.”)

We are at once the founders and leading adherents of capitalism and the chief perpetrators of the rebellion against capitalism.

Surely, history has nothing like us for versatility!

And oh! I almost forgot the reasons of reasons. We are the stiff-necked people who never accepted Christianity, and we are the criminal people who crucified its founder.

But I tell you, you are self-deceivers. You lack either the self-knowledge or the mettle to face the facts squarely and own up to the truth. You resent the Jew not because, as some of you seem to think, we crucified Jesus but because we gave him birth. Your real quarrel with us is not that we have rejected Christianity but that we have imposed it upon you!

Your loose, contradictory charges against us are not a patch on the blackness of our proved historic offence. You accuse us of stirring up revolution in Moscow. Suppose we admit the charge. What of it? Compared with what Paul the Jew of Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the Russian upheaval is a mere street brawl.

You make much noise and fury about the undue Jewish influence in your theatres and movie palaces. Very good; granted your complaint is well-founded. But what is that compared to our staggering influence in your churches, your schools, your laws and your governments, and the very thoughts you think every day?

A clumsy Russian forges a set of papers and publishes them in a book called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” which shows that we plotted to bring on the late World War. You believe that book. All right. For the sake of argument, we will underwrite every word of it. It is genuine and authentic. But what is that besides the unquestionable historical conspiracy which we have carried out, which we never have denied because you never had the courage to charge us with it, and of which the full record is extant for anybody to read?

If you really are serious when you talk of Jewish plots, may I not direct your attention to one worth talking about? What use is it wasting words on the alleged control of your public opinion by Jewish financiers, newspaper owners, and movie magnates, when you might as well justly accuse us of the proved control of your whole civilization by the Jewish Gospels?

You have not begun to appreciate the real depth of our guilt. We are intruders. We are disturbers. We are subverters. We have taken your natural world, your ideals, your destiny, and played havoc with them. We have been at the bottom of not merely the latest Great War but of nearly all your wars, not only of the Russian but of nearly every other major revolution in your history. We have brought discord and confusion and frustration into your personal and public life. We are still doing it. No one can tell how long we shall go on doing it.

Look back a little and see what has happened. Nineteen hundred years ago you were an innocent, care-free pagan race. You worshipped countless Gods and Goddesses, the spirits of the air, of the running streams and of the woodland. You took unblushing pride in the glory of your naked bodies. You carved images of your gods and of the tantalizing human figure. You delighted in the combats of the field, the arena and the battle-ground. War and slavery were fixed institutions in your systems. Disporting yourselves on the hillsides and in the valleys of the great outdoors, you took to speculating on the wonder and mystery of life and laid the foundations of natural science and philosophy. Yours was a noble, sensual culture, unirked by the prickings of the social conscience or by any sentimental questionings about human equality. Who knows what great and glorious destiny might have been yours — if we had left you alone.

But we did not leave you alone. We took you in hand and pulled down the beautiful and generous structure you had reared, and changed the whole course of your history. We conquered you as no empire of yours ever subjugated Africa or Asia. And we did it all without bullets, without blood or turmoil, without force of any kind. We did it solely by the irresistible might of our spirit, with ideas, with propaganda.

We made you the willing and unconscious bearers of our mission to the whole world, to the barbarous races of the world, to the countless unborn generations. Without fully understanding what we were doing to you, you became the agents at large of our racial tradition, carrying our gospel to unexplored ends of the earth.

Our tribal customs have become the core of your moral code. Our tribal laws have furnished the basic groundwork of all your august constitutions and legal systems. Our legends and our folk-tales are the sacred lore which you croon to your infants. Our poets have filled your hymnals and your prayer-books. Our national history has become an indispensable part of the learning of your pastors and priests and scholars. Our Kings, our statesmen, our prophets, our warriors are your heroes. Our ancient little country is your Holy Land. Our national literature is your Holy Bible. What our people thought and taught has become inextricably woven into your very speech and tradition, until no one among you can be called educated who is not familiar with our racial heritage.

Jewish artisans and Jewish fishermen are your teachers and your saints, with countless statues carved in their image and innumerable cathedrals raised to their memories. A Jewish maiden is your ideal of motherhood and womanhood. A Jewish rebel-prophet is the central figure in your religious worship. We have pulled down your idols, cast aside your racial inheritance, and substituted for them our God and our traditions. No conquest in history can even remotely compare with this clean sweep of our conquest over you.

