Posted on 03/21/2002 7:48:07 PM PST by nickcarraway
"In each narrow room of the Judenstrasse lived an average of six persons, so that the number of Jews in the city was not insignificant, but they were not allowed to work in the Christian areas of the city, not to join any of the guilds where men worked as artisans, nor to buy or sell merchandise of any kind except amongst themselves, nor to engage in any kind a enterprise except moneylending, which the Church still forbade to Christians; and it was not unusual to see the Christian dignitaries of Gretz come furtively to the Judenstrasse money shops, seeking loans, and then some months later to read the rabble in to kill the moneylenders, burn the account books, and thus erase all debt/"
"Our fools and jackasses, these priest, bishops, sophist and monks have treated the Jews in such a fashion that if a man wanted to become a true Christian he might better become a Jews. Were I a Jew and saw what blockheads and windbags rule and guide Christendom, I would rather be a sow than a Christian. For they have treated the Jews more like dogs than men. Yet the Jews are kith and kin and brothers-in-blood of our Saviour. If we are going to boast about the virtues of race, Christ belongs more to them than to us. To no other people has God shown such favor in entrusting them with His Holy Word."
The first clause in the above sentence completely invalidates the second clause.
One nit to pick with this otherwise excellent article. The term "anti-semitism" was coined in 19th Century Germany by the opponents of Jewish rights, who wanted a "more scientific" term than "Jew-hater."
>they have treated the Jews more like dogs than men
Really makes you wonder why, doesn't it?
"Lieb," the first farmer shouted, "what do you do with our money?"
"I run this place for the landlord," Leib said apologetically, hiding his employer's money.
And Kagan?" the second farmer asked. "What does he do with our money?"
"Like me. Gives it to the landlord."
The men had to admit that Lieb was right, and the second farmer said, "You Jews are as bad off as we are," and Lieb breathed easier.
But then the first farmer said idly, as if reflecting upon some critical event in his life, "Jerusalem is lost."
Like a spark this mournful observation lit up the eyes of the half-drunk peasants. A man who had not yet spoken repeated, "Jerusalem is lost."
There was a long moment of hesitation, during which the innkeeper prayed while the sun went down. The farmers watched it go, waiting. The signal came from a youth, drunker than the others, who uttered the fatal word, that hateful word which once pronounced could never be recalled.
"Hep," he said quietly, and Lieb turned white with fear.
"Hep," the first farmer repeated as Lieblooked to see if he could reach the door.
"Hep!" the peasants began to chant, and the villagers hearing the ominous word began boarding up their windows. Lieb, with panic on his face, shrank into a corner among the bottles.
"Hep!" the drinkers repeated, and of a sudden the young man leaped from his chair, flung himself upon the bar, sliding down to where he faced the innkeeper. Grabbing a knife from a leg of meat he threw himself upon the white-faced Jew and cut his throat.
"Hep!" roared the growing crowd as it surged toward the Jewish section of the village, bellowing the ancient cry of the pogrom: "Hep!" Hierosolyma est perdita. And somehow the fact that Jerusalem was lost, a distant city which the did not know, became an excuse for murdering Jews. If any people in the world had a right to mourn the loss of that sacred city to Islam it was the Jews, but its surrender was used as a reason for exterminating them.
There were some in the crowd who recognized the irrelevancy of their cry and these substituted another of equal potency: "The Zhid crucified our Lord." But whichever cry was used, it fed the wild spirit of the pogrom and all united in the culminating wail, "Kill the Zhid."
It was al-Husseini who suggested to Hitler what became "die Endlosung zu den Judenfrage," said Jack Wheeler of the Freedom Research Foundation. Hitler originally planned to get rid of Germany's Jews by expelling them to the Jewish portion of Palestine, Wheeler said.
"At a meeting in Berlin with Hitler on November 21, 1941, al-Husseini persuaded the Fuhrer that such a plan would result in a powerful independent Jewish state, and that a far better solution would be a final one: kill all the Jews," Wheeler said.
At the Nuremburg trials, Adolph Eichmann deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified: "the Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a colloborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in execution of this plan."
A hearty "Arafat is al-Husseini's nephew" bump.
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