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The Controversy of Zion

Douglas Lancelot Reed

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DOUGLAS REED - The Controversy of Zion

"For it is the day of the Lord's vengeance and the year of recompences for the controversy of Zion"- Isaiah 34:8.

"An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to silenf' Edmund Burke, 1789.

This book was writen in 1951-1956.

First published in 1978 by Dolphin Press (Pty) Ltd., Durban.

THE AUTHOR Douglas Lancelot Reed (1995 - 1976)

It is one of the commonplaces of history that adverse circumstances offer no obstacle to men of outstanding energy and ability. Douglas Reed, who described himself as "relatively unschooled", started out in life as an office boy at the age of 13 and was a bank clerk at 19 before enlisting at the outbreak of World War I. A less promising preparation for a man destined to be one of the most brilliant political analysts and descriptive writers of the century could hardly be imagined. He was already 26 years old when he reached the London Times in 1921 as a telephonist and clerk; and he was 30 when he finally reached journalism as sub-editor. Thereafter there was no stopping this late-starter. Three years later he became assistant Times correspondent in Berlin before moving on to Vienna as Chief Central European correspondent stationed at

Vienna. Reed broke with The Times in October 1938, almost simultaneously with the appearance of a book which was to win him instant world fame -Insanity Fair, a charming combination of autobiography and contemporary history. This was followed a year later by another runaway best seller, Disgrace Abounding. Other best-sellers followed in quick succession - A Prophet at Home, All Our Tomorrows, Test We Regret, Somewhere South of Sue and Far and Wide. After Far and Wide Reed was virtually banned by the establishment publishers and booksellers, but he emerged from his enforced retirement as a writer in 1966 with The Battle for Rhodesia, followed by The Siege Of Southern Africa in 1974, Behind the Scene (a new edition of Part Two of Far and Wide) and The Grand Design, published in 1976 and 1977.

DOUGLAS REED - The Controversy of Zion

CONTENTS:

PREFACE
l. THE START OF THE AFFAIR
2. THE END OF ISRAEL
3. THE LEVITES AND THE LAW
4. THE FORGING OF THE CHAINS
5. THE FALL OF BABYLON
6. THE PEOPLE WEPT
7. THE TRANSLATION OF THE LAW
8. THE LAW AND THE IDUMEANS
9. THE RISE OF THE PHARISEES
10. THE MAN FROM GALILEE
1l. THE PHARISAIC PHOENIX
12. THE LIGHT AND THE SHADOW
13. THE FENCE AROUND THE LAW
14. THE MOVABLE GOVERNMENT
15. THE TALMUD AND THE GHETTOES
16. THE MESSIANIC LONGING
17. THE DESTRUCTIVE MISSION
18. THE NAPOLEONIC INTERROGATION
19. THE WORLD REVOLUTION
20. THEDESIGN
21. THE WARNINGS OF DISRAELI
22. THE MANAGERS
23. THE "PROPHET"
24. THE COMING OF ZIONISM
25. THE WORLD ZIONIST ORGANIZATION
26. THE HERESY OF DR. HERZL
27. THE "PROTOCOLS"
28. THE ABERRATION OF MR. BALFOUR
29. THE AMBITION OF MR. HOUSE
30. THE DECISIVE BATTLE
31. THE WEB OF INTRIGUE
32. THE WORLD REVOLUTION AGAIN
33. THE LEAGUE TO ENFORCE PEACE
34. THE END OF LORD NORTHCLIFFE
35. THE NATIONAL HOME
36. THE STRANGE ROLE OF THE PRESS
37. THE MANAGERS, THE MESSIAHS AND THE MASSES
38. THE LITTLE COUNTRY FAR AWAY
39. THE ARMING OF ZION
40. THE INVASION OF AMERICA
41. THE REVOLUTION "EXTENDS"
42. THE TALMUDIC VENGEANCE
43. THE ZIONIST STATE (1)
44. THE WORLD INSTRUMENT
45. THE JEWISH SOUL
46. THE CLIMACTERIC
THE CLIMACTERIC (1) - 1. The Revolution
THE CLIMACTERIC (2) - 2. The Zionist State
THE CLIMACTERIC (3) - 3. The Years of Climax
THE EPILOGUE
APPENDIX - The Torah, The New Testament
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A SHORT LIST OF BOOKS RECOMMENDED FOR FURTHER READING

D. REED - The Controversy of Zion

A PREFACE

By Ivor Benson

The Author: In Europe during the years immediately before and after World War II the name of Douglas Reed was on everyone's lips; his books were being sold by scores of thousand, and he was known with intimate familiarity throughout the English-speaking world by a vast army of readers and admirers. Former London Times correspondent in Central Europe, he had won great fame with books like Insanity Fair, Disgrace Abounding, Lest We Regret, Somewhere South of Sue Far and Wide and several others, each amplifying a hundredfold the scope available to him as one of the world's leading foreign correspondents.

The disappearance into almost total oblivion of Douglas Reed and all his works was a change that could not have been wrought by time alone; indeed, the correctness of his interpretation of the unfolding history of the times found some confirmation in what happened to him when at the height of his powers.

After 1951, with the publication of Far and Wide, in which he set the history of the United States of America into the context of all he had learned in Europe of the politics of the world, Reed found himself banished from the bookstands, all publishers' doors closed to him, and those books already published liable to be withdrawn from library shelves and "lost", never to be replaced.

His public career as a writer now apparently at an end, Reed was at last free to undertake a great task for which all that had gone before was but a kind of preparation and education that no university could provide and which only the fortunate and gifted few could fully use - his years as a foreign correspondent, his travels in Europe and America, his conversations and contacts with the great political leaders of his day, plus his eager absorption through reading and observation of all that was best in European culture.

Experiences which other men might have accepted as defeat, served only to focus Douglas Reed's powers on what was to be his most important undertaking - that of researching and retelling the story of the last 2000 years and more in such a way as to render intelligible much of modern history which for the masses remains in our time steeped in darkness and closely guarded by the terrors of an invisible system of censorship.

The Book: Commencing in 1951, Douglas Reed spent more than three years - much of this time separated from his wife and young family - working in the New York Central Library, or tapping away at his typewriter in spartan lodgings in New York or Montreal. With workmanlike zeal, the book was rewritten, all 300,000 words of it, and the Epilogue only added in 1956.

The story of the book itself - the unusual circumstances in which it was written, and how the manuscript, after having remained hidden for more than 20 years, came to light and was at last made available for publication - is part of the history of our century, throwing some light on a struggle of which the multitudes know nothing: that conducted relentlessly and unceasingly on the battleground of the human mind.

It needed some unusual source of spiritual power and motivation to bring to completion so big a book involving so much laborious research and cross-checking, a book, moreover, which seemed to have little or no chance of being published in the author's lifetime.

Although there is correspondence to show that the title was briefly discussed with one publisher, the manuscript was never submitted but remained for 22 years stowed away in three zippered files on top of a wardrobe in Reed's home in Durban, South Africa.

Relaxed and at peace with himself in the knowledge that he had carried his great enterprise as far as was possible in the circumstances of the times, Douglas Reed patiently accepted his forced retirement as journalist and writer, put behind him all that belonged to the past and adjusted himself cheerfully to a different mode of existence, in which most of his new-found friends and acquaintances, charmed by his lively mind and rich sense of humour, remained for years wholly unaware that this was indeed the Douglas Reed of literary fame.

Of this he was sure, whether or not it would happen in his lifetime, there would come a time when circumstances would permit, and the means be found, to communicate to the world his message of history rewritten, and the central message of Christianity restated.Interpretation: For the rest, The Controversy of Zion, can be left to speak for itself; indeed, it is a work of revisionist history and religious exposition the central message of which is revealed in almost every page, understanding and compassionate of people but severely critical of the inordinate and dangerous ambitions of their leaders.

In the final chapter, under the heading the Climacteric, Douglas Reed remarks that if he could have planned it all when he began writing his book in 1949, he could not have chosen a better moment than the last months of 1956 to review the long history of Talmudic Zionism and re-examine it against the background of what was still happening on the stage of world politics.

For 1956 was the year of another American presidential election in which, once again, the Zionists demonstrated their decisive power to influence Western politics; it was the year in which the nations of the West stood by as helpless spectators as Soviet forces were used to crush a spontaneous revolt and re-install a Jewish-Communist regime in Hungary; and it was the year in which Britain and France, under Zionist pressure, were drawn into the disastrous fiasco of an attempt to capture the Suez Canal, an adventure from which, once again, Israel alone gained any advantage.

Everything that has happened since Reed wrote those last sentences in 1956 has continued to endorse the correctness of his interpretation of more than 2000 years of troubled history.

The Middle East has remained an area of intense political activity and of the maximum falsification of news and suppression of genuine debate, and it was only the few with some knowledge of the role of Talmudic Zionism and Communism who could have had any chance of solving the problem of successive events of major importance, like the so-called Six Day War in 1967 and the massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Those who have read The Controversy of Zion will not be surprised to learn that there were clear signs of collusion between the Soviet Union and Israel in precipitating the Israeli attack on Egypt, for it was only because Colonel Nasser had been warned by the Kremlin bosses that Israel was about to attack Egypt's ally Syria that he moved nearly all his armed forces to his country' s northern border, where they fell an easy prey to Israel's vastly superior army.

It seemed as if nothing had changed when in 1982 Israel launched a massive and most ruthless attack on Southern Lebanon, ostensibly for the purpose of rooting out the Palestine Liberation Organisation, but actually in furtherance of an expansionist policy about which Jewish leaders have always been remarkably frank.

By this time, however, the pro-Zionist mythology generated by Western politicians and media in which Israel was always represented as a tiny and virtuous nation in constant need of help and protection, was obviously beginning to lose much of its plausibility, so that few were surprised when the British Institute of Strategic Studies announced that Israel could now be regarded as fourth in the world as a military power, after the USA, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China - well ahead of nations like Britain and France.

More deeply significant was the reaction of the Jewish people, both in Israel and abroad, to an apparent triumph of Zionist arms in Lebanon. While Western politicians and media remained timorously restrained in their comment, even after news of the massacre of an estimated 1 500 men, women and children in two Beirut refugee camps, 350,000 of the residents of Tel Aviv staged a public demonstration against their government and there were reports in the Jewish press that controversy over the Lebanese war had rocked the Israel army and affected all ranks.

Of this, too, Douglas Reed seems to have had some presentiment, for among the last words in his book are these: "I believe the Jews of the world are equally beginning to see the error of revolutionary Zionism, the twin of the other destructive movement, and, as this century ends, will at last decide to seek involvement in common mankind".

IVOR BENSON.

Chapter 1. THE START OF THE AFFAIR

The true start of this affair occurred on a day in 458 BC which this narrative will reach in its sixth chapter. On that day the petty Palestinian tribe of Judah (earlier disowned by the Israelites) produced a racial creed, the disruptive effect of which on subsequent human affairs may have exceeded that of explosives or epidemics. This was the day on which the theory of the master-race was set up as "the Law".

At the time Judah was a small tribe among the subject-peoples of the Persian king, and what today is known as "the West" could not even be imagined. Now the Christian era is nearly two thousand years old and "Western civilization", which grew out of it, is threatened with disintegration.

The creed born in Judah 2,500 years ago, in the author's opinion, has chiefly brought this about. The process, from original cause to present effect, can be fairly clearly traced because the period is, in the main, one of verifiable history.

The creed which a fanatical sect produced that day has shown a great power over the minds of men throughout these twenty-five centuries; hence its destructive achievement. Why it was born at that particular moment, or ever, is something that none can explain. This is among the greatest mysteries of our world, unless the theory that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction is valid in the area of religious thought; so that the impulse which at that remote time set many men searching for a universal, loving God produced this fierce counter-idea of an exclusive, vengeful deity.

