This is an amazing book. I don't agree with everything he says,
particularly my experience of the God of Yisrael is not gloomy,
intense and demanding, yes, gloomy no, but, in the main, he is right
on target. It is significant that it was written in 1924, while the
world was still deeply traumatized by WWI, but had not yet experienced
WWII and the State of Israel was not in existence.
This quote:
"In everything, we are destroyers--even in the instruments of
destruction to which we turn for relief... We Jews, we, the
destroyers, will remain the destroyers for ever. Nothing that you will
do will meet our needs and demands. We will destroy because we need a
world of our own." - You Gentiles, pages 152, 155, and 147.
is taken out of context by anti-Semites. I guess they are counting on
the fact that most people will suffice with the quotes as they offer
them to you and will not go so far as to purchase the book, or even go
to the public library, and read it for themselves. Why don't you prove
them wrong?
It is also important that Anarchists and "Lefists" read this, because
anti-Semitism is rampant among the gentiles who call themselves
Anarchists and "Leftists" and it is important that they know the
difference between a Jewish and a gentile Anarchist and a Jewish and a
gentile Socialist or Communist.
These are the whole quotes, without the treatcherously misleading
excisions:
"Because your chief institution is the social structure inteself, it
is in this that we are most manifestly destroyers. We take part in the
economic struggle for existence: this necessity we share with you. But
our free spiritual energies point away from this struggle, for, unlike
you, we have no pleasure in it. You gentiles fight because you like to
fight; we fight because we have to – and in order to win." – pg 147
"The Jew is altogether too much of a cosmopolitan - even for your
internationalists." - pg. 151
"In everything we are destroyers – even in the instruments of
destruction to which we turn for relief. The very socialism and
internationalism through which our choked spirit seeks utterance,
which seem to threaten your way of life, are alien to our spirit's
demands and needs. Your socialists and internationalist are not
serious. The charm of these movements, the attraction, such as it is,
which they exercise, is only in their struggle: it is the fight which
draws your gentile radicals." – pg 152-3
There is more passages that the anti-Semitic detractors of this
magnificent book does not dare to include in their mendaciously
partial quotes.
"When the reckoning is drawn up your guilt cries to heaven: whatever
have been your relations to each other, we Jews have at least been the
common denominator of your brutality. Compared with each other, you
are gentlemen, warriors, democracies: set side by side with us, you
are bullies and cowards and mobs. Quotes such as these: In vain do
your quiescent majorities wash their hands; their quiescence is their
effective guilt - I care not that your minorities struck the blow: I
should not acquit the majority if I could give judgement and impose
punishment."
That you are unable to meet us on the spiritual level is made evident
by the following: We are a disturbing influence in your life not
through our own fault." - 128-129.
"Your world spins in a joyous illusion of progress; we, untouched by
that illusion, destructive of your mood, stand aside, static, serious.
We will be satisfied with nothing but the absolute." pg. 187
And, most importantly, let's complete the sentence and the passage
that was mendaciously cut off by the anti-Semites who quotes Maurice
Samuel, of blessed memory:
"We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers for ever.
Nothing that you do will meet our needs and demands. We will destroy
because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in
your nature to build. Beyond all temporary alliances with this or that
faction lies the ultimate split in nature and destiny, the enmity
between the Game and God." – pg 155
And there is this:
"We dream of a world of utter justice and God-spirit, a world which
whould be barren for you, devoid of all nourishment, bleak,
unfriendly, unsympathetic. You do not want such a world: you are unapt
for it. Seen in the dazzling light of your desires and needs our ideal
is repellently morose." - 148-149
What Samuel is saying is not that the Jews are deliberate destroyers,
or want to be. He is saying that we inadvertently destroy Gentile
society, which is nothing but sport, pageantry and spectacle, because
we demand a seriousness, a reality and a morality from life that is
far greater than gentiles can ever provide and so among the gentiles
we are forever trying to create moral structures that, as gentiles are
not able to bear them, break under the weight of them.
One of the most remarkable things that Maurice Samuels says in his
book YOU GENTILES, and which has been my experience too, to my chagrin
is that the Jewish radical is no less unlike our gentile counterpart
than the Orthodox traditional Jew is like a believing Xian.
In both cases, our conception of righteousness, of morality, is so
very much more sincere and profound as conceived by the Jew that we
are wholly misunderstood.
It is not the Jewish Socialists who degraded Socialism, as it is not
the Jewish Anarchists who degraded Anarchy. It was the gentile
Socialists and Anarchists who made compromises with absolute justice,
morality and concern for the other needed for those systems to work
who degraded them.
Then the Jews were blamed for the fact that Socialism is, in practice,
a totalitarian system. Gentiles made it so, not we.
It is very interesting too, how often the word 'alien' is used in this
book in the sense of one who is a stranger. Since this book is one of
the classic texts that the anti-Semites turn to for fodder with which
to load their cannons against us, it may me assumed that all this
recent talk of malevolent aliens from space, shapeshifting (Samuel
indeed employs the word 'protean' on page 172) and infiltrating the
elite is a code word for assimilated Jews.
Toward the very end of the book, Maurice Samuel, of blessed memory
writes:
"...if this book offends by it assertiveness, God knows that the
infinite tactfulness of thousands of other Jews seems to have offended
you no less." pg. 221
Amen, my holy,beautiful and absolutely Jewish Brother
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
Doree...@gmail.com