Quotes thread

It meant a good deal for a Scottish monk to visit a Lombard monastery, and nostalgia soon took him home again, but when a rabbi of Mainz — in 1000 the seat of the most important Talmudic seminary of the West — or of Salerno betook himself to Cairo or Merv or Basra, he was at home in every ghetto. In this tacit cohesion lay the very idea of the Magian nation — although the contemporary West was unaware of the fact, it was for the Jews, as for the Greeks of the period and the Parsees and Islam, State and Church and people all in one.​

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This State had its own jurisprudence and (what Christians never perceived) its own public life, and despised the surrounding world of the host-peoples as a sort of outland; and it was a veritable treason- trial that expelled Spinoza and Uriel Acosta — an event of which these host-peoples could not possibly grasp the under meaning. And in 1799 the leading thinker among the Eastern Hasidim, Senior Salman, was handed over by the rabbinical opposition to the Petersburg Government as though to a foreign state.​

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Jewry of the West-European group had entirely lost the relation to the open land which had still existed in the Moorish period of Spain. There were no more peasants. The smallest ghetto was a fragment, however miserable, of megalopolis, and its inhabitants (like those of hardened India and China) split into castes — the Rabbi is the Brahmin or Mandarin of the ghetto — and a coolie-mass characterized by civilized, cold, superior intelligence and an undeviating eye to business. But this phenomenon, again, is not unique if our historical sense takes in the wider horizon, for all Magian nations have been in this condition since the Crusade period.​

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The Parsee in India possesses exactly the same business-power as the Jews in the European-American world and the Armenians and Greeks in southern Europe. The same phenomenon occurs in every other Civilization, when it pushes into a younger milieu — witness the Chinese in California (where they are the targets of a true Anti-Semitism of western America), in Java, and in Singapore; that of the Indian trader in East Africa; and that of the Romans in the Early Arabian World. ​

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...no one belonging inwardly to the Consensus can even begin to comprehend the passion with which Faustians livingly experience the short crowded epochs in which their history and destiny take decisive turns — the beginning of the Crusades, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the German Wars of Liberation, and each and every turning-point in the existence of the several peoples. All this, for the Jew, lies thirty generations back. Outside him history on the grand style flowed on and past. Epochs succeeded to epochs, every century witnessed fundamental human changes, but in the ghetto and in the souls of its denizens all stood still.​

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And even when he regarded himself as a member of the people amongst whom he sojourned and took part in their good and evil fortune — as happened in so many countries in 1914 — he lived these experiences, not really as something his own, but as a partisan, a supporter; he judged them as an interested spectator, and hence it is just the deepest meanings of the struggle that must ever remain hidden from him. A Jewish cavalry-general fought in the Thirty Years' War (he lies buried in the old Jewish cemetery at Prague) — but what did the ideas of Luther or Loyola mean to him? What did the Byzantines — near relatives of the Jews — comprehend of the Crusades ?​

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The Romans, then an ageing people, cannot possibly have understood what was at issue for the Jews in the trial of Jesus or the rising of Bar Kokhba..... The member of an alien Culture can be a spectator, and therefore also a descriptive historian of the past, but he can never be a statesman, a man who feels the future working in him. If he does not possess the material power to enable him to act in the cadre of his own Culture, ignoring or manipulating those of the alien (which, of course, may occur, as with the Romans in the young East or Disraeli in England), he stands helpless in the midst of events.​

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The Roman and the Greek always mentally projected the life-conditions of his Polis into the alien event; the modern European always regards alien Destinies in terms of constitution, parliament, and democracy, although the application of such ideas to other Cultures is ridiculous and meaningless; and the Jew of the Consensus follows the history of the present (which is nothing but that of the Faustian Civilization spread over continents and oceans) with the fundamental feelings of Magian mankind, even when he himself is firmly convinced of the Western character of his thought.​

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As every Magian Consensus is non-territorial and geographically unlimited, it involuntarily sees in all conflicts concerning the Faustian ideas of fatherland, mother tongue, ruling house, monarchy, constitution, a return from forms that are thoroughly alien (therefore burdensome and meaningless) to him towards forms matching with his own nature. Hence the word "international," whether it be coupled with socialism, pacificism, or capitalism, can excite him to enthusiasm, but what he hears in that word is the essence of his landless and boundless Consensus. While for the European-American democracy constitutional struggles and revolutions mean an evolution towards the Civilized ideal, for him they mean (as he almost never consciously realizes) the breaking-down of all that is of other build than himself. ​

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Even when the force of the Consensus in him is broken and the life of his host-people exercises an outward attraction upon him to the point of an induced patriotism, yet the party that he supports is always that of which the aims are most nearly comparable with the Magian essence. Hence in Germany he is a democrat and in England (like the Parsee in India) an imperialist..... What the Western Culture has destroyed, by reform-efforts of its own type where it has had power, hardly bears thinking of; and Jewry has been equally destructive where it has intervened. The sense of the inevitableness of this reciprocal misunderstanding leads to the appalling hatred that settles deep in the blood and, fastening upon visible marks like race, mode of life, profession, speech, leads both sides to waste, ruin, and bloody excesses wherever these conditions occur.​