Bolshevism From Moses to Lenin:
A Dialogue Between Adolf Hitler and Me
By Dietrich Eckart
Translated by Dr. William Pierce
PART I
Editor's Foreword
The following material has been translated from a pamphlet found in the NSDAP Hauptarchiv. Its German title was Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Zwiegespräch zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir, and it was originally published in Munich in March 1924 from unfinished notes on which Dietrich Eckart had been working in the autumn of 1923.
Dietrich Eckart was born on March 23, 1868, in the Bavarian town of Neumarkt, which is about twenty miles southeast of Nürnberg, and he died on December 26, 1923, in Berchtesgaden. He was a poet, a playwright, a journalist, scholar, and a philosopher, as well as a dedicated fighter for the National Socialist cause. Among his better-known works are his play Lorenzaccio and his translation and adaptation to the German stage of Ibsen's Peer Gynt. He was for a while editor of the Völkischer Beobachter, and he wrote the NSDAP song, with the famous words "Deutschland erwache," which later became a NSDAP byword.
The reader interested in more details of Eckart's life, as well as a fairly extensive sampling of his poetry, is referred to Alfred Rosenberg's book Dietrich Eckart: Ein Vermächtnis (Munich, 1928 ff.)
Der Bolschewismus is of interest to Americans today for three reasons. First, it is the last earthly work of the man who, as the intimate companion of Adolf Hitler during those critical, early years in Munich, helped prepare the spiritual foundations of National Socialism. Eckart had been seriously ill as he was writing the pamphlet, and his arrest and temporary imprisonment, as a consequence of the Munich putsch of November 9, 1923, were followed shortly by his death.
Second, it is instructive, as being representative of a certain category of propaganda. Eckart was a practical propagandist as well as an idealist and a poet, and Der Bolschewismus is an excellent example of his style. Aimed at the reader with the equivalent of a high-school education, it is skillfully contrived to avoid tediousness and maintain a relatively unsophisticated audience's interest while making a rather extensive, if not intensive, historical investigation of the Jewish question. It achieves this by relegating the great majority of documentary evidence to footnotes and by liberally interspersing historically significant points with spicy or amusing tidbits.
Third, it is of considerable interest, even today, for its own sake. Although the last forty years have unfortunately provided us with considerably more experience of Jewish-Bolshevist activities, Eckart did quite well with the materials available to him in 1923. Of particular interest is his use of the Old Testament, as a history of the Jews, to throw light onto more recent Jewish activities.
Eckart's notes for Der Bolschewismus were still in rather rough and unfinished form when he died, and this will be evident at a few places in the text which follows. The editor has slightly condensed the original material during his translation, omitting several of the more ragged portions and such things as untranslatable puns, as well as a few sections which have limited interest for present-day readers. Additional footnotes have been added by the editor in a few places, and these are so designated.
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN ADOLF HITLER AND ME
Part I
"Yes!" he cried. "We've been on the wrong track! Consider how an astronomer would handle a similar situation. Suppose that he has been carefully observing the motion of a certain group of celestial bodies over a long period of time. Examining his records, he suddenly notices something amiss: 'Damn it!' he says. 'Something's wrong here. Normally, these bodies would have to be situated differently relative to one another; not this way. So there must be a hidden force somewhere which is responsible for the deviation. And, using his observations, he performs lengthy calculations and accurately computes the location of a planet which no eye has yet seen, but which is there all the same, as he has just proved.
But what does the historian do, on the other hand? He explains an anomaly of the same type solely in terms of the conspicuous statesmen of the time. It never occurs to him that there might have been a hidden force which caused a certain turn of events. But it was there, nevertheless; it has been there since the beginning of history. You know what that force is: the Jew."