How did we do it? Almost by accident. Nearly two thousand years ago in far-off Palestine, our religion had fallen into decay and materialism. Money-changers were in possession of the temple. Degenerate, selfish priests grew fat. Then a young patriot- idealist arose and went about the land calling for a revival of the faith. He had no thought of setting up a new church. Like all the prophets before him, his only aim was to purify and revitalize the old creed. He attacked the priests and drove the money-changers from the temple. This brought him into conflict with the established order and its supporting pillars. The Roman authorities , who were in occupation of the country, fearing his revolutionary agitation as a political effort to oust them, arrested him, tried him and condemned him to death by crucifixion, a common form of execution at that time. The followers of Jesus of Nazereth, mainly slaves and poor workmen, in their bereavement and disappointment, turned away from the world and formed themselves into a brotherhood of pacifists — non-resisters, sharing their memory of their crucified leader and living together communistically. They were merely a new sect in Judea, without power or consequence, neither the first nor the last.

Only after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans did the new creed come into prominence. Then a patriotic Jew named Paul or Saul conceived the idea of humbling the Roman power by destroying the morale of its soldiery with the doctrines of love and non- resistance preached by the little sect of Jewish Christians. He became the Apostle to the Gentiles, he who hitherto had been one of the most active persecutors of the band. And so well did Paul do his work that within four centuries the great empire which had subjugated Palestine along with half of the world, was a heap of ruins. And the law which went forth from Zion became the official religion of Rome.

This was the beginning of our dominance in your world. But it was only a beginning. From this time forth your history is little more than a struggle for mastery between your own old pagan spirit and our Jewish spirit. Half your wars, great and little, are religious wars, fought over the interpretation of one thing or another in our teachings. You no sooner broke free from your primitive religious simplicity and attempted the practice of the pagan Roman learning than Luther, armed with our Gospel, arose to down you and re-enthrone our heritage. Take the three principal revolutions in modern times — the French, the American, and the Russian. What are they but the triumphs of the Jewish idea of social, political and economic justice?

And the end is still a long way off. We still dominate you. At this very moment your churches are torn asunder by a civil war between Fundamentalists and Modernists, that is to say between those who cling to our teachings and traditions literally and those who are striving by slow steps to dispossess us. Again and again the Puritan heritage of Judea breaks out in waves of stage censorship, Sunday blue laws and national Prohibition acts. And while these things are happening you twaddle about Jewish influence in the movies.

Is it any wonder you resent us? We have put a clog upon your progress. We have imposed upon you an alien book and an alien faith which you cannot digest, which is at cross-purposes with your native spirit, which keeps you everlastingly ill-at-ease, and which you lack the spirit to either reject or accept in full.

In full, of course, you never have accepted our Christian teachings. In your hearts you still are pagans. You still take pride in the glory of the nude human figure. Your social conscience, in spite of all democracy and all your social revolution, is still a pitifully imperfect thing. We have merely divided your soul, confused your impulses and paralysed your desires. In the midst of the battle you are obliged to kneel down to him who commanded you to turn the other cheek, who said “Resist not evil” and “Blessed are the peace-makers.” In your lust for gain you are suddenly disturbed by a memory from your Sunday school days about taking no thought for the morrow. In your industrial struggles, when you would smash a strike without compunction, you are suddenly reminded that the poor are blessed and that men are brothers in the Fatherhood of the Lord. And as you are about to yield to temptation, your Jewish training puts a deterrent hand on your shoulder and dashes the brimming cup from your lips. You Christians have never become Christianized. To that extent we have failed with you. But we have forever spoiled the fun of paganism for you.

So why should you not resent us? If we were in your place we should probably dislike you more cordially than you do us. But we should make no bones about telling you why. We should not resort to subterfuges and transparent pretext. With millions of painfully respectable Jewish shopkeepers all about us we should not insult your intelligence and your own honesty by talking about communism as a Jewish philosophy. And with millions hard-working impecunious Jewish peddlers and labourers we should make ourselves ridiculous by talking about international capitalism as a Jewish monopoly. No, we should go straight to the point. We should contemplate this confused ineffectual muddle which we call civilization, this half- Christian half-pagan medley, and — we should say to you point-blank: “For this mess thanks to you, to your prophets, and your Bible.”

