Dagobert D. Runes - The Hebrew Impact on Western Civilization

The Hebrew Impact on Western Civilization

Abridged Edition

Edited by Dagobert D. Runes

Table of Contents

Professor of Education, New York University.

Author of Jewish Influence in Modern Thought.

Author of Jewish Contribution to Medicine in America.

Author of The Struggle for Tradition.

Special Consultant to the Economic Warfare Division of the U. S. Department of Justice during World War II; author of The Coming Battle of Germany.

Editor, Encyclopedia of Religion.

Preface

This book is a book of propaganda. It has the mission to bring intelligence about the work and the life of the Hebrews pro paganis. The pagans for whom this volume is intended are the many, many people in whose midst the Hebrews have lived for thousands of years. The Jews had to learn the ways of their harborers in order to live, but seldom did the princes and the people of the West give more than a passing glance to their strange Asiatic guests.

For almost eighteen hundred yearswith few and brief exceptionsthe Jews of the Western World were confined in high walled corrals, the gates to which were rarely opened and then only by the kings, knights and crusaders who combined the infernal spectacle of slaughtered, defenseless Jewish men and women with their instinct for robbery, together with a remarkably recurrent Christian theology of vengeance on the descendants of those who allegedly had executed the son of God.

During these many hundreds of years of their ghetto life, the mind of Israel and the art of Israel and the courage of Israel were pining away in a captives existence, chained to frustration by intolerant and bigoted nations. The Great Show of the world was closed to them. On rare occasions only was it possible for someand fewto break out and to storm into the whirl of events.

Then, two hundred years ago, there rose the American rebellion against a king and his disciples, and the jubilant Dare, so vehemently sparked in America, flamed up in France and from there spread over most of the Western World. The same spirit that drove tyranny from American soil and corruption from France, the same spirit smashed the ghetto walls of Europe and set the Jew free.

It is actually with the American and French revolutions that the real life and influence of the Israelites in the Western World begins.

If what the Jews have done for Europe and America in these few hundred years appears gigantic, the statement of it here is no exaggeration, as the scholar can quickly discover, and it is not overstressed, I am sure, by any of the contributors, of whom some are Jews and some are not. It is rather related purposefully so that those who disapprove of an act or person of a Jew may balance such acts and persons against the magnitude of Jewish Drama on the other scale.

It is with the Christians among whom Jews reside as it is with the human heart: they are rarely aware of the Jew unless he hurts them. His silent and constant work for their welfareone would almost think it doesnt exist.

And still, their every church is a monument to the Jew Jeshu ben Joseph and his Apostles:Saul, whom they named Paul; and Shimon, whom they named Peter; and Levi, whom they named Matthew; and so on. It is trueif it isthat many of those who knew Jeshu (whom we call, after the Greek, Jesus), did not take him for the Messiah (in Greek: Christos) but many of them did, and they all, as well as Miriam (Mary), (and her sons whom she bore after Jeshu) were Jews. The whole ancient church of Christendom is Jewish in origin, Jewish in concept (Messiah) and Jewish in followship; and if there were many who wished his death, there were many who wished his life to be unending.

When Christianity made its great reforms in the 16th and 17th centuries, it opened the pages of the Old Testament and drank from the Hebrew fountain of wisdom. The Hebrew testament was the light and the guide by which not only the Puritans but also the other great armies of pioneers and settlers worked, lived and governed. In the later years our greatest statesmen and reformers, men like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Abraham Lincoln,they held the Hebrew Testament to be the Truth forever.

The Western World has pulled some sordid jokes on the Jew. For almost two thousand years they stopped him from owning land, and then they accused him of refusing to work it; they stopped him from bearing arms, and then they called him a coward; they kept him from their schools and laughed at his ignorance; they kept him from public office and the right to vote, and then they called him subversive and disloyal; they stopped him from engaging in anything but small trade, and then they referred to him sneeringly as an unmitigated tradesman; and some of the grand lords in the manors of the Medieval Ages used the Jews to administer their loan business, and then they called them usurers.

This book will show to those who wish to learn that the Jew is a diligent farmer, an heroic soldier, a loyal servant of his people and an ardent scholar.

Many of the facts quoted in this book may startle even the well-read. How many people know, for instance, that half of the German Nobel Prize winners were men of Jewish descent? Six hundred thousand Jews of pre-war Germany produced as many Nobel Prize winners as sixty million Germans, the Herrenvolk that showed its gratitude to the men who so tremendously helped in their growth by massacring the Jewish people of Europe. Six million souls in six years! A million Jews a year were hunted down by German nationals in every corner of Europe, dragged to the executioners, choked to death in sealed trains or gassed in torture chambers and burned in huge bread ovens. This is how one Christian nation repaid its debt to the people of Israel. And of the millions of the Teutonic malefactors, the axemen as well as their millions of helpers and their multi-millions of Jew-denouncers and Hitler-heilers, all but an ugly few are alive and kicking the same bloody boots in goose-step.

Perhaps it would be better to forget the Hitler monstrosities. The Western World is somewhat embarrassed about its indifference towards Teutonic inhumanity. Perhaps we Jews would like to forget too. Forget the joyful victory marches in every town and hamlet of Germany when their last Jew was safely squeezed into the awaiting freight car, to die of asphyxiation with the other hundred members of his tribe, men, women and infants, living for minutes and minutes without a breath of air, body after body collapsing, so closely packed that the dead would hang against the shoulders and backs of those still living, and at the point of destination, hours away, the whole sordid mess of human cadavers would be shovelled into huge stoves by their German tormentors.

We would like to forget those things. We would like to forget the cultured German officers who so carefully lined up three children in a row that they might kill them with one bullet instead of three we would like to forget the German scientists who vivisected our mothers and sisters and daughters in cannibalistic fashion we would like to forget the group of German scholars that succeeded in making soap out of Jewish body fat, and later sold it to the Jews at exorbitant prices, for burial purposes. We would like to forget those things, but the Germans dont forget. They havent forgotten the glory and the strut of their Jew-killing heydays, even though they go to church on Sundays, and to the Salzburg festivals and the Passion play in Oberammergau. And though by all candid reportage they may have some doubts as to Hitlers political craftsmanship, there is no doubt today in their black hearts, after all has been shown and told, that they enjoyed this spirit of Jew-killing and regret nothing more than that it stopped.