Quotes from Tom Reiss

energized and emboldened delegates of the Third Estate, the "99 percent"—in reality, closer to 96 percent—of the French population who paid the bulk of the taxes

1938, Italians from Milan to Naples had opened their newspapers to discover that they were all "pure Aryan Nordics" and that their Jewish colleagues were dangerous aliens. Jews, including die-hard Fascists, were dismissed from all military, university, and government posts. By that fall, Italian Jews were not allowed to have listed phone numbers, presumably because it corrupted the sea of pure Nordic names in the Italian telephone directory.

a kind of Turkish parallel to the German idea of lebensraum, the future was to be found in the East—in an invasion of Russia to reclaim ancestral lands from the thirteenth century and earlier, not only those of the Ottomans but of the other great Turanians, the Mongols and the Huns.*21

The pope heard of the Knights' lax morals and sent an inquisitor to the island in 1574; he set up shop in a mansion in the shopping district.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Jews of Europe began to take on the new role of interpreters of the East. In addition to their own search for identity in the Orient, they were encouraged by Europe's new openness to the East, now that the Muslims were in a state of decline and not threatening

Wednesday, June 17, 1789, France went from a system where only the nobility and the church had power to a system where, at least theoretically, the common people did.

bluster—Enver sent Turkish troops to fight in the Caucasus in winter with no overcoats and without even boots—but the increasingly fanatical Young Turk junta looked for someone else to blame for the failure of the Turanian dream. Thus, the infamous Armenian massacres of 1915 were set in motion.

Dumas was possibly the strongest man in the French army.… In the riding school he liked to stand up in the stirrups, take hold of an overhead beam, and lift himself and his horse bodily off the ground.

This mulatto gentleman could powder and dress as he liked, however, because he was acknowledged to be the greatest swordsman in Europe. Over the previous decade and a half, every white champion had stepped up to try to beat Saint-Georges; except for one Italian, who fought him under exceptional circumstances, they all failed. Saint-Georges

He was the more moderate kind of nationalist. He did not sport a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache or excel at massacring Armenian civilians.

A crack shot and a great equestrian to boot, Saint-Georges had become an honorary member of the king's guard—allowed to take the title of "chevalier," essentially a knight—as a result of avenging a racist insult.

and less than three years later, Soviet armored divisions, tanked up with Baku oil, were at the gates of Berlin.

French Enlightenment philosophers liked to use slavery as a symbol of human oppression, and particularly political oppression. "Man is born free but is everywhere in chains," wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract in 1762. A generation of crusading lawyers put Enlightenment principles into action by helping slaves sue for the right to be treated as ordinary French subjects.

The repression the Republic imposed in the Vendée escalated to a level of surreal violence that dwarfed the Parisian Terror.

the concept, going back to the misty foundations of the nation, that France was the land of the free—that no one should be kept in unwilling servitude on its soil.

This is the positive way of seeing the modern Jewish dilemma: I am from everywhere. The negative way is no matter where you go, you find out that you're a victim, that you're unwanted and don't belong.