Of considerable interest here has been the forthright condemnation of anti-Semitism and the expression of a feeling of solidarity expressed here by Lord Melchett, son and heir of the late Sir Alfred Mond.
Lord Melchett in a statement prepared following the conclusion of the Jewish conference in Geneva where a world Jewish congress was decided upon, declared as follows:
“The persecution of the Jews provides one of the most interesting studies in human nature and in the history of mankind.
“The great men of almost every country, race and nationality have for centuries borne testimony to the spiritual, intellectual and social qualities of the Jewish people.
“The Jewish race has provided the world with the basis of three of the great religions of mankind.
“They produced the Bible at a period in history when the population of the present European nations was savage and illiterate, but they have at all times been numerically an inferior people; moreover, they have always been a “different” people.
“They have always kept themselves apart from the rest of mankind, as their prophets from Moses onwards commanded them to do.
“From these circumstances follow certain natural results bound to be produced by such a situation, human nature being what it is.
“First of all the fruits of victory in this world go to the strong. The Jews, in their early history as a nation, were a famous fighting people, holding their little country against great empires in the face of overwhelming odds with varying success, but with a courage and determination for which it is hard to find the equal.
“Finally, their power was destroyed by the mighty Roman Empire, and they were dispersed into foreign countries, where they have remained for two thousand years as strangers among strange people.
“Now, the ordinary human being loves to have two things to make him seem a fine fellow to himself. One is someone to despise; the other is someone to blame.
“Most nations despise foreigners. All crowds, packs, and herds are by nature hostile to strangers. This fact is merely the working out in the mass of the instinct of self-preservation. But the Jews are the only people in the world who, as a nation, perpetually live amongst foreigners, so that this mass hostility and contempt have so eaten into their very soul in two thousand years as to produce various national characteristics too complex to be dealt with in any single article.
“When things have gone wrong with any nation in the world it has always been convenient to blame the Jews. Moreover, being everywhere religious as well as racial foreigners, religious prejudice existing against them in every country in the world has always made it easy to beat up an anti-Semitic agitation either to consolidate a movement by the binding factor of a good common ‘hate’ or to divert the attention of the people from the failures of Governments.
“The present anti-Semitic Hitler movement in Germany is of the former character. The memories of the war bring back to us the capabilities of the German people for organized “hating,” to which must be added their capacity for dealing harshly with people smaller than themselves.
“One wonders whether the heroic Nazis who have been bombing and shooting at defenseless Jews will be rewarded with some special kind of cross—the symbol of Him who preached Peace.
“The Jews think in terms of centuries where other nations think in decades, and they do this because their recorded history covers well over five
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