Judah-ism was retrogressive even in 458 BC, when men in the known world were beginning to turn their eyes away from idols and tribal gods and to look for a God of all men, of justice and of neighbourliness. Confucius and Buddha had already pointed in that direction and the idea of one-God was known among the neighbouring peoples of Judah. Today the claim is often made that the religious man, Christian, Muslim or other, must pay respect to Judaism, whatever its errors, on one incontestable ground: it was the first universal religion, so that in a sense all universal religions descend from it. Every Jewish child is taught this. In truth, the idea of the one-God of all men was known long before the tribe of Judah even took shape, and Judaism was above all else the denial of that idea. The Egyptian Book of the Dead (manuscripts of which were found in the tombs of kings of 2,600 BC, over two thousand years before the Judaist "Law" was completed) contains the passage: "Thou art the one, the God from the very beginnings of time, the heir of immortality, self-produced and self-born; thou didst create the earth and make man". Conversely, the Scripture produced in Judah of the Levites asked, "Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the. Gods?" (Exodus),

The sect which attached itself to and mastered the tribe of Judah took this rising concept of one-God of all-peoples and embodied it in its Scripture only to destroy it, and to set up the creed based on its denial. It is denied subtly, but with scorn, and as the creed is based on the theory of the master-race this denial is necessary and inevitable. A master-race, if there be one, must itself he. God.

The creed which was given force of daily law in Judah in 458 BC was then and still is unique in the world. It rested on the assertion, attributed to the tribal deity (Jehovah), that "the Israelites" (in fact, the Judahites) were his "chosen people" who, if they did all his "statutes and judgments", would be set over all other peoples and be established in a "promised land". Out of this theory, whether by forethought or unforeseen necessity, grew the pendent theories of "captivity" and "destruction". If Jehovah were to be worshipped, as he demanded, at a certain place in a specified land, all his worshippers had to live there.

Obviously all of them could not live there, but if they lived elsewhere, whether by constraint or their own choice, they automatically became "captives" of "the stranger", whom they had to "root out", "pull down" and "destroy". Given this basic tenet of the creed, it made no difference whether the "captors" were conquerors or friendly hosts; their ordained lot was to be destruction or enslavement.

Before they were destroyed or enslaved, they were, for a time, to be "captors" of the Judahites, not in their own right, but because the Judahites, having failed in "observance", deserved punishment. In this way, Jehovah revealed himself as the one-God of all-peoples: though he "knew" only the "chosen people", he would employ the heathen to punish them for their "transgressions", before meting out the foreordained destruction to these heathen.

The Judahites had this inheritance thrust on them. It was not even theirs, for the "covenant", according to these Scriptures, had been made between Jehovah and "the children of Israel", and by 458 BC the Israelites, spurning the non-Israelitish Judahites, had long since been absorbed by other mankind, taking with them the vision of a universal, loving God of all men. The Israelites, from all the evidence, never knew this racial creed which was to come down through the centuries as the Jewish religion, or Judaism. It stands, for all time, as the product of Judah of the Levites.

What happened before 458 BC is largely lore, legend and mythology, as distinct from the period following, the main events of which are known. Before 458 BC, for instance, there were in the main only "oral traditions"; the documentary period begins in the two centuries leading up to 458 BC, when Judah had been disavowed by the Israelites. At this stage, when the word-of-mouth tradition became written Scripture, the perversion occurred. The surviving words of the earlier Israelites show that their tradition was a widening one of neighbourliness under a universal God. This was changed into its opposite by the itinerant priests who segregated the Judahites and established the worship of Jehovah as the god of racialism, hatred and revenge.

In the earlier tradition Moses was a great tribal leader who heard the voice of one-God speak from a burning bush and came down from a mountain bearing this one-God's moral commandments to the people. The time when this tradition took shape was one when the idea of religion was first moving in the minds of men and when all the peoples were borrowing from each other's traditions and thought.

Whence the idea of one-God may have come has already been shown, although the earlier Egyptians themselves may have received it from others. The figure of Moses himself, and his Law, both were taken from material already existing. The story of Moses's discovery in the bulrushes was plainly borrowed from the much earlier legend (with which it is identical) of a king of Babylonia, Sargon the Elder, who lived between one and two thousand years before him; the Commandments much resemble earlier law codes of the Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians. The ancient Israelites built on current ideas, and by this means apparently were well on the way to a universal religion when they were swallowed up by mankind.

Then Judah put the process into reverse, so that the effect is that of a film run backward. The masters of Judah, the Levites, as they drew up their Law also took what they could use from the inheritance of other peoples and worked it into the stuff they were moulding. They began with the one just God of all men, whose voice had been briefly heard from the burning bush (in the oral tradition) and in the course of five books of their written Law turned him into the racial, bargaining Jehovah who promised territory, treasure, blood and power over others in return for a ritual of sacrifice, to be performed at a precise place in a specified land.

Thus they founded the permanent counter-movement to all universal religions and identified the name Judah with the doctrine of self- segregation from mankind, racial hatred, murder in the name of religion, and revenge.

The perversion thus accomplished may be traced in the Old Testament, where Moses first appears as the bearer of the moral commandments and good neighbour, and ends as a racial mass-murderer, the moral commandments having been converted into their opposites between Exodus and Numbers. In the course of this same transmutation the God who begins by commanding the people not to kill or to covet their neighbours' goods or wives, finishes by ordering a tribal massacre of a neighbouring people, only the virgins to be saved alive!

Thus the achievement of the itinerant priests who mastered the tribe of Judah, so long ago, was to turn one small, captive people away from the rising idea of a God of all men, to reinstate a bloodthirsty tribal deity and racial law, and to send the followers of this creed on their way through the centuries with a destructive mission.

The creed, or revelation of God as thus presented, was based on a version of history, every event of which had to conform with, and to confirm the teaching. This version of history went back to the Creation, the exact moment of which was known; as the priests also claimed to possess the future, this was a complete story and theory of the universe from start to finish. The end was to be the triumphant consummation in Jerusalem, when world dominion was to be established on the ruins of the heathen and their kingdoms.

The theme of mass-captivity, ending in a Jehovan vengeance ("all the firstborn of Egypt"), appears when this version of history reaches the Egyptian phase, leading up to the mass-exodus and mass-conquest of the promised land. This episode was necessary if the Judahites were to be organized as a permanent disruptive force among nations and for that reason, evidendy, was invented; the Judaist scholars agree that nothing resembling the narrative in Exodus actually occurred.

Whether Moses even lived is in dispute. "They tell you", said the late Rabbi Emil Hirsch, "that Moses never lived. I acquiesce. If they tell me that the story that came from Egypt is mythology, I shall not protest; it is mythology. They tell me that the book of Isaiah, as we have it today, is composed of writings of at least three and perhaps four different periods; I knew it before they ever told me; before they knew it, it was my conviction".

Whether Moses lived or not, he cannot have led any mass-exodus from Egypt into Canaan (Palestine). No sharply-defined Israelitish tribes existed (says Rabbi Elmer Berger) at any time when anyone called Moses may have led some small groups out of Egyptian slavery. The Habiru (Hebrews) then were already established in Canaan, having reached it long before from Babylonia on the far side: Their name, Habiru, denoted no racial or tribal identity; it meant "nomads". Long before any small band led by Moses can have arrived they had overrun large Canaanite areas, and the governor of Jerusalem reported to Pharaoh in Egypt, "The King no longer has any territory, the Habiru have devastated all the King's territory".

A most zealous Zionist historian, Dr. Josef Kastein, is equally specific about this. He will often be quoted during this narrative because his book, like this one, covers the entire span of the controversy of Zion (save for the last twenty-two years; it was published in 1933). He says, "Countless other Semitic and Hebrew tribes were already settled in the promised land which, Moses told his followers, was theirs by ancient right of inheritance; what matter that actual conditions in Canaan had long since effaced this right and rendered it illusory".

Dr. Kastein, a fervent Zionist, holds that the Law laid down in the Old Testament must be fulfilled to the letter, but does not pretend to take the version of history seriously, on which this Law is based. In this he differs from Christian polemicists of the "every word is true" school. He holds that the Old Testament was in fact a political programme, drafted to meet the conditions of a time, and frequently revised to meet changing conditions.

Historically, therefore, the Egyptian captivity, the slaying of "all the firstborn of Egypt", the exodus toward and conquest of the promised land are myths. The story was invented, but the lesson, of vengeance on the heathen, was implanted in men's minds and the deep effect continues into our time.

It was evidently invented to turn the Judahites away from the earlier tradition of the God who, from the burning bush, laid down a simple law of moral behaviour and neighbourliness; by the insertion of imaginary, allegorical incident, presented as historical truth, this tradition was converted into its opposite and the "Law" of exclusion, hatred and vengeance established. With this as their religion and inheritance, attested by the historical narrative appended to it, a little band of human beings were sent on their way into the future.

By the time of that achievement of 458 BC, many centuries after any possible period when Moses may have lived, much had happened in Canaan. The nomadic Habiru, supplanting the native Canaanites by penetration, intermarriage, settlement or conquest, had thrown off a tribe called the Ben Yisrael, or Children of Israel, which had split into a number of tribes, very loosely confederated and often at war with each other. The main body of these tribes, the Israelites, held the north of Canaan. In the south, isolated and surrounded by native Canaanitish peoples, a tribe called Judah took shape. This was the tribe from which the racial creed and such words as "Judaism", "Jewish" and "Jew" in the course of centuries emerged.

From the moment when it first appears as an entity this tribe of Judah has a strange look. It was always cut off, and never got on well with its neighbours. Its origins are mysterious. It seems from the beginning, with its ominous name, somehow to have been set apart, rather than to have been "chosen". The Levitical Scriptures include it among the tribes of Israel, and as the others mingled themselves with mankind this would leave it the last claimant to the rewards promised by Jehovah to "the chosen people". However, even this claim seems to be false, for the Jewish Encyclopaedia impartially says that Judah was "in all likelihood a non-Israelitish tribe".

This tribe with the curious air was the one which set out into the future saddled with the doctrine drawn up by the Levites, namely, that it was Jehovah's "chosen people" and, when it had done "all my statutes and judgments", would inherit a promised land and dominion over all peoples.

Among these "statutes and judgments" as the Levites finally edited them appeared, repeatedly, the commands, "utterly destroy", "pull down", "root out". Judah was destined to produce a nation dedicated to destruction.

Chapter 2. THE END OF ISRAEL

About five hundred years before the event of 458 BC, or nearly three thousand years ago today, the brief and troubled association between Judah and the Israelites ("the children of Israel") came to an end. Israel rejected the chosen people creed which was beginning to take shape in Judah and went its own way. (The adoption of the name "Israel" by the Zionist state which was set up in Palestine in 1948 was transparent false pretence).

The events which led to the short-lived, unhappy union covered earlier centuries. The mythological or legendary period of Moses was followed by one in Canaan during which "Israel" was the strong, cohesive and recognizable entity, the northern confederation of the ten tribes. Judah (to which the very small tribe of Benjamin attached itself) was a petty chiefdom in the south.

Judah, from which today's Zionism comes down, was a tribe of ill repute. Judah sold his brother Joseph, the most beloved son of Jacob-called-Israel, to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver (as Judas, the only Judean among the disciples, much later betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver), and then founded the tribe in incest, (Genesis 37-38). The priestly scribes who wrote this Scriptural account centuries afterwards had made themselves the masters of Judah and as they altered the oral tradition, whenever it suited them, the question prompts itself: why were they at pains to preserve, or possibly even to insert, this attribution of incestuous beginnings and a treacherous nature to the very people who, they said, were the chosen of God? The thing is mysterious, like much else in the Levitical Scriptures, and only the inner sect could supply an answer.