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Arvin N. Prebost
Arvin N. Prebost
12 December, 2010 4:55 pm

Something to think about! Some preliminary thoughts: Some good points, but “a care-free pagan race”? Care-free? That’s very far-fetched, and insulting. Also, no one should be ashamed of the flesh. I myself have studied artistic anatomy for over ten years, and the human body is a miracle. Everyone should be trim and fit, like the Greek ideal. Shame is unhealthy. But the pagans did not prance naked all over the hills, like a band of hippies, as he seems to be implying. Also, the Vatican, to this day, has all sorts of nude statues from Classical Europe. There is no shame. “War and slavery were fixed institutions in your systems.” And they weren’t in the Semitic systems? THAT is where it all began! Slavery, prostitution, unbelievable cruelty in war, treating… Read more »

Anthony Collins
Anthony Collins
Reply to  Arvin N. Prebost
4 September, 2017 1:34 am

“Ravage does indeed correctly describe the Old Testament as fables.” I think Ben Klassen succinctly remarked that the Old Testament is a book of dirty stories about dirty Jews.

Floris van Holland
Floris van Holland
19 January, 2011 4:55 pm

The author has read Nietzsche I am sure. Well, Nietzsche was right of course: Christianity is a curse!

Chris Smith
Chris Smith
28 August, 2011 7:35 am

This is all very esoteric. The real base of the reason that in general Gentiles do not like Judaics is because of the disdain of the latter for the Goyim, the animals, the beasts, and all of the animosity that Judaism holds for them. That is the root of it, nothing more. Want to know the root? Read Jewish Religion, Jewish History by Professor Israel Shahak.

CCcracker
CCcracker
28 August, 2011 3:23 pm

Very thought provoking. There is no doubt that ultimately the most important battles are not necessarily on the battlefield, but rather of culture and ideas. Christianity is a fake, man-made religion concocted at the Council of Nicea, 325 AD. It is a curse upon progressive thought and truth with it’s ridiculous ideas of killing God, an independent devil, Adam and Eve, and virgin births, which are only a few of nonsense ideas in Christianity which to believe in one has to suspend all intelligence. The sooner the insanity of Jadaism, Christinity and Islam, all coming from the Jews ultimately, are rooted out of society and replaced with religion of the Absolute Truth the better for all.

Thomas Plaster
Thomas Plaster
2 September, 2017 10:01 pm

I had thought for some time, before encountering this work by Marcus Ravage, that the Catholic church seemed to be working back toward Gentile/Germanic ideals; authoritarian structure in church hierarchy, veneration of saints (people who had actually existed and had, supposedly, did something worthwhile in spirituality), not so much emphasis on Scripture, more emphasis on rituals. To me that seems to appeal more to the Germanic people’s hearts than Old Testament and New.

And Protestantism was an alleged “correction” in religion. Now I see that a correction, a reassertion, of the virus of jew think i.e. Christianity.

Arvin N. Prebost
Arvin N. Prebost
Reply to  Thomas Plaster
3 September, 2017 7:54 pm

I have found that when I am feeling really good, about myself and my possibilities, that I identify with ethical paganism.

When I am down, feeling ashamed or hopeless, I veer toward Christianity, the suffering Christ, and the futility of it all.

I find this to be interesting. Very interesting.

Thomas Plaster
Thomas Plaster
Reply to  Arvin N. Prebost
3 September, 2017 9:08 pm

Arvin: I know what you mean. I have experienced this myself. I have always heard that across Christendom many who do well “forget the Lord” and those who are suffering in some way “find the Lord”. Sounds like what you mentioned.

JimB
JimB
3 September, 2017 11:31 pm

“You make much noise and fury about the undue Jewish influence in your theatres and movie palaces. Very good; granted your complaint is well-founded. But what is that compared to our staggering influence in your churches, your schools, your laws and your governments, and the very thoughts you think every day?”

BOOM.

JimB
JimB
4 September, 2017 12:41 am

Having read this, and I’ve read this particular Jew’s words before, on another site somewhere, I can’t help but coming away with the belief that the Jews’ greatest strength lies in their ability to sow DOUBT in the minds of their victims. That’s not to say that I believe “the Bible” in any form or fashion, no. I’m not a Christian. I’m only pointing out that, while one can easily take away from this Jew’s words his braggart admission that “we Jews created the Bible and Christianity itself”, one can’t escape, upon deeper thought, the feeling that perhaps this Jew is merely wanting us to THINK that the Jews imposed a hoax-religion upon us, because, after all, it’s no secret that Jews have appeared to oppose Christianity since its beginnings.… Read more »

Anthony Collins
Anthony Collins
Reply to  JimB
4 September, 2017 1:29 am

“Having read this, and I’ve read this particular Jew’s words before, on another site somewhere, I can’t help but coming away with the belief that the Jews’ greatest strength lies in their ability to sow DOUBT in the minds of their victims.” This is certainly one of the great talents of the Jews: to undermine the self-confidence of the goyim they afflict. On this point, Joseph Goebbels wrote, in his excellent article “Mimicry”: “He [i.e., the Jew] is such an expert on twisting the truth that he can tell his innocent opponent the exact opposite of the truth even on the plainest matter in the world. He does this with such astonishing impudence that the listener becomes uncertain, at which point the Jew has usually won.” http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb18.htm In a documentary… Read more »

JimB
JimB
Reply to  Anthony Collins
4 September, 2017 2:05 am

And even within those words Rushkoff said, there exists deception, subtly and strategically placed.

