Quotes About Jews

Moses Lazarus, father of Emma, had been a founding member of the Knickerbocker Club, New York's second-most exclusive. The Sephardim made the most of their entrenched position, and, if German Jews found the gentiles in New York society indifferent, they found the Sephardic Jews almost unapproachable.

The old differentiation between the German "uptown" Jew and the Russian of the "Lower East Side" has become a difference between the "quiet, cultivated Wall Street type" and the "noisy, pushy, Seventh Avenue type"—who do not mix any more easily than oil and water. And out of all this has come the impression that Jews "dominate" both these fields in the city.

they were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the new "scientific" anti-Semitic theories that ascribed a host of loathsome traits to Jews' inherent racial characteristics.

The Jews are a nervous people. Nineteen centuries of Christian love have taken a toll.

The best evidence is the fact that this book predates Jesus and gives a multitude of prophecies for him. The Dead Sea Scroll copies of Enoch were found to predate Jesus and belong to the Essenes. This was a group of Jews that broke off from the mainstream and lived in various caves before Jesus was born.

liberty and the homeland of the Jews. Athenian democracy had shifted to Washington, and ancient Judaism had taken a secular form in the state of Israel.

brief, German Jews were prisoners of what George L. Mosse analysed as an insurmountable contradiction between Bildung and Sittlichkeit, the former being increasingly Judaized, while the latter remained ever unattainable, even by individuals as rich and powerful as the banker Gerson Bleichröder or the industrialist Walther Rathenau.

Even as a political religion, therefore, Zionism is a phenomenon sui generis. It effects a fusion between the secularization of an old messianism (the return to Eretz Israel) and the sacralization of the memory of a profane historical experience (the extermination of six million Jews).

On the eve of the Second World War, almost ten million Jews had lived in Europe; by the mid 1990s less than two million remained.3 After the war, Jewry practically ceased to exist in Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Germany and Austria, the countries that had been its main centres.

Between 1933 and 1938, a great exodus of German Jews began, far greater in its extent than that of the Spanish Jews after 1492 or that of the Huguenots after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. More than 450,000 Jews left central Europe as it came under Nazi rule.37 The whole of German-Jewish culture was exiled

born from the treaty of Versailles in the wake of the collapse of the empires. In these states, Jews embodied modernity and polarized the rejection of conservative forces. In France, they became the target of legitimists and nationalists opposed to the Third Republic; in Italy, of Catholics horrified by the Piedmont monarchy that had led the peninsular's unification; in Germany, of conservatives who sought to preserve the Christian character of the Prussian monarchy. After

In 1933 nearly 70 percent of Germany's Jews worked in business and commerce; over 30 percent lived in the city of Berlin alone; and 70 percent lived in cities with a population of over 100,000 inhabitants.

heard in communist circles that numbers of Jews were being gassed."45.

amount of fear that most Jews perceived grew in a nearly linear fashion

Even if many people had heard foreign radio broadcasts about the murder of Jews, it was by no means guaranteed that the reports were trusted.

Jewish organizations had pushed early on to make the persecution and murder of the Jews a key issue, the Allied military leadership regarded it as more important to wear down the German military and to make this the topic of the leaflets in order to undermine German morale.55

Many Germans, however, were quick to accept the new situation and concerned themselves only with their own private lives and tended not to think about what was happening to the Jews.

But where the Jews were concerned, did they talk about that? Many people say that nobody talked about it. They're lying.

news of the atrocities reached a large portion of the German public by the end of the war. A substantial minority of about one-third of the population became aware of the mass murder of Jews while it was still taking place, and most believed this information, especially because it came from persons they trusted.

For many Germans, even if they had heard such speeches, the murder of the Jews was beyond their imagination. And some may have suppressed what they heard because it disturbed them. The radical nature of the language that was used in this matter was also typical in other matters, which is why the Jewish professor Victor Klemperer aptly described the Nazis' language as a language of "superlatives.

annihilated" and "exterminated," even though such phraseology had an old history in Germany and had often been used when no mass murder of Jews had yet been envisioned

there was a remarkably strong connection between knowledge about the euthanasia program and knowledge about the mass murder of Jews.

It is also evident that many Germans did not want to know about what was being done to the Jews. Either it did not interest them or they wanted to suppress it from their consciousness. All too often, they were too involved in their own lives and worries, and they became blind to the sufferings of the Jews and deceived themselves about their fate.

The Latvians wanted to storm the ghetto. They wanted to kill the Jews. So the Germans had to protect us—the German army or SS or whatever it was. It is paradoxical.