Anyway, those Scriptures and today's authorities agree about the separateness of "Israel" and "Judah". In the Old Testament Israel is often called "the house of Joseph", in pointed distinction from "the house of Judah". The Jewish Encyclopaedia says, "Joseph and Judah typify two distinct lines of descent" and adds (as already cited) that Judah was "in all likelihood a non-Israelitish tribe". The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that Judaism developed long after the Israelites had merged themselves with mankind, and that the true relationship of the two peoples is best expressed in the phrase, "The Israelites were not Jews", Historically, Judah was to survive for a little while and to bring forth Judaism, which begat Zionism. Israel was to disappear as an entity, and it all came about in this way:

The little tribe in the south, Judah, became identified with the landless tribe, that of the Levites. These hereditary priests, who claimed that their office had been bestowed on them by Jehovah on Mount Sinai, were the true fathers of Judaism. They wandered among the tribes, preaching that the war of one was the war of all, and Jehovah's war. Their aim was power and they strove for a theocracy, a state in which God is the sovereign and religion the law. During the period of the Judges they achieved their aim to some extent, for they naturally were the Judges. What they, and isolated Judah, most needed was union with Israel. Israel, which distrusted

this lawgiving priesthood, would not hear of unification unless it were under a king; all the surrounding peoples had kings.

The Levites grasped this opportunity. They saw that if a king were appointed the ruling class would supply the nominee, and they were the ruling class. Samuel, at their head, set up a puppet monarchy, behind which the priesthood wielded true power; this was achieved through the stipulation that the king should reign only for life, which meant that he would not be able to found a dynasty 7. Samuel chose a young Benjaminite peasant, Saul, who had made some name in tribal warfare and, presumably, was thought likely to be tractable (the choice of a Benjaminite suggests that Israel would not consider any man of Judah for the kingship). The unified kingdom of Israel then began; in truth it survived but this one reign, Saul's.

In Saul's fate (or in the account given of it in the later Scriptures) the ominous nature of Judaism, as it was to be given shape, may be discerned. He was commanded to begin the holy war by attacking the Amalekites "and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass". He destroyed "man and woman, infant and suckling", but spared King-Agag and the best of the sheep, oxen, yearlings and lambs. For this he was excommunicated by Samuel, who secretly chose one David, of Judah, to be Saul's successor. Thereafter Saul vainly strove by zeal in "utter destruction" to appease the Levites, and then by attempting David's life to save his throne. At last he killed himself.

Possibly none of this happened; it is the account given in the Book of Samuel, which the Levites produced centuries later. Whether it is true or allegorical, the importance lies in the plain implication: Jehovah demanded literal obedience when he commanded "utter destruction", and mercy or pity were capital offences. This lesson is driven home in many other depictments of events which were possibly historical and possibly imaginary.

This was really the end, three thousand years ago, of the united kingdom, for Israel would not accept the man of Judah, David, as king. Dr. Kastein says that "the rest of Israel ignored him" and proclaimed Saul's son, Ishbosheth, king, whereon the re-division into Israel and Judah "really took place". According to Samuel, Ishbosheth was killed and his head was sent to David, who thereon restored a nominal union and made Jerusalem his capital. He never again truly united the kingdom or the tribes; he founded a dynasty which survived one more reign.

Formal Judaism holds to this day that the Messianic consummation will come about under a worldly king of "the house of David"; and racial exclusion is the first tenet of formal Judaism (and the law of the land in the Zionist state). The origins of the dynasty founded by David are thus of direct relevance to this narrative.

Racial discrimination and segregation were clearly unknown to the tribespeople in those days of the association between Israel and Judah, for the Old Testament says that David, the Judahite, from his roof, saw "a very beautiful woman" bathing, commanded her to him and made her with child, and then had her husband, a Hittite, sent into the front battle-line with orders that he be killed. When he was dead David added the woman, Bathsheba, to his wives, and her second son by him became the next king, Solomon (this story of David and Bathsheba, as related in the Old Testament, was bowdlerized in a Hollywood-made moving picture of our day).

Such was the racial descent of Solomon, the last king of the riven confederacy, according to the Levitical scribes. He began his reign with three murders, including that of his brother, and vainly sought to save his dynasty by the Habsburg method, marriage, though on grander scale. He married princesses from Egypt and many neighbouring tribes and had hundreds of lesser wives, so that in his day, too, racial segregation must have been unknown. He built the temple and established a hereditary high priesthood.

That was the story, concluded in 937 BC, of the short association between Israel and Judah. When Solomon died the incompatible associates finally split, and in the north Israel resumed its independent life. Dr Kastein says:

"The two states had no more in common, for good or evil, than any other two countries with a common frontier. From time to time they waged war against each other or made treaties, but they were entirely separate. The Israelites ceased to believe that they had a destiny apart from their neighbours and King Jeroboam made separation from Judah as complete in the religious as in the political sense". Then, of the Judahites, Dr. Kastein adds, "they decided that they were destined to develop as a race apart... they demanded an order of existence fundamentally different from that of the people about them. These were differences which allowed of no process of assimilation to others. They demanded separation, absolute differentiation. "

Thus the cause of the breach and separation is made clear. Israel believed that its destiny lay with involvement in mankind, and rejected Judah on the very grounds which recurrently, in the ensuing three thousand years, caused other peoples to turn in alarm, resentment and repudiation from Judaism. Judah "demanded separation, absolute differentiation". (However, Dr. Kastein, though he says "Judah", means "the Levites". How could even the tribespeople of Judah, at that stage, have demanded "separation, absolute differentiation", when Solomon had had a thousand wives?)

It was the Levites, with their racial creed, that Israel rejected. The next two hundred years, during which Israel and Judah existed separately, and often in enmity, but side by side, are filled with the voices of the Hebrew "prophets", arraigning the Levites and the creed which they were constructing. These voices still call to mankind out of the tribal darkness which beclouds much of the Old Testament, for they scarified the creed which was in the making just as Jesus scarified it seven or eight

hundred years later, when it was long established, at the Temple in Jerusalem.

These men were nearly all Israelites; most of them were Josephites. They were on the road to the one-God of all-peoples and to participation in mankind. They were not unique among men in this: soon the Buddha, in India, was to oppose his Sermon at Benares and his Five Commands of Uprightness to the creed of Brahma, the creator of caste-segregation, and to the worship of idols. They were in truth Israelite remonstrants against the Levitical teaching which was to become identified with the name of Judah. The name "Hebrew prophets" is inapt because they made no pretence to power of divination and were angered by the description ("I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son", Amos), They were protestants in their time and gave simple warning of the calculable consequences of the racial creed; their warning remains valid today.

The claims of the Levite priesthood moved them to these protests, particularly the priestly claim to the firstborn ("That which openeth the womb is mine," Exodus), and the priestly insistence on sacrificial rites. The Israelite expostulants (to whom this "so-called law of Moses" was unknown, according to Mr. Montefiore) saw no virtue in the bloodying of priests, the endless sacrifice of animals and the "burnt offerings", the "sweet savour" of which was supposed to please Jehovah. They rebuked the priestly doctrine of slaying and enslaving "the heathen". God, they cried, desired moral behaviour, neighbourly conduct and justice towards the poor, the fatherless, the widow and the oppressed, not blood sacrifices and hatred of the heathen.

These protests provide the first forelight of the dawn which came some eight hundred years later. They find themselves in strange company among the injunctions to massacre in which the Old Testament abounds. The strange thing is that these remonstrances survived the compilation, when Israel was gone and the Levites, supreme in Judah, wrote down the Scriptures.

Today's student cannot explain, for instance, why King David suffers Nathan publicly to rebuke him for taking Uriah's wife and having Uriah murdered. Possibly among the later scribes who compiled the historical narrative, long after Israel and the Israelite expostulants were gone, were some of their mind, who contrived in this way to continue their protest.

Conversely, these benevolent and enlightened passages are often followed by fanatical ones, attributed to the same man, which cancel them, or put the opposite in their place. The only reasonable explanation is that these are interpolations later made, to bring the heretics into line with Levitical dogma.

Whatever the explanation, these Israelite protests against the heresy of Judah have an ageless appeal and form the monument to vanished Israel. They force their way, like little blades of truth, between the dark stones of tribal saga. They pointed the way to the rising and widening road of common involvement in (10) mankind and away from the tribal abyss.

Elijah and Elisha both worked in Israel, and Amos spoke solely to the Josephites. He in particular attacked the blood sacrifices and priestly rites: "I hate, I despise your feasts and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meal offerings, I will not accept them. Neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs" (the Levites' chanted liturgies) "and let me not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run as water and righteousness as a mighty stream". And then the immortal rebuke to the "peculiar people" doctrine: "Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel, saith the Lord".

Hosea, another Israelite, says, "I desired mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings". Hosea exhorts to the practice of "justice and righteousness", "loving kindness and compassion and faithfulness", not discrimination and contempt.

In Micah's time the Levites apparently still demanded the sacrifice of all the firstborn to Jehovah:

"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil. Shall I give my firstborn for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? It hath been told to thee, O man, what is good and what the Lord doth require of thee: only to do jusdy and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God".

These men contended for the soul of the tribespeople during the two centuries when Israel and Judah existed side by side, and sometimes at daggers drawn. During this period the Levites, earlier distributed among the twelve tribes, were driven more and more to congregate in tiny Judah and in Jerusalem, and to concentrate their energies on the Judahites.

Then, in 721 BC, Israel was attacked and conquered by Assyria and the Israelites were carried into captivity. Judah was spared for that moment and for another century remained an insignificant vassal, first of Assyria and then of Egypt, and the stronghold of the Levitical sect.

At that point "the children of Israel" disappear from history and if promises made to them are to be redeemed, this redemption must evidently be from among the ranks of mankind, in which they became involved and merged. Given the prevalent westward trend among the movements of peoples during the last twenty-seven hundred years, it is probable that much of their blood has gone into the European and American peoples.

The Judaist claim, on the other hand, is that Israel was totally and deservedly "lost", because it rejected the Levitical creed and chose "rapprochement with neighbouring peoples". Dr. Kastein, whose words these are, nearly twenty- seven centuries later ardently rejoiced, on that very account, in their downfall: "The ten northern tribes, with their separate development, had drifted so far from their kindred in the south that the chronicle of their fall takes the form of a brief bald statement of fact unrelieved by any expression of grief. No epic poem, no dirge, no sympathy marked the hour of their downfall".

The student of the controversy of Zion has to plod far before he begins to unveil its mysteries, but very soon discovers that in all things it speaks with two tongues, one for "the heathen" and one for the initiates.

The Levites of that ancient time did not, and today's Zionists do not believe that the Israelites "vanished without leaving a trace" (as Dr. Kastein says). They were pronounced " dead" , in the way that a Jew marrying out of the fold today is pronounced dead (for instance, Dr. John Goldstein); they were excommunicated and only in that sense "vanished".

Peoples do not become extinct; the North American Indians, the Australian Blackfellows, the New Zealand Maoris, the South African Bantu and others are the proofs of that. For that matter, the Israelites could not have been "taken away captive", had they been physically exterminated. Their blood and thought survive in mankind, somewhere, today.

Israel remained separate from Judah of its own will, and for the very reasons which ever since have aroused the mistrust and misgiving of other peoples. The Israelites "were not Jews"; the Judahites were "in all likelihood non-Israelitish".

The true meaning of the assertion that Israel "disappeared" is to be found in the later Talmud, which says: "The ten tribes have no share in the world to come". Thus, "the children of Israel" are banned from heaven by the ruling sect of Judah because they refused to exclude themselves from mankind on earth.

The Chief Rabbi of the British Empire in 1918, the Very Rev. J.H. Hertz, in answer to an enquiry on this point said explicitly, "The people known at present as Jews are descendants of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin with a certain number of descendants of the tribe of Levi". This statement makes perfectly clear that "Israel" had no part in what has become Judaism (no authority, Judaist or other, would support the claim made to blood-descent from Judah, for the Jews of today, but this is of little account).

Therefore the use of the name "Israel" by the Zionist state which was created in Palestine in this century is in the nature of a forgery. Some strong reason must have dictated the use of the name of a people who were not Jews and would have none of the creed which has become Judaism. One tenable theory suggests itself. The Zionist state was set up with the connivance of the great nations of the West, which is also the area of Christendom. The calculation may have been that these peoples would be comforted in their consciences if they could be led to believe that they were fulfilling Biblical prophecy and God's promise to "Israel", at whatever cost in the "destruction" of innocent peoples.

If that was the motive for the misuse of the name "Israel", the expedient may for the time being have been successful; the multitude was ever easily "persuaded". However, truth will out in the long run, as the surviving remonstrances of the Israelite prophets show.