"Yes, certainly," I replied, "but to prove it, to prove it! For the last fifty or hundred years, so far as I'm concerned, it's been obvious; indeed, a good deal further back, perhaps even in pre-Christian times..."To Part II
"My dear fellow," he replied to me, "we can read in Strabo[1] that already in his time, shortly after the birth of Christ, there was hardly a place to be found on the whole earth which was not then dominated by the Jews; dominated, he writes, not merely inhabited. Already decades earlier, Cicero[2] -- at that time a great and powerful man, my friend! -- suddenly lost his nerve when, in his well-known defense plea in the Capitol, he was obliged to point out the great influence and the cohesiveness of the Jews: 'Softly, softly! I want none but the judges to hear me. The Jews have already gotten me into a fine mess, as they have many another gentleman. I have no desire to furnish further grist for their mills.' Similarly, the influence of the Jews with Augustus was so great that they completely intimidated Pontius Pilate, who, as deputy of the Roman Emperor, was certainly not a nobody. Thus he said, 'For God's sake, away with this sordid Jewish affair!' as he reached for the washbasin and condemned Christ, whom he considered guiltless, to death (John 19:12). Considering these things, my friend, every child knows -- or rather, could know -- how late the hour already was at that time."A reach for the Old Testament, a brief flipping of pages, and -- "There," he cried, "the recipe from which the Jews always brew their hellish broth! We anti-Semites are really something. We manage to find out everything except that which is really important." Word for word, he emphatically read with a hard voice:
"And I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians: and they shall fight every one against his brother and every one against his neighbor; city against city and kingdom against kingdom. And the spirit of Egypt shall fall in the midst thereof; and I will destroy the counsel thereof: and they shall seek to the idols, and to the charmers, and to them that have familiar spirits, and to the wizards (Isaiah 19:2-3).
"Yes indeed," he laughed bitterly, "now the people will seek to Dr. Cuno, and Dr. Schweyer, and Dr. Heim,[3] and whatever other charmers and wizards they have. When asked why Germany has become a pigsty these gentlemen will answer reproachfully, 'You yourselves are to blame. You have no more good breeding, no faith, only selfishness and conceit. Now you will try to put the blame on the Jews. It's always been like that when you have needed a scapegoat. Then everyone has jumped on the Jews and persecuted them unmercifully. And just because they had the money, and because they were defenseless. Is it any wonder that a few individual Jews are behaving in a reprehensible manner now? After all, one finds some black sheep in every group. As if there weren't a good number of decent Jews! Look at their piety, their sense of family responsibility, their sober way of life, their readiness to make sacrifices, and, above all, their ability to stick together! And you? At one another like dogs and cats: sheer insanity!'
Thus will the charmers and wizards prattle on and on, till one night the blood sign will appear on all the Jewish houses, and the infuriated masses, led by the Jews, will swarm forth to smite all the firstborn in the land again as in Egypt" (Exodus 12:7-13, 29-30).
"Remember how it was here in Munich during the communist takeover?" I interjected. "The houses of the Jews certainly weren't marked with blood, but there must have been a secret arrangement, because among all those who suffered the misfortune of a house search not one was a Jew. As a matter of fact, one of the stupid Red troopers who had me by the hair answered my sarcastic question by explaining that it was forbidden to search the Jewish houses.
"And in 1871, in Paris, the Jewish defense also ran according to plan. There the communists destroyed whatever they could, but the many places and houses of the Rothschilds remained completely intact.[4] All this enables us to understand the place in Exodus according to which 'a mixed multitude' also left Egypt with the Jews."
"In Egypt the scoundrels' scheme succeed only about halfway," he finished. "The Egyptians became masters of the situation at the last moment and sent the 'mixed multitude' to the devil, together with the Jews. There must have been a desperate struggle. The slaughter of the firstborn reveals that clearly enough. Just as they have done with us, the Jews had won the great lower stratum of the population for themselves -- 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!' -- until one night they sent out the order, 'Down with the bourgeois! Kill them, the dogs!' but things didn't turn out so well as they had expected. That portion of the Egyptian nation that had remained patriotic turned the tables and booted Moses, Cohn, and Levi out of the country, followed by the inhabitants whom they had incited. During this exodus they carried along as much stolen booty as they could manage, the Bible reports with satisfaction. It also reports, in no uncertain terms, that the Egyptians were glad to be rid of them (Exodus 12:35-36; Psalms 105:38). The best, though, was the reward the Jews gave their stupid accomplices. Suddenly they began calling them 'rabble,'[5] whereas formerly they had called them 'comrade' and pretended to love them. Imagine the faces these deluded ones must have made in the desert when they heard this."
