Chosen Peoples by Israel Zangwill — Read

Much might, of course, be adduced to mitigate the seeming ferocity or / egotism of these passages. It would be indeed strange if Prussia, / which Napoleon wittily described as "hatched from a cannon-ball," / should be found really resembling Judaea, whose national greeting was / "Peace"; whose prophet Ezekiel proclaimed in words of flame and / thunder God's judgment upon the great military empires of antiquity; / whose mediaeval poet Kalir has left in our New Year liturgy what might / be almost a contemporary picture of a brazen autocracy "that planned / in secret, performed in daring. " And, as a matter of fact, some of / these passages are torn from their context. The pictures of Messianic / prosperity, for example, are invariably set in an ethical framework: / the all-dominant Israel is also to be all-righteous. The blood that is / to be avenged is the blood of martyrs "who went through fire and water / for the sanctification of Thy name."

But let us take these passages at their nakedest. Let us ignore -- as / completely as Jesus did -- that the legal penalty of "eye for eye" had / been commuted into a money penalty by the great majority of early / Pharisaic lawyers. Is not that very maxim to-day the clamoured policy / of Christian multitudes? "Destroy them from under the heavens of the / Lord! " When this is the imprecation of a Vehaeren or a Maeterlinck / over Belgium and not of a mediaeval Jew over the desolated home of / Jacob, is it not felt as a righteous cry of the heart? Nay, only the / other Sunday an Englishwoman in a country drawing-room assured me she / would like to kill every German -- man or woman -- with her own hand!