If the Zionist state of 1948 could lay claim to any name whatever taken from far antiquity, this could only be "Judah", as this chapter has shown.

Chapter 3. THE LEVITES AND THE LAW

During the hundred years that followed the Assyrian conquest of Israel, the Levites in Judah began to compile the written Law. In 621 BC they produced Deuteronomy and read it to the people in the temple at Jerusalem.

This was the birth of "the Mosaic law", which Moses, if he ever lived, never knew. It is called the Mosaic law because it is attributed to him, but the authorities agree that it was the product of the Levites, who then and later repeatedly made Moses (and for that matter, Jehovah) say what suited them. Its correct description would be "the Levitical law" or "the Judaic law".

Deuteronomy is to formal Judaism and Zionism what the Communist Manifesto was to the destructive revolution of our century. It is the basis of the Torah ("the Law") contained in the Pentateuch, which itself forms the raw material of the Talmud, which again gave birth to those "commentaries" and commentaries-on-commentaries which together constitute the Judaic "law".

Therefore Deuteronomy is also the basis of the political programme, of worldly dominion over nations despoiled and enslaved, which has been largely realized in the West during this Twentieth Century. Deuteronomy is of direct relevancy to the events of our day, and much of the confusion surrounding them disperses if they are studied in its light.

It was read, in 621 BC, to so small an audience in so small a place that its great effects for the whole world, through the following centuries into our time, are by contrast the more striking.

Before Deuteronomy was compiled only the "oral tradition" of what God said to Moses existed. The Levites claimed to be the consecrated guardians of this tradition and the tribespeople had to take their word for it (their pretensions in this respect chiefly caused the anger of the Israelite "prophets"). If anything had been written down before Deuteronomy was read, such manuscripts were fragmentary and in priestly keeping, and as little known to the primitive tribesmen as the Greek poets to Kentucky hillsfolk today.

That Deuteronomy was different from anything that had been known or understood before is implicit in its name, which means "Second Law". Deuteronomy, in fact, was Levitical Judaism, first revealed; the Israelites (as already shown) "were not Jews" and had never known this "Law".

Significantly, Deuteronomy which appears as the fifth book of today's Bible, with an air of growing naturally out of the previous ones, was the first book to be completed as a whole. Though Genesis and Exodus provide the historical background and mount for it, they were later produced by the Levites, and Leviticus and Numbers, the other books of the Torah, were compiled even later.

Deuteronomy stood the earlier tradition on its head, if it was in harmony with the moral commandments. However, the Levites were within their self-granted right in making any changes they chose, for they held that they were divinely authorized to amend the Law, as orally revealed by God to Moses, in order to meet "the constantly changing conditions of existence in the spirit of traditional teaching" (Dr. Kastein).

For that matter, they also claimed that Moses had received at Sinai a secret oral Torah, which must never be committed to writing. In view of the later inclusion of the Old Testament in one volume with the Christian New Testament, and the average Gentile's assumption that he thus has before his eyes the whole of "the Mosaic Law", this qualification is of permanent interest.

The Talmud, as quoted by Dr. Funk, says, "God foresaw that one day a time would come when the Heathen would possess themselves of the Torah and would say to Israel, 'We, too, are sons of God'. Then will the Lord say: 'Only he who knows my secrets is my son'. And what are the secrets of God? The oral teachings".

The few people who heard Deuteronomy read in 621 BC, and then first learned what "the Mosaic Law" was to be, were told that the manuscripts had been "discovered". Today's Judaist authorities dismiss this and agree that Deuteronomy was the independent work of the Levites in isolated Judah after Judah's rejection by the Israelites and the conquest of Israel. Dr. Kastein puts the matter like this:

"In 621 BC, a manuscript hoary with the dust of ages was discovered among the archives. It contained a curious version of the laws which had been codified up to that time, a sort of repetition and variation of them, giving a host of instructions regarding man's duty to God and to his neighbour. It was couched in the form of speeches supposed to have been delivered by Moses just before his death on the farther side of Jordan. Who the author was it is impossible to say".

Thus Dr. Kastein, a zealot who awaits the literal fulfilment of "the Mosaic Law" in every detail, does not believe that its author was either Jehovah or Moses. It is enough for him that it was produced by the lawgiving priesthood, which for him is divine authority.

None can now tell how closely Deuteronomy, as we know it, resembles Deuteronomy as it was read in 621 BC, for the books of the Old Testament were repeatedly revised up to the time of the first translation, when various other modifications were made, presumably to avoid excessive perturbation among the Gentiles. No doubt something was then excised, so that Deuteronomy in its original form may have been ferocious indeed, for what remains is savage enough.

Religious intolerance is the basis of this "Second Law" (racial intolerance was to follow later, in another "New Law") and murder in the name of religion is its distinctive tenet. This necessitates the destruction of the moral Commandments, which in fact are set up to be knocked down. Only those of them which relate to the exclusive worship of the "jealous" Jehovah are left intact. The others are buried beneath a great mound of "statutes and judgments" (regulations issued under a governing Law, as it were) which in effect cancel them.

Thus the moral commandments against murder, stealing, adultery, coveting, bad neighbourliness, and the like are vitiated by a mass of "statutes" expressly enjoining the massacre of other peoples, the murder of apostates individually or in communities, the taking of concubines from among women captives, "utter destruction" that leaves "nothing alive", the exclusion of "the stranger" from debt-remission and the like.

By the time the end of Deuteronomy is reached the moral commandments have been nullified in this way, for the purpose of setting up, in the guise of a religion, the grandiose political idea of a people especially sent into the world to destroy and "possess" other peoples and to rule the earth. The idea of destruction is essential to Deuteronomy. If it be taken away no Deuteronomy, or Mosaic Law, remains.

This concept of destruction as an article of faith is unique, and where it occurs in political thought (for instance, in the Communist philosophy) may also derive originally from the teaching of Deuteronomy, for there is no other discoverable source.

Deuteronomy is above all a complete political programme: the story of the planet, created by Jehovah for this "special people", is to be completed by their triumph and the ruination of all others. The rewards offered to the faithful are exclusively material: slaughter, slaves, women, booty, territory, empire. The only condition laid down for these rewards is observance of "the statutes and judgments", which primarily command the destruction of others. The only guilt defined lies is non-observance of these laws. 7«tolerance is specified as observance; tolerance as non-observance, and therefore as guilt. The punishments prescribed are of this world and of the flesh, not of the spirit. Moral behaviour, if ever demanded, is required only towards co-religionists and "strangers" are excluded from it.

This unique form of nationalism was first presented to the Judahites in Deuteronomy as "the Law" of Jehovah and as his literal word, spoken to Moses. The notion of world domination through destruction is introduced at the start (chapter 2) of these "speeches supposed to have been delivered" by the dying Moses:

"The Lord spake unto me, saying... This day will I begin to put the dread of thee and the fear of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear report of thee, and shall tremble, and be in is anguish because of thee". In token of this, the fate of two nations is at once shown. The King of Sihon and the King of Bashan "came out against us, he and all his people", whereon they were "utterly destroyed, the men, and the women, and the litde ones", only the cattle being spared and "the spoil" being taken "for a prey unto ourselves". (The insistence on utter destruction is a recurrent and significant feature of these illustrative anecdotes).

These first examples of the power of Jehovah to destroy the heathen are followed by the first of many warnings that unless "the statutes and judgments" are observed Jehovah will punish his special people by dispersing them among these heathen. The enumeration of these "statutes and judgments" follows the Commandments, the moral validity of which is at once destroyed by a promise of tribal massacre:

"Seven nations greater and mightier than thou" are to be delivered into the Judahites' hands, and: "Thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them... ye shall destroy their alters... for thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God; the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are on the face of the earth... Thou shalt be blessed above all people... And thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them... the Lord thy God will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed... And the Lord thy God will put out these nations before thee by little and little... But the Lord thy God shall deliver them unto thee, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction until they be destroyed. And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven; there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them..."

By the Twentieth Century AD the peoples of the West, as a whole, had ceased to attach any present meaning to these incitements, but the peoples directly concerned thought differently. For instance, the Arab population of Palestine fled en masse from its native land after the massacre at Deir Yasin in 1948 because this event meant for them (as its perpetrators intended it to mean) that if they stayed they would be "utterly destroyed".

They knew that the Zionist leaders, in the palavers with British and American politicians of the distant West, repeatedly had stated that "the Bible is our Mandate" (Dr. Chaim Weizmann), and they knew (if the Western peoples did not realize) that the allusion was to such passages as that commanding the "utter destruction" of the Arab peoples. They knew that the leaders of the West had supported and would continue to support the invaders and thus they had no hope of even bare survival, save by flight. This massacre of 1948 AD relates directly to the "statute and judgment" laid down in chapter 7 of the book of The Law which the Levites completed and read in 621 BC.

The incitements and allurements of Deuteronomy continue: "... Go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself... the Lord thy God is he which goeth over before thee; as a consuming fire he shall destroy them, and he shall bring them down before thy face; so shalt thou drive them out, and destroy them quickly, as the Lord hath said unto thee... For if ye shall diligently keep all these commandments which I command you... then will the Lord drive out all these nations from before you, and ye shall possess greater nations and mightier than yourselves... even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be. There shall no man be able to stand before you: for the Lord your God shall lay the fear of you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon..."

Then Moses, in this account, enumerates the "statutes and judgments" which must be "observed" if all these rewards are to be gained, and again "the Law" is to destroy:

"These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do... Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods... When the Lord thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land: Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them... and that thou inquire not after their gods."

This tenet of "the Law" requires the faithful to destroy other religions. It was impartial when enacted but gained a specific application in later centuries from the fact that the Christian faith grew up in, and the mass of Jews then moved into, the same geographical area: the West. (This made Christianity the primary object of the command to "utterly destroy the places...", and the dynamiting of Russian cathedrals, the opening of "anti-God museums", the canonization of Judas and other acts of early Bolshevist governments, which were to nine-tenths comprized of Eastern Jews, were evidently deeds of "observance" under this "statute" of Deuteronomy).

The ideas of the inquisition of heretics and of the informer, which the West has used in its retrogressive periods and repudiated in its enlightened ones, also find their original source (unless any can locate an earlier one) in Deuteronomy. Lest any such heretic should call in question the Law of destruction, summarized in the preceding paragraphs, Deuteronomy next provides that "if there arise among you a prophet or a dreamer of dreams... (he) shall be put to death"; the crucifixion of Jesus (and the deaths of numerous expostulants against literal Judaism) fall under this "statute".

The denunciation of kinsfolk who incur suspicion of heresy is required. This is the terrorist device introduced in Russia by the Bolshevists in 1917 and copied in Germany by the National Socialists in 1933. The Christian world at the time professed horror at these barbarbous innovations, but the method is plainly laid down in Deuteronomy, which requires that any who say, "Let us go and serve other gods", be denounced by their brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, wives and so on, and be stoned to death.

Characteristically, Deuteronomy prescribes that the hand of the bloodkinsman or spouse shall be "first upon" the victim of denunciation at the killing, and only afterwards "the hand of all the people". This "statute of the Law" is still observed today, in a measure dictated by local conditions and other circumstances. Apostates cannot be publicly stoned to death in the environment of foreign communities, where the law of "the stranger" might hold this to be murder, so that a formal pronunciation of "death" and ceremony of mourning symbolically takes the place of the legal penalty; see Dr. John Goldstein's account both of the symbolic rite and of a recent attempt to exact the literal penalty, which during the centuries was often inflicted in closed Jewish communities where the law of "the stranger" could not reach.

The Law also demands that entire communities shall be massacred on the charge of apostasy: "Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein".

In this matter of destroying cities, Deuteronomy distinguishes between near (that is, Palestinian) and far cities. When a "far off city" has been captured, "thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword, but the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself..." This incitement in respect of captured women is a recurrent theme and Deuteronomy lays down the law that a Judahite captor who sees among captives "a beautiful woman" may take her home, but if he had "no delight in her" may turn her out again.