"The murder of seventy-five thousand Persians, in the Book of Esther, no doubt had the same Bolshevist background," I answered. "The Jews certainly didn't accomplish that all by themselves."
"No more," he confirmed, "than the dreadful bloodbath over half the Roman Empire, which took place during the reign of Emperor Trajan. Hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish nobles in Babylonia, in Cyrenaica, in Egypt, and on Cyprus butchered like cattle, most of them after the most abominable torture![6] And today the Jews still rejoice over that. 'If only the various centers of rebellion had cooperated,' triumphs the Jew Graetz, 'then perhaps they would have already been able to give the Roman colossus its death blow at that time.'"[7]
"The Jews call our Sedan Day[8] celebration barbarous," I remarked. "But they find entirely in order the fact that, year in and year out, they still, after all this enormous time, celebrate in the synagogues their heroic deed concerning the seventy-five thousand Persians, in the feast of Purim."[9]
"None of this evidence seems to make any impression on us, however," he said dryly. "One would think us deaf and blind.
"Before the first clash with the Egyptians, the head scoundrel, the modest Joseph, had pretty well prepared: the seven lean cows, all the granaries filled, the people raging with hunger, the reigning Pharaoh a perfect flunky of the Jews, and Joseph, with a corner on the grain supply, 'ruler over all the land'! (Genesis 41:43). All the lamentations of the Egyptians were in vain; the Jew held the warehouse closed with an iron fist until they, in return for a bit of bread, were obliged to give away first their money, then their cattle and their land, and finally their freedom. And suddenly the capital was swarming with Jews; old Jacob was there, and 'his sons, and his sons' sons with him, his daughters, and his sons' daughters, and all his seed' -- the entire hodgepodge (Genesis 46:7). And Joseph 'wept a good while' for joy. Afterward, he said to his brothers: 'ye shall eat the fat of the land,' and 'the good of all the land of Egypt is yours.' (Genesis 45:18,20)
"But some time after this glorious Egyptian citizen of the Jewish faith, one hundred and ten years old, had died, the old Pharaoh also passed away and was succeeded by another Pharaoh, who 'knew not Joseph,' and, seeing the multitude of Jews, who meanwhile had grown very powerful, he became quite frightened. He feared lest: 'when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies' (Exodus 1:6-10); thus he was smarter than Wilhelm II,[10] who hoped for their support. The Jews must work, he decided. In all seriousness, work. 'Unmerciful,' wailed the Jewish chronicler. No wonder that they breathed vengeance. After all, for what did one have the Pöbelvolk, if not to do the work?
"By now, the Egyptians had forgotten dear Joseph, who was dead and gone but there was no lack of others on whom to blame the state of affairs, namely the landowners, the industrialists, the bourgeois. According to the Jews, no one else was responsible. 'Proletarians of all countries, unite!' And the masses believed it and turned on their own flesh and blood for the sake of the 'chosen people,' who had brought on all their distress in the first place. But to us they touchingly read aloud in school the beautiful story of Joseph and his brothers. No doubt many teachers 'wept a good while.' It's enough to drive one to despair."
He paused with a dark look at the Book of Hate.