Thomas Plaster
Thomas Plaster
Reply to  Anthony Collins
4 September, 2017 2:05 am

“In a sense our detractors have us right, in that we are a corrosive force. We’re breaking down the false gods of all nations and all people because they’re not real, and that’s very upsetting to people.”
===============================
A jew, whose religious book claims of talking snakes, parting waters et alia, says other people’s gods are not real i.e. said religion is false. Pot, meet Kettle.

JimB
JimB
Reply to  Thomas Plaster
4 September, 2017 3:14 am

One thing about the Jews, though: All of their allegories, symbols, and even the name of their “Elohim” (or God, YHWH)… points to something missed by most: JEWS BELIEVE THAT THEY, AS A PEOPLE, ARE THEMSELVES GOD. Everything else, to them, is false. Even the “gods” that they foisted onto the gullible “goyim”. And when I say “God”, I’m not talking about the Man In The Sky that the superstitious kneel to, the “Creator of The Universe”. I’m simply meaning The Owner Of Earth. That is, in essence, what Jews mean when they say that they “worship God”. They worship (venerate) themselves… as Elohim, who they consider REAL, as opposed to the ghosts given to “Gentiles” for worship. So, in a sense, this Jew Rushkoff is sharing a true-ism in… Read more »

Thomas Plaster
Thomas Plaster
Reply to  JimB
4 September, 2017 10:15 am

Jews think they are God.

That would explain a lot. Such as the attitude that they are God’s chosen. Might as well just drop the chosen part and it would be more accurate.

Plus, the attitude toward others; that others exist to serve The Chosen. Plus, the utterly rotten things they do to nations/peoples i.e. corrupt and subvert them like actual parasites do in nature.

Jews think they are God. It would be well to think that sentence each time your mind considers the jews. And keep it at the front of your mind when dealing with jews. It would probably cut out a lot of historical sympathy for jews that allows them into host countries.

Anthony Collins
Anthony Collins
Reply to  Anthony Collins
4 September, 2017 3:46 am

I think that Maurice Samuel, an atheist Jew and a Zionist leader, may have effectively said much the same thing as Douglas Rushkoff in You Gentiles. As I haven’t read Rushkoff’s book, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, I’m not exactly sure what his religious views are, but he’s evidently not a Jew in the religious sense. (Of course, his book may be misleading, and deliberately so: Jews often use words, not to express their thoughts, but to conceal them.) Rushkoff evidently thinks highly of Jewish iconoclasm, which has nothing to do with seeking or affirming the truth and everything to do with subverting the host societies in which the Jews ensconce themselves. The Jews have a very peculiar conception of religiosity as well as rationality. Perhaps Judaism, in the… Read more »

Thomas Plaster
Thomas Plaster
4 September, 2017 1:45 am

I’ve been on this earth a little over a half century and have noticed that Christianity is pilloried left and right, unmercifully. And it is claimed to have caused much suffering on this earth. No doubt.

But nothing is said about jews, who created the entire Christian bible; Old Testament completely grafted from the Torah etc into the KJ Bible. And the founding father of Christianity was a rabbinical trained jew, Saul of Tarsus.

Yet, no opprobrium for jews bringing Christianity into existence.

To determine who really runs/controls society, first ask whom one may not criticize. Indeed. (words close to that)

Anthony Collins
Anthony Collins
Reply to  Thomas Plaster
4 September, 2017 4:04 am

I have the impression that the “new atheists” routinely criticize Christianity on the grounds that it has promoted anti-Semitism against the poor, persecuted Jews (oy vey!), but are strangely silent about the misanthropic teachings and practices that have always been a integral part of rabbinic Judaism.

JimB
JimB
4 September, 2017 1:59 am

“To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?”

Indeed, true. Thank Mr. Strom for those words.
https://nationalvanguard.org/2017/01/voltaire-didnt-say-it/