The case of a near city is different; the law of utter destruction (against which Saul transgressed) then rules. "But of the cities of these people which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth; But thou shalt utterly destroy them... as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee". (This verse 16 of chapter 20, again, explains the mass flight of the Palestinian Arabs after Deir Yasin, where nothing that breathed was saved alive. They saw that literal fulfilment of the Law of 621 BC was the order of the day in 1948 AD, and that the might of the West was behind this fulfilment of the Law of "utter destruction".)

The Second Law continues: "Thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth". Further "statutes and judgments" then provide that "anything that dieth of itself, being unclean, may not be eaten, but "thou shalt give it to the stranger... or thou mayest sell it to the alien; for thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God".

Every seven years a creditor shall remit his "neighbour's" debt, but "of a foreigner thou mayest exact it again". Chapter 10 (surprisingly in this context) says, "Love ye therefore the stranger; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt", but chapter 23 brings the familiar cancellation: "Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother... unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury" (and graver examples of this legal discrimination between the "neighbour" and "the "stranger" appear in later books, as will be seen).

Deuteronomy ends with the long-drawn-out, rolling, thunderous curse-or-blessing theme. Moses, about to die, once more exhorts "the people" to choose between blessings and cursings, and these are enumerated.

The blessings are exclusively material: prosperity through the increase of kith, crop and kine; the defeat of enemies; and world dominion. "The Lord thy God will set thee on high

above all nations of the earth... The Lord shall establish thee an holy people unto himself... And all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the Lord; and they shall be afraid of thee... thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow. And the Lord shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath..."

These blessings occupy thirteen verses; the cursings some fifty or sixty. The deity in whose name the curses are uttered clearly was held capable of doing evil (indeed, this is explicidy stated in a later book, Ezekiel, as will be shown).

Literal Judaism is ultimately based on terror and fear and the list of curses set out in chapter 28 of The Second Law shows the importance which the priesthood attached to this practice of cursing (which literal Judaists to this day hold to be effective in use). These curses, be it remembered, are the penalties for non-observance, not for moral transgressions! "If thou will not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and statutes... all these curses shall come upon thee..."

The city and the dwelling, the children, crops and cattle, are to be cursed "until thou be destroyed and until thou perish utterly". Plague, wasting, inflammation, mildew, botch, emerods, scab, itch, madness, blindness, famine, cannibalism and drought are specified. Men's wives are to lie with other men; their children are to be lost into slavery; any that remain at home are to be eaten by their parents, the father and mother contesting for the flesh and denying any to the children still alive. (These curses were included in the Great Ban when it was pronounced on apostates down to relatively recent times, and in the fastnesses of Talmudic Jewry are probably in use today).

The diseases and disasters were to be visited on the people "if thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful name, the Lord Thy God:...I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live for ever".

Such was the life and the blessing which the Judahites, gathered in the Temple in 621 BC, were exhorted in the name of Jehovah and Moses to choose by their tribal chieftain Josiah, the mouthpiece of the priesthood. The purpose and meaning of existence, under this "Mosaic Law", was the destruction and enslavement of others for the sake of plunder and power. Israel might from that moment have counted itself happy to have been pronounced dead and to have been excluded from such a world to come. The Israelites had mingled in the living bloodstream of mankind; on its banks the Judahites were left stranded in the power of a fanatical priesthood which commanded them, on pain of "all these curses", to destroy.

To the terror inspired by "all these curses" the Levites added also an allurement. If "the people" should "return and obey the voice of the Lord, and do all his commandments...", then "all these curses" would be transferred to their "enemies" (not because these had sinned, but simply to swell the measure of the blessing conferred on the rehabilitated Judahites!)

In this tenet Deuteronomy most clearly revealed the status allotted to the heathen by The Second Law. In the last analysis, "the heathen" have no legal existence under this Law; how could they have, when Jehovah only "knows" his "holy people"? Insofar as their actual existence is admitted, it is only for such purposes as those stated in verse 65, chapter 28 and verse 7, chapter 30: namely, to receive the Judahites when they are dispersed for their transgressions and then, when their guests repent and are forgiven, to inherit curses lifted from the regenerate Judahites. True, the second verse quoted gives the pretext that "all these curses" will be transferred to the heathen because they "hated" and "persecuted" the judahites, but how could they be held culpable of this when the very presence of the Judahites among them was merely the result of punitive "curses" inflicted by Jehovah? For Jehovah himself, according to another verse (64, chapter 28) took credit for putting the curse of exile on the Judahites:

"And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other... and among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest..."

Deuteronomy employs this Doublespeak (to use the modem idiom) throughout: the Lord makes the special people homeless among the heathen for their transgressions; the heathen, who have no blame either for their exile or for those transgressions, are their "persecutors "; ergo, the heathen will be destroyed.

The Judaist attitude towards other mankind, creation, and the universe in general, is better understood when these and related passages have been pondered, and especially the constant plaint that Jews are "persecuted" everywhere, which in one tone or another runs through nearly all Jewish literature. To any who accept this book as The Law, the mere existence of others is in fact persecution; Deuteronomy plainly implies that.

The most nationalist Jew and the most enlightened Jew often agree in one thing: they cannot truly consider the world and its affairs from any but a Jewish angle, and from that angle "the stranger" seems insignificant. Thinking makes it so, and this is the legacy of twenty-five centuries of Jewish thinking; even those Jews who see the heresy or fallacy cannot always divest themselves entirely of the incubus on their minds and spirits.

The passage from Deuteronomy last quoted shows that the ruling sect depicted homelessness at one and the same time as the act of the special people's god and as persecution by the special people's enemies, deserving of "all these curses". To minds of such extreme egotism a political outrage in which 95 Gentiles and 5 Jews lose their lives or property is simply an anti-Jewish disaster, and they are not consciously hypocritical in this. In the Twentieth Century this standard of judgment has been projected into the lives of other peoples and applied to all major events in the ordeal of the West. Thus we live in the century of the Levitical fallacy.

Having undertaken to put "all these curses" on innocent parties, if the Judahites would return to observance of "all these statutes and judgments", the resurrected Moses of Deuteronomy promised one more blessing ("The Lord thy God, he will go over before thee, and he will destroy these nations from before thee, and thou shaft them...") and then was allowed to die in the land of Moab.

In "the Mosaic Law" the destructive idea took shape, which was to threaten Christian civilization and the West, both then undreamed of. During the Christian era a council of theologians made the decision that the Old Testament and the New should be bound in one book, without any differentiation, as if they were stem and blossom, instead of immovable object and irresistible force. The encyclopaedia before me as I write states laconically that the Christian churches accept the Old Testament as being of "equal divine authority" with the New.

This unqualified acceptance covers the entire content of the Old Testament and may be the original source of much confusion in the Christian churches and much distraction among the masses that seek Christianity, for the dogma requires belief in opposite things at the same time. How can the same God, by commandment to Moses, have enjoined men to love their neighbours and "utterly to destroy" their neighbours? What relationship can there be between the universal, loving God of the Christian revelation and the cursing deity of Deuteronomy?

But if in fact all the Old Testament, including these and other commands, is of "equal divine authority" with the New, then the latterday Westerner is entitled to invoke it in justification of those deeds by which Christendom most denied itself: the British settlers' importation of African slaves to America, the American and Canadian settlers' treatment of the North American Indian, and the Afrikaners' harsh rule over the South African Bantu. He may justly put the responsibility for all these things directly on his Christian priest or bishop, if that man teaches that the Old Testament, with its repeated injunction to slay, enslave, and despoil is of "equal divine authority". No Christian divine can hold himself blameless if he so teaches. The theological decision which set up this dogma cast over Christendom and the centuries to come the shadow of Deuteronomy, just as it fell on the Judahites themselves when it was read to them in 621 BC.

Only one other piece of writing has had any comparable effect on the minds of men and on future generations; if any simplification is permissible, the most tempting one is to see the whole story of the West, and particularly of this decisive Twentieth Century, as a struggle between the Mosaic Law and the New Testament and between the two bodies of mankind which rank themselves behind one or other of those two messages of hatred and love respectively.

In Deuteronomy Judaism was born, yet this would have been a stillbirth, and Deuteronomy might never again have been heard of, if that question had rested only with the Levites and their captive Judahites. They were not numerous, and a nation a hundred times as many could never have hoped to enforce this barbarous creed on the world by force of its own muscle. There was only one way in which "the Mosaic Law" could gain life and potency and become a disturbing influence in the life of other peoples during the centuries to follow. This was if some powerful "stranger" (among all those strangers yet to be accursed), some mighty king of those "heathen" yet to be destroyed, should support it with arms and treasure.

Precisely that was about to happen when Josiah read The Second Law to the people in 621 BC, and it was to repeat itself continually down the centuries to our day: the gigantic improbability of the thing confronts the equally large, demonstrable fact that it is so! The rulers of those "other nations" which were to be dispossessed and destroyed repeatedly espoused the destructive creed, did the bidding of the dominant sect, and at the expense of their own peoples helped to further its strange ambition.

Some twenty years after the reading of Deuteronomy in Jerusalem, Judah was conquered by the Babylonian king, in about 596 BC. At the time, this looked like the end of the affair, which was a petty one in itself, among the great events of that period. Judah never again existed as an independent state, and but for the Levites, their Second Law and the foreign helper the Judahites, like the Israelites, would have become involved in mankind.

Instead, the Babylonian victory was the start of the affair, or of its great consequences for the world. The Law, instead of dying, grew stronger in Babylon, where for the first time a foreign king gave it his protection. The permanent state- within- states, nation-within-nations was projected, a first time, into the life of peoples; initial experience in usurping power over them was gained. Much tribulation for other peoples was brewed then.

As for the Judahites, or the Judaists and Jews who sprang from them, they seem to have acquired the unhappiest future of all. Anyway, it was not a happy man (though it was a Jewish writer of our day, 2,500 years later, Mr. Maurice Samuel) who wrote: "... we Jews, the destroyers, will remain the destroyer forever... nothing that the Gentiles will do will meet our needs and demands".

At first sight this seems mocking, venomous, shameless. The diligent student of the controversy of Zionism discovers that it is more in the nature of a cry of hopelessness, such as the "Mosaic Law" must wring from any man who feels he cannot escape its remorseless doctrine of destruction.

Chapter 4. THE FORGING OF THE CHAINS

The Babylonian episode was decisive in its consequences, both for the petty tribe of Judah at the time and for the Western world today.

During this period the Levites achieved things which were permanently to affect the life of peoples. They added four Books to Deuteronomy and thus set up a Law of racio-religious intolerance which, if it could be enforced, would for all time cut off the Judahites from mankind. By experiment in Babylon, they found ways of enforcing it, that is to say, of keeping their followers segregated from those among whom they dwelt. They acquired authority among their captors, and at last they "pulled down" and "utterly destroyed" their captors' house; or if this did not truly happen, they handed on this version of history to a posterity which accepted it and in time began to see in these people an irresistibly destructive force.

The first "captivity" (the Egyptian) seems to have been completely legendary; at any rate, what is known confutes it and as Exodus was completed after the Babylonian incident the Levitical scribes may have devised the story of the earlier "captivity", and of Jehovah's punishment of the Egyptians, to support the version of the Babylonian period which they were then preparing.

In any case, what truly happened in Babylon seems to have been greatly different from the picture of a mass-captivity, later followed by a mass-return, which has been handed down by the Levitical scriptures.

No mass-exodus of captives from Jerusalem to Babylon can have occurred, because the mass of the Judahite people, from which a Jewish nation later emerged, was already self-distributed far and wide about the known world (that is, around the Mediterranean, in lands west and east of Judah), having gone wherever conditions for commerce were most favourable.

In that respect the picture was in its proportions very much like that of today. In Jerusalem was only a nucleus, comprizing chiefly the most zealous devotees of the Temple cult and folk whose pursuits bound them to the land. The authorities agree that merely a few tens of thousands of people were taken to Babylon, and that these represented a small fraction of the whole.

