World Press Digest

The London Times, writing on Maimonides, says:

Moses ben Maimon, usually called Maimonides, was the most important Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages. He was born at Cordoba in 1135, but left Spain in 1160, and after spending five years at Fez, passed on to Egypt, where he remained until his death at Cairo in 1204. As early as his sixteenth year he produced a philosophical work, and he soon became celebrated as an authority on Jewish dogma and law, which he was the first to codify in his work Mishneh-Torah, produced in 1180. By that time he was the recognized head of the Jewish community in Egypt.

By profession, however, he was a physician, and acted in that capacity for Salain and his sons, for one of whom he wrote a number of medical works. These, like the bulk of his books, were written in the Arabic language, though he appears always to have used the Hebrew alphabet himself. He is best known through his great philosophical work, called the “Guide for the Perplexed,” which was soon translated into Latin, and in that form exercised a considerable influence on medieval philosophy.

HAMLET HAD A WORD FOR LUDENDORFF

The Catholic Times of London, commenting on Ludendorff, says:

There is just a possibility that General Ludendorff is in his dotage. At one time the extravagance of his pronouncements on the Jewish menace and German paganism was regarded as sufficient proof that his mental faculties were not as great as they had been, but the way others have since spoken clears him of suspicion.

On his seventieth birthday he proclaims that he is “an anti-Christian and heathen and proud of it.” He tells us that “Christian teaching is there for only one purpose—to help the Jewish people to domination. Only through complete renunciation of Christianity will the German people achieve unity.”

“These tedious old fools!” as Hamlet exclaims. We must bear with them and pity them.

OUR GUESS IS: ‘BEHEAD HIM’

The London News Chronicle quotes Nietzsche on the Jewish question as follows:

What a blessing a Jew is among Germans! See the obtuseness, the flaxen head, the blue eye, and the lack of intellect in the face, the language, and the bearing; the lazy habit of stretching the limbs, and the need of repose among Germans —a need which is not the result of overwork, but of the disgusting excitation and overexcitation caused by alcohol.

“What would Herr Hitler say to that?” the News Chronicle asks.

NORDIC SUPERIORITY CALLED ‘POPPYCOCK’

The Chicago Daily News, in interviews with a number of professors on the racial question, quotes Prof. Fay-Cooper Cole, head of the department of anthropology at the Chicago University, as saying that the “Nordic myth of racial superiority is sheerest poppycock.” Prof. Cole said:

“The idea of a superior race is preposterous, scientifically speaking. “The Nordic race has been so diluted that even in the Scandinavian countries not fifty per cent are pure Nordic. There is no German race. Apparently Hitler is as much Alpine as Nordic. Neither is there an ‘Aryan’ race, as Herr Hitler is now trying to call the Nordics. ‘Aryan’ is a linguistic term, and is used to designate those peoples who speak an ‘Aryan’ language, such as the Hindoos, who are just as good ‘Aryans’ as Hitler. Moreover, the Jews are just as good Caucasians as the Germans. Nor are they a race in the biological sense. They are a religious group with a set of traditions of their own.”