"And so it goes, through the entire Old Testament," he began again. "Indeed, I'm telling you nothing new, but we must bring it home to ourselves as often as possible in order to be able to negate the constant hypocritical babble. Really, the Book of Joshua should suffice; such a thing of uninterrupted genocide, of bestial cruelty, of shameless rapacity and cold-blooded cunning -- Hell incarnate! And everything in the name of Jehova, in fact, according to his express wish! When the city of Jericho fell victim to the Jews through the treachery of the harlot Rahab, neither man nor beast, neither young nor old remained among the living; only the harlot was spared. She and her whole, noble family were rewarded with the privilege of living in Israel (Joshua 6:25). And what good-natured peoples they were who, one after another, were completely exterminated! Delitzsch, who has thoroughly investigated that period, writes, for example, about the Canaanites: on all the hills, under every shady tree, they rendered adoration and reverence to the sun god and to the salutary goddess Aschera; and he compares this beautiful, poetic custom with the pious way of our Catholic villagers, serving the Almighty in remote mountain chapels."[11]
"Joshua alone," I emphasized, "was responsible for the massacre of thirty-one kings, with all their people. Among those nations exterminated in these predatory raids were several who had yielded themselves trustingly to him. Each time the sinister words, 'let none survive,' were heard. I am inclined to believe that the Pöbelvolk or at least their descendants, must have still been the obedient shock troops of the Jews, not because the work was so atrocious, but because the children of Israel have always let deluded Gentiles do their dirty work, particularly where danger was involved. Besides, they would not have been strong enough to subdue the peoples to whom they were opposed, without the bellicose enthusiasm of their brutalized comrades.
"Of particular interest is the evident satisfaction with which the Jews have deliberately enumerated each of the slain kings one is reminded of the prophet Isaiah. In one place, he raves as if possessed: 'The Lord is angry at all the Gentiles; he will deliver them to the slaughter; their land will became burning pitch; it will become a wasteland, soaked with their blood; there will be no nobles in the land; their princes will die out' (Isaiah 34). Between Isaiah and Joshua were hundreds of years, but in that whole time the infernal rage of the Jews against non-Jewish royalty hadn't changed a bit."
"And in all eternity nothing will change," he proceeded, "so far as the attitude of the Jews toward our kings and our leaders is concerned. To destroy them is their eternal sin, and when they can't accomplish this by force, then they will use cunning. Whenever we have a strong leadership, the Jews are obliged to keep their noses clean. Our leadership can be truly strong, however, only if it is based completely in our people; only if it concerns itself with the welfare of the least among them just as much as with that of the wealthiest of them; only if, in the firm conviction of its own worth, it bars every alien influence from the beginning; only if it is not merely national, but is also social, down to its very bones. No matter what others may say, I assert this: a time will come when all the elite nations of the world will have such a leadership; and then everyone will be astonished to see that, instead of grating on one another as has previously been the case, they will treat one another with respect and consideration. For then there will be no more whipping up of land greed, of an itching for power, of suspicion -- sentiments which exist in unmixed form only in the isolated few, and not in the more trusting general populace, anyhow. There will be an end to the lying praise of an indiscriminate human brotherhood, which would be possible, if at all, only under the supposition that one had from the first excluded that eternal mischief-maker, the Jew. But had this been done, there would be no need to push the universal brotherhood idea; the various peoples would find themselves compatible of their own accord."
"Tell me," I interrupted him; "strictly speaking, do you consider the Jew to be national, or international?"
"Neither," was the answer. "One who really feels international has as much regard for the rest of the world as he does for his own nation. Were our so-called international swarms really like that -- fine. But I fear that they are secretly more concerned with the attitude of the rest of the world toward themselves than with their own attitude toward the world. Internationalism requires basically good intentions. But the Jew fundamentally and completely lacks these. He hasn't the remotest idea of classifying himself with the rest of humanity. His aim is to dominate others in order to extort from them at his leisure. Were he really interested in comradeship, he has had the longest and most abundant opportunity for it. Jehovah's command to him to make no alliances with foreign peoples, but, on the contrary, to devour one after the other, went straight to his heart (Exodus 34:12; Deuteronomy 7:16). Everywhere one greeted him with cordiality, at first: in ancient Egypt, in Persia, in Babylonia, in Europe; the cloven hoof appeared everywhere. The early Germanic conquerors found him with a number of arrogated rights and made no move to dispossess him of these. He was allowed to do business wherever and however he wanted, even in the slave trade, toward which he has always been peculiarly inclined. Like everyone else, he could hold public office, including the magistracy; and his so-called religion was protected by the state. Thus wrote Otto Hauser, who is an excellent source of fascinating illuminations regarding the Jews."[12]
"I should say so!" I nodded. "One must partake of him with caution though, otherwise one may not see the black forest for the 'blond' trees.[13] On the whole, I prefer Werner Sombart, even though his Berlin lectures swarm with Jews."