Nor were the Judahites unique in this dispersion, although the literature of lamentation implies that. The Parsees of India offer a case nearly identical and of the same period; they, too, survived the loss of state and country as a religious community in dispersion. The later centuries offer many examples of the survival of racial or religious groups far from their original clime. With the passing of generations such racial groups come to think of their ancestors' homeland simply as "the old country"; the religious ones turn their eyes towards a holy city (say, Rome or Mecca) merely from a different spot on earth.

The difference in the case of the Judahites was that old country and holy city were the same; that Jehovaism demanded a triumphant return and restoration of (24) temple-worship, over the bodies of the heathen destroyed; and that this religion was also their law of daily life, so that a worldly political ambition, of the ancient tribal or nationalist kind, was also a primary article of faith. Other such creeds of primitive times became fossilized; this one survived to derange the life of peoples throughout the ages to our day, when it achieved its most disruptive effect.

This was the direct result of the experiments made and the experience gained by the Levites in Babylon, where they were first able to test the creed in an alien environment.

The benevolent behaviour of the Babylonian conquerors towards their Judahite prisoners was the exact opposite of that enjoined on the Judahites, in the reverse circumstances, by the Second Law which had been read to them just before their defeat: "Save nothing alive that breatheth..." Dr. Kastein says the captives "enjoyed complete freedom" of residence, worship, occupation and selfadministration.

This liberality allowed the Levites to make captives of people who thus were largely free; under priestly insistence they were constrained to settle in closed communities, and in this way the ghetto and Levite power were born. The Talmudic ruling of the Christian era, which decreed the excommunication of Jews if without permission they sold "neighbour-property" to "strangers", comes down from that first experiment in self-segregation, in Babylon.

The support of the foreign ruler was necessary for this corralling of expatriates by their own priests, and it was given on this first occasion, as on innumerable other occasions ever since.

With their people firmly under their thumbs, the Levites then set about to complete the compilation of "The Law". The four books which they added to Deuteronomy make up the Torah, and this word, which originally meant doctrine, is now recognized to mean "the Law". However, "completion" is a most misleading word in this connection.

Only the Torah (in the sense of the five books) was completed. The Eaw was not then and never can be completed, given the existence of the "secret Torah" recorded by the Talmud (which itself was but the later continuation of the Torah), and the priestly claim to divine right of interpretation. In fact, "the Law" was constantly changed, often to close some loophole which might have allowed "the stranger" to enjoy a right devolving only on "a neighbour". Some examples of this continuing process of amendment have already been given, and others follow in this chapter. The effect was usually to make hatred of or contempt for "the stranger" an integral part of "the Law" through the provision of discriminatory penalties or immunities.

When the Torah was complete a great stockade, unique in its nature but still incomplete, had been built between any human beings who at any time accepted this "Law" and the rest of mankind. The Torah allowed no distinction between this Law of Jehovah and that of man, between religious and civil law. The law of "the stranger", theologically and juridically, had no existence, and any pretension to enforce one was

"persecution", as Jehovah's was the only law.

The priesthood claimed that the Torah governed every act of daily life, down to the most trivial. Any objection that Moses could not have received from Jehovah on the mountain detailed instructions covering every conceivable action performed by man, was met with the dogma that the priesthood, like relay runners, handed on from generation to generation "the oral tradition" of Jehovah's revelation to Moses, and infinite power of reinterpretation. However, such objections were rare, as the Law prescribed the death penalty for doubters.

Mr. Montefiore remarks, accurately, that the Old Testament is "revealed legislation, not revealed truth", and says the Israelite prophets cannot have known anything of the Torah as the Levites completed it in Babylon. Jeremiah's words, "the pen of the Scribes is in vain" evidently refer to this process of Levitical revision and to the attribution of innumerable new "statutes and judgments" to Jehovah and Moses.

"Sin" was not a concept in the Torah as it took shape. That is logical, for in law there cannot be "sin", only crime or misdemeanour. The only offence known to this Law was non-observance, which meant crime or misdemeanour. What is commonly understood by "sin", namely, moral transgression, was sometimes expressly enjoined by it or made absolvable by the sacrifice of an animal.

The idea of "the return" (together with the related ideas of destruction and dominion) was basic to the dogma, which stood or fell by it. No strong impulse to return from Babylon to Jerusalem existed among the people (any more than today, when the instinct of the vast majority of Jews is completely against "return", so that the Zionist state is much more easily able to find money abroad than immigrants).

Literal fulfilment was the supreme tenet and that meant that possession of Palestine, the "centre" of the dominant empire to come, was essential (as it still is); its importance in the pattern was political, not residential.

Thus the Levites in Babylon added Exodus, Genesis, Leviticus and Numbers to Deuteronomy. Genesis and Exodus provide a version of history moulded to fit the "Law" which the Levites by then had already promulgated, in Deuteronomy. This goes right back to the Creation, of which the Scribes knew the exact date (however the first two chapters of Genesis give somewhat different accounts of the Creation and the Levitical hand, as scholars believe, is more to be seen in the second chapter than the first).

Whatever has survived of the former Israelite tradition is in Genesis and Exodus, and in the enlightened passages of the Israelite prophets. These more benevolent parts are invariably cancelled out by later, fanatical ones, which are presumably Levitical interpolations.

The puzzle is to guess why the Levites allowed these glimpses of a loving God of all men to remain; as they invalidated the New Law and could have been removed. A tenable theory might be that the earlier tradition was too well known to the tribespeople to be merely expunged, so that it had to be retained and cancelled out by allegorical incident and amendment.

Although Genesis and Exodus were produced after Deuteronomy the theme of fanatical tribalism is faint in them. The swell and crescendo come in Deuteronomy, Eeviticus and Numbers, which bear the plain imprint of the Levite in isolated Judah and Babylon.

Thus in Genesis the only fore-echo of the later sound and fury is, "And I will make of thee a great nation and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing; and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed... and the Lord appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land..."

Exodus is not much different: for instance, "If thou shalt indeed... do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies... and I will cut them off; and even these passages may be Levitical interpolations.

But in Exodus something of the first importance appears: this promise is sealed in blood, and from this point on blood runs like a river through the books of The Law. Moses is depicted as "taking the blood and sprinkling it on the people" and saying, "Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words". The hereditary and perpetual office of the Aaronite priesthood is founded in this blood-ritual: Jehovah says unto Moses, "And take unto thee Aaron thy brother and his sons with him that he may minister unto me in the priest's office".

The manner of a priest's consecration is then laid down in detail by Jehovah himself, according to the Levitical scribes:

He must take a bullock and two rams "without blemish", have them butchered "before the Lord", and on the altar burn one ram and the innards of the bullock. The blood of the second ram is to be put "upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron and upon the tip of the right ear of his sons and upon the thumb of their right hands and upon the great toe of their right foot" and sprinkled "upon the altar round about... and upon Aaron, and upon his garments, and upon his sons and the garments of his sons".

The picture of blood-bespattered priests, thus given, is worth contemplation. Even at this distance of time the question prompts itself: why was this insistent emphasis laid on blood-sacrifice in the books of the Law which the Levites produced. The answer seems to lie in the sect's uncanny genius for instilling fear by terror; for the very mention of "blood", in such contexts, made the faithful or superstitious Judahite tremble for his own son!

It is all spelt out in Exodus, this claim of the fanatical priests to the firstborn of their followers:

"And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Sanctify unto me all the firstborn, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast: it is mine".

According to the passage earlier quoted from Micah, this practice of sacrificing the human firstborn long continued, and the sight of the bloodied Levite must have had a terrible significance for the humble tribesman, for in the words attributed to God, quoted above, the firstborn "of man and of beast" are coupled. This significance remained long after the priesthood (in a most ingenious way which will later be described) contrived to discontinue human sacrifice while retaining the prerogative. Even then the blood which was sprinkled on the priest, though it was an animal's, was to the congregation still symbolically that of their own offspring!

Moreover, in the Talmudic strongholds of Jewry this ritual bloodying of priests has continued into our time; this is not a reminiscence from antiquity. Twenty-four centuries after Exodus was compiled the Reform Rabbis of America (at Pittsburgh in 1885) declared: "We expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the administration of the sons of Aaron; nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish State". The importance of this statement lay in the need, thus felt in 1885, to make it publicly; it shows that the opposite school of Jewry still practised literal observance, including the ritual of "sacrificial worship". (By the 1950's the Reform Rabbis of America had lost much ground and were in retreat before the force of Zionist chauvinism).

The Levitical authorship of the Torah is indicated, again, by the fact that more than half of the five books are given to minutely detailed instructions, attributed directly to the Lord, about the construction and furnishings of altars and tabernacles, the cloth and design of vestments, mitres, girdles, the kind of golden chains and precious stones in which the blood-baptized priest is to be arrayed, as well as the number and kind of beasts to be sacrificed for various transgressions, the uses to be made of their blood, the payment of tithes and shekels, and in general the privileges and perquisites of the priesthood. Scores of chapters are devoted to blood sacrifice, in particular.

God probably does not so highly rate the blood of animals or the fine raiment of priests. This was the very thing, against which the Israelite "prophets" had protested. It was the mummifying of a primeval tribal religion; yet this is still The Law of the ruling sect and it is of great potency in our present-day world.

When they compiled these Books of the Law, the Levitical scribes included many allegorical or illustrative incidents of the awful results of "non-observance". These are the parables of the Old Testament, and their moral is always the same: death to the "transgressor". Exodus includes the best known of these, the parable of the golden calf. While Moses was in the mountain Aaron made a golden calf; when Moses came down and saw it he commanded "the sons of Levi" to go through the camp "and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour", which these dutiful Levites did, so that "there fell of the people that day about three thousand men".

Christendom also has inherited this parable of the golden calf (having inherited the Old Testament) and holds it to be a warning against the worship of idols. However, a quite different motive may have produced whatever trend among the people caused the Levites to invent it. Many Judahites, and possibly some priests, at that time may have thought that God would be better pleased with the symbolic offering of a golden calf than with the eternal bleating of butchered animals, the "sprinkling" of their blood, and the "sweet savour" of their burning carcasses. The Levites at all times fought fiercely against any such weakening of their ritual, so that these parables are always directed against any who seek to change it in any detail.

A similar case is the "rebellion of Korah" (Numbers), when "two and fifty hundred princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown, gathered themselves together against Moses and against Aaron and said unto them, Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them; wherefore then lift ye yourselves above the congregation of the Lord".

The Israelite "prophets" had made this very complaint, that the Levites took much on themselves, and the parable in Numbers is plainly intended to discourage any other objectors: "So the earth opened and swallowed Korah and his two hundred and fifty men of renown" (however, the congregation "continued to murmur", whereon the Lord smote it with the plague, and by the time Aaron interceded, "fourteen thousand and seven hundred" lay dead.)

The lesson of these parables, respect for the priesthood, is driven home immediately after this anecdote by the enumeration, in words attributed to the Lord, of the Levite's perquisites: "All the best of the oil, and all the best of the wine, and of the wheat, the first fruits of them which they shall offer unto the Lord, them have I given thee".

Presumably because the older tradition imposed some restraint in the writing of history, Genesis and Exodus are relatively restrained. The fanatical note, first loudly sounded in Deuteronomy, then becomes ever louder in Eeviticus and Numbers, until at the end a concluding parable depicts a racio-religious massacre as an act of the highest piety in "observance", singled out for reward by God! These last two books, like Deuteronomy, are supposed to have been left by Moses and to relate his communions with Jehovah. In their cases, no claim was made that "a manuscript hoary with the dust of ages" had been discovered; they were just produced.

They show the growth of the sect's fanaticism at this period, and the increasing heat of their exhortations to racial and religious hatred. Deuteronomy had first decreed, "Love ye therefore the stranger", and then cancelled this "judgment" (which probably came down from the earlier Israelite tradition) by the later one which excluded the stranger from the ban on usury.

Leviticus went much further. It, too, began with the admonition to love: "The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself (chapter 19). The reversal came in chapter 25: "Of the children of the stranger that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land, and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren, the children of Israel, ye shall not rule over one another with rigour".

