The Moor Can Go!

The sudden attack of Judephobia to which Germany succumbed so rapidly is by no means an isolated phenomenon in German history. German-Jewish relations have, except for a hundred years’ peace, been strained. As a matter of fact, Adolf Hitler is only repeating what Martin Luther said about the Jew. Captain Goering is only emulating the example set by Goethe. Goethe, the greatest German poet and the greatest figure in European literature since Shakespeare, offered stubborn resistance to Jewish emancipation.

If it is true that the literature of a people only reflects the realities of a people’s life, then Jew-hatred in Germany has always been an outstanding feature of German life, for German literature, as represented by great poets and philosophers, is rampant with anti-Semitism. There is only one exception, the immortal Lessing, the friend of Moses Mendelssohn and the adherent of Spinoza. Even Immanuel Kant was not free from anti-Semitism. Hegel, Fichte and Schopenhauer hated Jews and Judaism with a ferocious hatred, and the greatest German religious figure since Martin Luther, the great Schleiermacher, was an enemy of Judaism and the Jewish people. Nor was Schiller a friend of the Jews. The German romantic school, too, was anti-Semitic to the core.

But for 100 years, from 1833 to 1933, the German Jews were not molested. They were never fully emancipated until the end of the World War. Even in the heyday of the Hohenzollerns, a Jew in Germany could never occupy a Civil Service position, but pogroms were forbidden in Germany, and when Count Pueckler, in 1902, started to do what Hitler is doing now, William II lost no time in committing him to an insane asylum. Physical attacks on Jews were “verboten”, because the Jew then was doing useful work for the Fatherland.

Six hundred thousand Jews in Germany did more for the industrialization of the country than ten million Germans. It was a Jew by the name of Ballin, who built up the German shipping industry. Ballin was the creator of the Hamburg-American line. It was another Jew, Rathenau, who established and developed the German electrical industry. It was another Jew, by the name of Rudolf Mosse, who established and developed the German publishing and advertising enterprises. A number of German Jews, among them the world-famous Haber, have developed German chemistry and have made Germany the greatest chemical power in Europe. In addition, German Jews have established and developed the tobacco industry, the fur industry, the textile industry, and so forth, but more important than all that is the fact that Jews brought home a lion’s share of the foreign markets for German goods. Six percent of all representatives of German firms in South and Central America and the Far East were Jews.

Now Germany is highly industrialized and commercialized. Now Germany is in possession of foreign markets in South and Central America and in the Far East. Now Germany thinks that she no longer needs the Jew,

The Moor has done his duty, the Moor can go. That is all there is to Hitlerism.