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The Reader’s Forum

May 10, 1934
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Information reaching me shows that the press in Germany did not carry the recent scientific conclusions, that the alphabet is of Jewish, rather than of Phoenician origin. It is conjectural what their surprise will be to learn that their sacred emblem, the swastika, is of Jewish derivation. For the swastika is nothing but the first letter of the aleph-beth. Put the swastika alongside dear old aleph, and their common ancestry will at once become evident. The former is the straight-line version of the latter, losing its curves through the difficulty of the ancients in doing anything but straight lines in metal or stone.

The appearance of the swastika about 1000 B. C. coincides with the complete development of the Hebrew aleph-beth, whence the Phoenicians borrowed their script and introduced it wherever they had trading posts. Thus they were agents for disseminating it in various places from the coastal towns of China and India to the Coast of Denmark and Norway. The aleph, meaning “Sacred Ox” in the old Hebrew (as all letters were named after animals or objects) was a religious charm among them. The two horns of the aleph are evidently the horns of the ox, worn as festive decoration, or etched into metal or stone weapons lest evil befall the possessor. The discovery a few years back in Denmark of bronze swords of Phoenician workmanship with the swastika or squared aleph engraved on the short handle, substantiates this view.

The “Aryan” Nazis revere the swastika as an “Aryan” symbol. But their forebears did not bring the swastika from Asia with them, for how would they explain its presence only at the site of the Phoenician trading stations, the coastal tow###s, and not the interior of China and India in the 10th Century B. C., long after the Nazi ethnologists claim they were on their way to Europe?

AN OFFICIAL BOYCOTT

If there was any further need of proof of the duplicity and the employment of terror and lies by the Hitler regime, it is furnished by its own official government publication. The “Reichsanzeiger” or the official gazette of the German government has published lately the rules and regulations concerning the government’s subsidy which is being granted to newlywed couples. As it is well known, the peace-loving Hitler in his desire to fill the ranks of the German regiments for the next war has ordered a premium of 1,000 marks-or about $400-to be granted to every newly-wed couple for the purpose of endowing the home with furniture and other necessities of family life. Among the regulations for the qualification of shops and business houses for such purposes there is the following paragraph:

“Not permitted are department stores, one price stores, consumers’ associations, auction places, and all such business establishments whose owners are not of Aryan descent. If the non-Aryan owner was severely wounded in the last war, the community may admit his shop as purchase place for newly-wed couples. In case of a shop which is partly in Aryan and partly in non-Aryan hands, the authorities of the community may decide according to each individual case, but always guided by the principle that the owners must offer adequate guarantee that at all times they will unqualifiedly support the Nazi state.”

Here is a plain, clear-cut, official government boycott.

Union of American Hebrew Congregations,

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