"Now, he says the same thing!" he cried. "According to him the Jews were by no means always second-class citizens. In antiquity one even found them often with special privileges which absolved them from certain duties, such as military service.[14] It was never their strong side to risk armed conflict. In the War of Liberation,[15] the Jews of Deutsch-Krone, in Pomerania, sent a petition to the king, requesting permission to remain home from the campaign in return for money. In this petition they argued that ten thousand talers would be of much more use in the war effort than the frankly questionable fighting ability of a Jew. The petition was accepted, not only from them, but also from the Jews of five more of the seven Prussian districts."[16]
"Yes, I know that place in Hauser," I added; "it is authentic. He also quotes there from Mayer's Encyclopedia, however, a statement which calmly claims that the Jews, through their heroic spirit in the War of Liberation, proved themselves as worthy German citizens."
"Just as they did in the World War," he winked expressively. "If I had my way, I'd require placards to be hung in all the schools, at every street corner, and in every public room, on which would be printed nothing but Schopenhauer's description of the Jews: 'Great masters of the lie'![17] There is no better description. And it applies without exception to every Jew equally, whether high or low, stock exchange tycoon or rabbi, baptized or circumcised. Our servile people! Provoked for thousands of years! And the innocents are taken in again and again by this blatant swindle. It is understandable that they become surly with the Jews, but only after the latter have shamelessly abused their naive good nature and plundered them to the skin with their usury and fraud. And that has been the case everywhere: in the old Roman Empire, in Egypt, in Asia, later in England, Italy, France, Poland, Holland, Germany, and even, as Sombart writes, 'in the Iberian peninsula, where the Jews have experienced so many blessings'!
"And the game they're playing today, they have been at for two thousand years," he continued. "I think that suffices to characterize the nature of Jewish internationalism. Now we still have left to consider the national feeling of the Jews. Naturally not that of the one for Germany, of the other for England, and so on. Not many mice are to be caught with that bait any longer. 'Send me a box full of German soil, so that I can at least symbolically defile the accursed country,' wrote the German Jew, Börne; and Heinrich Heine sniffed out Germany's future from a toilet bowl.[18] The physicist, Einstein, whom the Jewish publicity agents celebrate as a second Kepler, explained he would have nothing to do with German nationalism. He considered 'deceitful' the custom of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith of concerning themselves only with the religious interests of the Jews and not with their racial community also. A rare bird? No, only one who believed his people already safely in control, and thus considered it no longer necessary to keep up pretenses. In the Central Association itself, the mask has already fallen. A Dr. Brünn frankly admitted there that the Jews could have no German national spirit.[19] We always mistake their unprincipled exertions to accommodate themselves to all and everyone for impulses of the heart. Whenever they see an advantage to be gained by adopting a certain pose, they never hesitate, and certainly wouldn't let ethical considerations stand in their way. How many Galician Jews have first become Germans, then Englishmen, and finally Americans! And every time in the twinkling of an eye. With startling rapidity they change their nationality back and forth, and wherever their feet touch, there resounds either the 'Watch on the Rhine,' or the 'Marsellaise,' or 'Yankee Doodle.' Dr. Heim does not once question the fact that our Warburgs, our Bleichroders, or our Mendelssohns are able to transfer their patriotism as well as their residence of today to London or to New York on the morrow. 'On the sands of Brandenburg an Asiatic horde!' Walther Rathenau once blurted out about the Berlin Jews.[20]