This made hereditary bondage and chattel-slavery of "strangers" a tenet of the Law (which is still valid). If the Old Testament is of "equal divine authority" with the New, professing Christians of the pioneer, frontiersman or Voortrekker kind were entitled in their day to invoke such passages as these in respect of slavery in America or South Africa.

Leviticus introduced (at all events by clear implication) what is perhaps the most significant of all the discriminations made by the Law between "thy neighbour" and "the stranger". Deuteronomy, earlier, had provided (chapter 22) that "if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die; but unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death; for as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter". This is the kind of provision, in respect of rape, which probably would have been found in any of the legal codes which were then taking shape, and for that matter it would fit into almost any legal code today, save for the extreme nature of the penalty. This passage, again, may very well represent the earlier Israelite attitude towards this particular transgression; it was impartial and did not vary according to the person of the victim.

Leviticus (chapter 19) then provided that a man who "lieth carnally" with a betrothed woman slave might acquit himself of fault by bringing a ram to the priest "as a trespass offering", when "the sin which he hath done shall be forgiven him", but the woman "shall be scourged". Under this Law the word of a woman slave clearly would not count against that of her owner, on a charge of rape, so that this passage appears to be an amendment, of the discriminatory kind, to the provision in Deuteronomy, Certain allusions in the Talmud support this interpretation, as will be shown...

Leviticus also contains its parable depicting the awful consequences of non-observance, and this particular example shows the extreme lengths to which the Levites went. The transgression committed by the two allegorical characters in this case (who were themselves two Levites, Hadab and Abihu) was merely that they burned the wrong kind of fire in their censers. This was a capital offence under "the Law" and they were immediately devoured by the Lord!

Numbers, the last of the five Books to be produced, is the most extreme. In it the Levites found a way to rid themselves of their chief prerogative (the claim to the firstborn) while perpetuating "the Law" in this, its supreme tenet. This was a political move of genius. The claim to the firstborn evidently had become a source of grave embarrassment to them, but they could not possibly surrender the first article of a literal Law which knew no latitude whatever in "observance"; to do so would have been itself a capital transgression. By one more reinterpretation of the Law they made themselves proxies for the firstborn, and thus staked a permanent claim on the gratitude of the people without any risk to themselves:

"And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, And I, behold. I have taken the Levites from among the children of Israel instead of all the firstborn that openeth the matrix among the children of Israel: therefore the Levites shall be mine; because all the firstborn are mine..." (As the firstborn to be so redeemed outnumbered their Levite redeemers by 273, payment of five shekels each for these 273 was required, the money to be given "to Aaron and his sons".)

Proceeding from this new status of redeemers, the Levites laid down many more "statutes and judgments" in Numbers, They ruled by terror and were ingenious in devising new ways of instilling it; an example is their "trial of jealousy". If "the spirit of jealousy" came on a man, he was legally obliged (by "the Lord speaking unto Moses, saying") to hale his wife before the Levite, who, at the altar, presented her with a is concoction of "bitter water" made by him, saying, "If no man have lain with thee and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness with another instead of thy husband, be thou free from this bitter water that causeth the curse. But if thou hast gone aside to another instead of thy husband, and if thou be defiled, and some man have lain with thee beside thine husband... the Lord make thee a curse and an oath among thy people, when the Lord doth make thy thigh to rot, and thy belly to swell."

The woman then had to drink the bitter water and if her belly swelled the priests "executed the law" of death on her. The power which such a rite put in the hands of the priesthood is apparent; ascribed to the direct command of God, it resembles the practices of witch doctors in Africa.

The final touch is given to "the Law" in the last chapters of this, the last book to be compiled. It is provided by the parable of Moses and the Midianites. The reader will have remarked that the life and deeds of Moses, as related in Exodus, made him a capital transgressor, several times over, under the "Second Law" of Deuteronomy and the numerous other amendments of Leviticus and Numbers, By taking refuge with the Mdianites, by marrying the Midianite highpriest's daughter and by receiving instruction in priestly rites from him, and in other ways, Moses had "gone a-whoring after other gods", had "taken of their daughters", and so on. As the whole structure of the law rested on Moses, in whose name the commands against these things were laid down in the later books, something evidently had to be done about him before the Books of the Law were completed, or the whole structure would fall to the ground.

The last small section of Numbers shows how the difficulty was overcome by the scribes. In these final chapters of "the Law" Moses is made to conform with "all the statutes and judgments" and to redeem his transgressions by massacring the entire Midianite tribe, save for the virgins! By what in today's idiom would be called a fantastic "twist", Moses was resurrected so that he might dishonour his saviours, his wife, two sons and father-in-law. Posthumously he was made to "turn from his wickedness", to validate the racio-religious dogma which the Levites had invented, and by complete transfiguration from the benevolent patriarch of earlier legend to become the founding father of their Law of hatred and murder!

In Chapter 25 Moses is made to relate that "the anger of the Lord was kindled" because the people were turning to other gods. He is commanded by the Lord, "Take all the heads of the people and hang them up before the Lord against the sun", whereon Moses instructs the judges, "Slay ye every one his men that were joined unto Baalpeor" (Baal-worship was extensively practised throughout Canaan, and the competition of this cult with Jehovah- worship was a particular grievance of the Levites).

The theme of religious hatred is thus introduced into the narrative. That of racial hatred is joined to it when, in the direct sequence, a man brings "a Midianitish woman in the sight of Moses". Phinehas (the grandson of Moses's brother Aaron) goes after them "and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the women through her belly". Because of this deed, "the plague was stayed", and "the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Phinehas hath turned away my wrath from the children of Israel, while he was jealous for my sake... Wherefore say, Behold, I give unto him my covenant of peace!"

Thus the covenant between Jehovah and the hereditary Aaronite priesthood was again sealed (by the Levitical scribes) in blood, this time the blood of a racioreligious murder, which "the Lord" then describes as "an atonement for the children of Israel". Moses, the witness of the murder, is then ordered by the Lord, "Vex the Midianites and smite them". The symbolism is plain. He is required, in resurrection, to strike equally at "other gods" (the god of the high priest Jethro, from whom he had received instruction) and at "strangers" (his wife's and father-in-law's race).

The Levites even made the ensuing massacre Moses's last act on earth; he was rehabilitated on the brink of eternity! "And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites; afterwards thou shalt be gathered to thy people". Thus ordered, Moses's men "warred against the Midianites as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males... and took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of their cities, and all their flocks, and all their gods, and burnt their cities".

This was not enough. Moses, the husband of a loving Midianite wife and the father of her two sons, was "wroth" with his officers because they had "saved all (32) the Midianite women alive. Behold these caused the children of Israel... to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregations of the Lord. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children,

that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves". (The booty is then listed; after the numeration of sheep, beeves and asses follow "thirty and two thousand persons in all, of women that had not known man by lying with him". These were shared among the Levites, the soldiers and the congregation; "the gold" was brought to the Levites "for the Lord".)

With that, Moses was allowed at last to rest and the Books of the Law were concluded. Incitement could hardly be given a more demoniac shape. Chapters 25 and 31 of Numbers need to be compared with chapters 2, 3 and 18 of Exodus for the full significance of the deed foisted on Jehovah and Moses by the Levites to become apparent. It was a plain warning to the special people of what Jehovaism was to mean to them; it remains today a warning to others.

On that note The Law ended. Its authors were a small sect in Babylon, with a few thousand followers there. However, the power of their perverse idea was to prove very great. By giving material ambition the largest shape it can have on earth, they identified themselves forever with the baser of the two forces which eternally contend for the soul of man: that downward pull of the fleshly instincts which wars with the uplifting impulse of the spirit.

The theologians of Christendom claim more for this Law than the scholars of Jewry. I have before me a Christian Bible, recently published, with an explanatory note which says the five books of the Torah are "accepted as true", and for that matter also the historical, prophetic and poetic books. This logically flows from the dogma, earlier quoted, that the Old Testament is of "equal divine authority" with the New.

The Judaist scholars say differently. Dr. Kastein, for instance, says that the Torah was "the work of an anonymous compiler" who "produced a pragmatic historical work". The description is exact; the scribe or scribes provided a version of history, subjectively written to support the compendium of laws which was built on it; and both history and laws were devised to serve a "political purpose. "A unifying idea underlay it all", says Dr. Kastein, and this unifying idea was tribal nationalism, in a more fanatical form than the world has otherwise known. The Torah was not revealed religion but, as Mr. Montefiore remarked, "revealed legislation", enacted to an end.

While the Law was being compiled (it was not completed until the Babylonian "captivity" had ended) the last two remonstrants made their voices heard, Isaiah and Jeremiah. The hand of the Levite may be traced in the interpolations which were made in their books, to bring them into line with "the Law" and its supporting "version of history". The falsification is clearest in the book of Isaiah, "which is the best known case because it is the most easily demonstrable. Fifteen chapters of the book were written by someone who knew the Babylonian captivity, whereas Isaiah lived some two hundred years earlier. The Christian scholars circumvent this by calling the unknown man "Deutero-Isaiah", or the second Isaiah.

"This man left the famous words (often quoted out of their context), "The Lord hath said... I will also give thee for a light unto the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth". This was heresy under the Law which was in preparation and the Levite apparently added (as the same man presumably would not have written) the passages foretelling that "the kings and queens" of the Gentiles "shall bow down to thee with their face towards the earth and lick up the dust of thy feet... I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine; and all flesh shall know that I am the Lord thy Saviour and thy Redeemer" (This sounds like the voice of Ezekiel, who was the true father of the Levitical Law, as will be seen.)

Jeremiah's book seems to have received Levitical amendment at the start, because the familiar opening passage sharply discords with other of Jeremiah's thoughts: "See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy..."

That does not sound like the man who wrote, in the next chapter: "The word of the Lord came to me saying, Go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, Thus saith the Lord: I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown... What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me... my people have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters..."

Jeremiah then identified the culprit, Judah (and for this offence well may have come by his death): "The backsliding Israel hath justified herself more than treacherous ]udah", Israel had fallen from grace, but Judah had betrayed; the allusion is plainly to the Levites' new Law. Then comes the impassioned protest, common to all the expostulants, against the priestly rites and sacrifices:

"Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord..." (the formal, repetitious incantations) "...but thoroughly amend your ways and your doings, oppress not the stranger, the fatherless and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place" (the ritual of blood-sacrifice and the ordained murder of apostates)... "Will ye steal, murder and commit adultery, and swear falsely... and come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations" (the ceremonial absolution after animal-sacrifice). "Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?... I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices "

In such words Jeremiah, like Jesus later, protested against the "destruction" of the Law in the name of its fulfilment. It seems possible that even in Jeremiah's time the Levites still exacted the sacrifice of firstborn children, because he adds, "And they have built the high place... to burn their sons and daughters in the fire; which I commanded not, neither came it into my heart".

Because of these very "abominations", Jeremiah continued, the Lord would "cause to cease from the cities of Judah, and from the streets of Jerusalem, the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride; for the land shall be desolate".

This is the famous political forecast which was borne out; the Levites, with their genius for perversion, later invoked it to support their claim that Judah fell because their Law was not observed, whereas Jeremiah's warning was that their Law would destroy "treacherous Judah". Were he to rise from the earth today he might use the word without change in respect of Zionism, for the state of affairs is similar and the ultimate consequence seems equally foreseeable.

When Judah fell Jeremiah gave his most famous message of all, the one to which the Jewish masses today often instinctively turn, and the one which the ruling sect ever and again forbids them to heed: "Seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it; for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace". The Levites gave their angry answer in the 137th Psalm:

"By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept Our tormentors asked of us mirth: Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth... O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones".

In Jeremiah's admonition and the Levites' reply lies the whole story of the controversy of Zion, and of its effects for others, down to our day.

Jeremiah, who was apparently put to death, would today be attacked as a "crackpot", "paranoiac", "antisemite" and the like; the phrase then used was "prophet and dreamer of dreams". He describes the methods of defamation, used against such men, in words exactly applicable to our time and to many men whose public lives and reputations have been destroyed by them (as this narrative will show when it reaches the present century): "For I heard the defaming of many, fear on every side. Report, they say, and we will report it. All my familiars watched for my halting, saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him".