He forgot to add that the same horde is on the Isar, the Elbe, the Main, the Thames, the Seine, the Hudson, the Neva, and the Volga. And all of them with the same deceit toward their neighbors. Our charmers and wizards, however, distinguish between respectable and not-so-respectable, between settled and newly immigrated, between western and eastern Jews, and if worse comes to worst, they shrug their shoulders and mutter, 'Every country has the Jews it deserves.' It means nothing to them that it was a Jew who coined this fine-sounding phrase. Nor that in the case of Germany, considering the quality of the Jews we have 'deserved,' it becomes a resounding slap in the face. 'All Israel stands openly in the British camp!' announced the American union leader Samuel Gompers in 1916. And that includes the German Jews too, as the American, Ford, well knew. He has written of the faithlessness of the so-called 'German' Jews toward the country where they live, of the fact that they have united themselves with the rest of the world's Jews toward the ruin of Germany. 'Why?' jeers the Jew. 'Because the German is a vulgar scoundrel, a backward, medieval creature, who hasn't the faintest idea of our worth. And we should help such rabble? No, he has the Jews he deserves!' Such arrogance is indeed staggering to behold."
I reminded him of Russia. "Before the revolution, the Jews condemned her as a downright sewer of vileness, even though they were the evident vermin in that sewer; now, the same Jews are at the helm, and, wuppdiwupp, the same Russia is a great nation."
"In the year 1870," he rejoined, "we Germans had the privilege of being a great people. The Jews considered that the time had arrived for replacing the French emperor, who had become undependable, with a pliable president. This also seemed an excellent opportunity to establish the Commune;[21] thus the 'heroic German people.' No wonder that right behind our princes and generals a pack of gesticulating Jewish financiers rode into Paris. Meanwhile, though, we have sunk back down into the pack again. The press, 'that select tool of the Anti-christ,' as Bismarck called it, has designated us as 'Boches' and as 'Huns.' But have patience! The more quickly we approach Bolshevism, the more glorious we will become again. And one fine day it will be the English and the French who are the scoundrels. One doesn't need spectacles to see that. 'I am a British subject but, first and foremost, a Jew,' screamed a Hebrew years ago in a large English-Jewish newspaper.[22] And another: 'Whoever has to choose between his duties as an Englishman and as a Jew must choose the latter.'[23] And a third: 'Jews who want to be both patriotic Englishmen and good Jews are simply living lies.'[24] That they could venture things of that sort so openly indicates how overrun with Jews England already was then."
"The stronghold of European Jewry had its origin in the period between Cromwell and Edward VII," I emphasized. "Since then, however, the center of Jewish activity seems to have been transferred to America. They have had a good footing there for a long time. Sombart maintains that it was Jewish money which made the first two voyages of Columbus possible.[25] A Jew, Luis de Torres, is supposed to have been the first European to step on American soil. And, topping everything else, the Jews have recently claimed Columbus himself as one of them."
"That's not surprising," he laughed. "Everyone who has somehow played a role in the world, the dear Lord included, is a Jew.[26] They even have Goethe and Schopenhauer on their list. And blessed be he who believes it. For my part, I contest them Columbus as well as Torres; ocean travel was much more hazardous then than now."
"According to Hauser," I replied, "Columbus was an Aryan, perhaps even of German descent."
"It's all the same to me," he responded. "As far as I'm concerned, he could have been a Zulu, I'd sooner attribute his deed to a Negro than to a Jew."
"Completely aside from that, it's clear that they have had America by the throat for quite a while," I continued. "No country, writes Sombart, displays more of a Jewish character than the United States.[27] We have already seen a consequence of this in the World War. In 1915, at a time when the true Americans hadn't the slightest thought of a war against us and, in fact, were so disposed toward us that any indication of a possible conflict of interest could have been smoothly and amicably settled, a secret advisory committee met with President Wilson for the sole purpose of preparing the country for war against Germany.[28] And who was the chief wire-puller in these nefarious activities, which were set into motion a full two years before the engagement of the United States in the war? The previously unknown Jew, Bernard Baruch. 'I believed that the war would come, long before it came,' he later calmly explained to the special committee of Congress which confirmed all this. And no one got up and beat the crafty scoundrel to a pulp."
"The resolution of the Jewish high command many years ago to unleash the World War is well authenticated," he said. "At the sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, in 1903, the president, Max Nordau, proclaimed: 'Herzl knows that we stand before a tremendous upheaval of the whole world.'[29] Good old Herzl! What an idealist! Our charmers and wizards were filled with awe at the thought of this noble patriarch. The scoundrel knew, however, what his filthy people had in mind for us!"
"But Herzl was a Zionist," I interjected.
"He was a Jew!" he said, striking the table with his fist. "The word Jew says everything. There is no need for any further distinction! 'God's chosen people' want to have their own 'God's country' again. Catch that: 'again'! God's people and God's country, neither of which, in reality, ever existed! Every portrayal ridicules for its depravity that general state of affairs which existed for some six hundred years in Palestine, till the Assyrians put an end to the mischief. Can you call that a country? Can't one accept the Old Testament as the authority on the matter? First we read of the uninterrupted murders and plunderings of the other peoples of Palestine, which, naturally, took many years. Then right up to the last, with the most abominable vileness, one state of anarchy followed another. The pinnacle, the flowering, the glory of Jewish statesmanship, namely, King David, was such a rascal that even the unprecedented villainy of the letter condemning Uriah was not enough for him; on his deathbed he urged his son to murder his old war comrade, Joab.
"When Cyrus gave the Jews permission to return to Palestine (from their Babylonian 'captivity') the overwhelming majority ignored Zion and remained in immeasurably rich Babylonia. Completely content there, they continued their financial speculations and other activities."
"In the year 1267," I informed him, "there were only two Jewish residents in Jerusalem. Up to the World War, the number of Jews in all Palestine had grown to only 12,000,[30] even though they had been free to return there since ancient times and certainly weren't lacking travel expenses. The remaining twenty or so millions -- exactly how many is difficult to ascertain, since the Jews themselves do the counting -- fatten themselves upon the sweat of others all over the world. It is hard to understand how tiny Palestine can hope to accommodate this enormous crowd."
"That's not necessary," he retorted. "The point is that it is now official. Israel has remembered itself. Its chains are cast aside. The sun of a new God's state rises over Zion. What an act! Finally liberated from bondage! Everyone is numbed with awe. The Jews grin."
"They have already issued a resolution...." I wanted to continue.
"Yes indeed," he cried, "if anywhere, this is where the cat jumps out of the bag! The resolution of the Pan-Jewish Conference of 1919, in Philadelphia!: 'The Jews are citizens of the new Jewish state of Palestine, but at the same time they have complete rights of citizenship of whatever countries they choose to live in.' One must read that non plus ultra of arrogance twice, indeed, a hundred times, in order to be sure one isn't dreaming. Imagine instead: 'The English are citizens of Great Britain. Each Englishman who chooses to live in Germany or France or Italy retains all his rights of English citizenship, but at the same time he has the complete rights of citizenship of the country in which he is living.' Now ask yourself what a scream of indignation, not we or the French or the Italians, but the Jews themselves would raise if the English people had actually made such a resolution! The Pan-Jewish Congress, however, issued its resolution as categorically as a command.
"This assembly comprised representatives of all the Jews of the world, including the Zionists. Their intentions were, in short, that the Jews should stay where they were and that the new Zion should simply have the purpose, first, to strengthen their political backbone, second, to gratify their arrogance, and last but most important, to provide them a state where they could carry on their dirty business without fear of detection.
"I think we can form a pretty good idea of Jewish nationalism from this."