While Jeremiah was a refugee in Egypt, the second Isaiah, in Babylon, wrote those benevolent words which glow like the last light of day against the dark background of the teaching which was about to triumph:

"Thus saith the Lord, Keep ye judgment, and do justice let not the son of the stranger, that hath (35) joined himself to the Lord, speak, saying The Lord hath utterly separated me from his people... The sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the Lord, to serve him, and to love the name of the Lord, to be his servants... even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer... for mine house shall be called an house of pray er for all people".

With this glimpse of a loving God of all mankind the protests ended. The Levites and their Law were left paramount, and therewith the true captivity of "the Jews" began, for their enslavement to the law of racial and religious hatred is the only genuine captivity they have suffered.

Jeremiah and the Second Isaiah, like the earlier Israelite remonstrants, spoke for mankind, which was slowly groping its way towards the light when the Levites reverted to darkness. Before the Law was even completed Prince Sidharta Gautama, the Buddha, had lived and died and founded the first religion of all mankind, founded on his First Law of Life: "From good must come good, and from evil must come evil". This was the answer to the Levites' Second Law, though they probably never heard of it. It was also time's and the human spirit's inevitable answer to Brahminism, Hindu racialism and the cult of the perpetual master-caste (which strongly resembles literal Judaism).

Five hundred years ahead lay a second universal religion, and five hundred years after that a third. The little nation of Judah was held back in the Law's chains from this movement of mankind; it was arrested in the fossil stage of spiritual development, and yet its primitive tribal creed retained life and vigour. The Levitical Law, still potent in the Twentieth Century, is in its nature a survival from sunken times.

Such a Law was bound to cause curiosity, first, and alarm next among peoples with whom the Judahites dwelt, or to their neighbours, if they dwelt alone. When the Judahites returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, about 538 BC, this impact on other peoples began. At that moment in time it was felt only by little clans and tribes, the immediate neighbours of the repatriated Judahites in Jerusalem. It has continued ever since in widening circles, being felt by ever greater numbers of peoples, and in our century has produced its greatest disturbances among them.

Chapter 5. THE FALL OF BABYLON

Before this first impact of "the Mosaic Law" could be felt by other peoples came the event of 536 BC which set the pattern of the Twentieth Century AD: the fall of Babylon.

The resemblance between the pattern of events today (that is to say, the shape taken by the outcome of the two World Wars) and that of the fall of Babylon is too great to be accidental, and in fact can now be shown to have been deliberately produced. The peoples of the West in the present century, had they realized it, were governed under "the Judaic Law", not under any law of their own, by the forces that controlled governments.

The grouping of characters and the final denouement are alike in all three cases. On one side of the stage is the foreign potentate who has oppressed and affronted the Judahites (or, today, the Jews). In Babylon this was "King Belshazzar"; in the first World War it was the Russian Czar; in the second war, it was Hitler. Confronting this "persecutor", is the other foreign potentate, the liberator. In Babylon, this was King Cyrus of Persia; in the second case, it was a Mr. Balfour; in the third, it was a President Truman.

Between these adversaries stands the Jehovan prophet triumphant, the great man at the foreign ruler's court who foretells, and survives, the disaster which is about to befall the "persecutor". In Babylon, this was Daniel. In the first and second world wars of this century it was a Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist prophet at foreign courts.

These are the characters. Then comes the denouement, a Jehovan vengeance on "the heathen" and a Jewish triumph in the form of a symbolic "restoration". "King Belshazzar", when Daniel has foretold his doom, is killed "in the same night" and his kingdom falls to the enemy. The Jewish captors who killed the Russian Czar and his family, at the end of the First Twentieth Century war, quoted this precedent in a couplet "written on the wall" of the room where the massacre occurred; the Nazi leaders, at the end of the Second Twentieth Century war, were hanged on the Jewish Day of Atonement.

Thus the two World Wars of this century have conformed, in their outcomes, to the pattern of the Babylonian-Persian war of antiquity as depicted in the Old Testament.

Presumably the peoples who fought that ancient war thought that something more than the cause of the Judahites was at stake, and that they strove for some purpose or interest of their own. But in the narrative that has come down through the centuries all else has been expunged. The only significant results, in the picture which has been imprinted on the minds of peoples, are the Jehovan vengeance and Judahite triumph, and the two world wars of this century followed that same pattern.

King Belshazzar survives only as the symbolic foreign "persecutor" of the (37) Judahites (although Jehovah made them his captives, as a punishment, he is nevertheless their "persecutor" and hence must be barbarously destroyed). King Cyrus, similarly, is but the fulfilling instrument of Jehovah's promise to visit "all these curses" on "thine enemies" when they have served their turn as captors (and thus deserves no credit in his own right, either as conqueror or liberator; he is not truly any better than King Belshazzar, and his house will in turn be destroyed).

King Cyrus, from what true history tells of him, seems to have been an enlightened man, as well as the founder of an empire which spread over all Western Asia. According to the encyclopaedias, "he left the nations he subjected free in the observance of their religions and the maintenance of their institutions". Thus the Judahites may have benefited by a policy which he impartially applied to all, and possibly King Cyrus, could he return to earth today, would be surprised to find that his portrait in history is that of a man whose only notable and enduring achievement was to restore a few thousand Judahites to Jerusalem.

However, if by any chance he thought this particular question to be of paramount importance among his undertakings (as the Twentieth Century politicians demonstrably think), he would at his return to earth today be much gratified, for he would find that through this act he exerted a greater influence on human events in the 2,500 years to come, probably than any other temporal ruler of any age. No other deed of antiquity has had consequences in the present time so great or so plain to trace.

In the Twentieth Century AD two generations of Western politicians, in the quest for Jewish favour, competed with each other to play the part of King Cyrus. The result was that the two World Wars produced only two enduring and significant results: the Jehovan vengeance on the symbolic "persecutor" and the Jewish triumph in the form of a new "restoration". Thus the symbolic legend of what happened at Babylon had by the Twentieth Century gained the force of the supreme "Law", overriding all other laws, and of truth and history.

The legend itself seems to have been two-thirds untruth, or what today would be called propaganda. King Belshazzar himself was apparently invented by the Levites. The historical book which records the fall of Babylon was compiled several centuries later and was attributed to one "Daniel". It states that he was a Judahite captive in Babylon who rose to the highest place at court there and "sat in the gate of the king" (Nebuchadnezzar) through his skill in interpreting dreams. Upon him devolved the task of interpreting the "writing on the wall" (Daniel, 5).

King "Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar", is then depicted as offering an insult to the Judahites by using "the golden and silver vessels" taken by his father from the temple in Jerusalem for a banquet with his princes, wives and concubines. Thereon the fingers of a man's hand write on the wall the words, (38) "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin". Daniel, being called to interpret, tells the king that they mean, "God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it; thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting; thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians". Thereon King Belshazzar "in the same night" b, slain, and the Persian conqueror enters, who is to "restore" the Judahites.

Thus the end of a king and a kingdom is related directly to an affront offered to Judah and given the guise of a Jehovan retribution and Jewish vengeance. What matter if Daniel and King Belshazzar never existed: by its inclusion in the Levitical scriptures this anecdote gained the status of a legal precedent! When the murder of the Russian Czar, his wife, daughters and son in 1918, again, was related direcdy to this legend by words quoted from it and scrawled on a blood-bespattered wall this was at once an avowal of authorship of the deed, and a citation of the legal authority for it.

When an ancient legend can produce such effects, twenty-five centuries afterwards, there is little gain in demonstrating its untruth, for politicians and the masses they manipulate alike love their legends more than truth. However, of the three protagonists in this version of the fall of Babylon, only King Cyrus certainly existed; King Belshazzar and Daniel seem to be figures of Levitical phantasy!

The Jewish Encyclopaedia, which points out that King Nebuchadnezzar had no son called Belshazzar and that no king called Belshazzar reigned in Babylon when King Cyrus conquered it, says impartially that "the author of Daniel simply did not have correct data at hand", and thus does not believe that Daniel wrote Daniel. Obviously, if an important Judahite favourite at court, called Daniel, had written the book he would at least have known the name of the king whose end he foretold, and thus have had "correct data".

Evidently the book of Daniel, like the books of the Law attributed to Moses, was the product of Levitical scribes who in it patiently continued to make history conform with their Law, already laid down. If a King Belshazzar could be invented for the purpose of illustration and precedent, so could a prophet Daniel. This, apparently mythical Daniel is the most popular prophet of all with the fervent Zionists of today, who rejoice in the anecdote of the Judahite vengeance and triumph foretold on the wall, and see in it the legal precedent for all later time. The story of our present century has done more than that of any earlier one to strengthen them in this belief and for them Daniel, with his "interpretation" fulfilled "in the same night", gives the conclusive, crushing answer to the earlier Israelite prophets who had envisioned a loving God of all men. The fall of Babylon (as depicted by the Levites) gave practical proof of the truth and force of the

"Mosaic" Law.

However, it would all have come to nothing without King Cyrus, who alone of the three protagonists did exist and did either allow, or compel, a few thousand Judahites to return to Jerusalem. At that point in history the Levitical theory of (39) politics, which aimed at the exercise of power through the acquirement of mastery over foreign rulers, was put to its first practical test and was successful.

The Persian king was the first of a long line of Gentile oracles worked by the ruling sect, which through him demonstrated that it had found the secret of infesting, first, and then directing the actions of foreign governments.

By the present century this mastery of governments had been brought to such a degree of power that they were all, in large measure, under one supreme control, so that their actions, in the end, always served the ambition of this supreme party. Towards the end of this book the reader will see how the Gentile oracles were worked, so that the antagonisms of peoples might be incited and brought into collision for this super-national purpose.

However, the reader will need to look into his own soul to find, if he can, the reason why these oracles, his own leaders, submitted.

King Cyrus was the first of them. Without his support the sect could not have set itself up again in Jerusalem and have convinced the incredulous J udahite masses, watching from all parts of the known world, that the racial Law was potent and would be literally fulfilled. The line of cause-and-effect runs straight and clear from the fall of Babylon to this century's great events; the West today owes its successive disappointments and its decline even more to King Cyrus, the first of the Gentile puppets, than to the ingenious, stealthy priesthood itself.

"Judaism originated in the name of the Persian king and by the authority of his Empire, and thus the effect of the Empire of the Alchemenides extends with great power, as almost nothing else, directly into our present age", says Professor Eduard Meyer, and this authority's conclusion is demonstrably true. Five hundred years before the West even began, the Levites laid down the Law, and then through King Cyrus set the precedent and pattern for the downfall of the West itself.

The five books of the Law were still not complete when King Cyrus came to Babylon and conquered. The sect in Babylon was still busy on them and on the supporting version of history which, by such examples as that of "King Belshazzar", was to give plausibility to the unbelievable and supply the precedent for barbaric deeds twenty-five centuries later. The mass of Judahites still knew nothing of the Law of racial intolerance which was being prepared for them, though religious intolerance was by this time familiar to them:

The sect had yet to complete the Law and then to apply it to its own people. When that happened in 458 BC, under another Persian king, the controversy of Zion at last took the shape in which it still implacably confronts its own people and the rest of mankind. The umbilical cord between the Judahites and other men was then finally severed.

These segregated people, before whom the priesthood flaunted its version of the fall of Babylon like a banner, then were set on the road to a future which would find them a compact force among other peoples, to whose undoing they were by their Law dedicated.

Chapter 6. THE PEOPLE WEPT

The first people to feel the impact of this "Mosaic Law" which the Levites were developing in Babylon were the Samaritans, who in 538 BC warmly welcomed the Judahites returning to Jerusalem and in token of friendship offered to help rebuild the temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in 596 BC. At the Levites' order the Samaritans were brusquely repulsed and at this affront became hostile, so that the restoration of the temple was delayed until 520 BC. (The feud against the Samaritans continued throughout the centuries to the present time, when they have been reduced to a few score or dozen souls).

The friendly approach shows that the new "Law" of the Judeans was unknown to their neighbours, who were taken by surprise by this rebuff. It seems to have been just as little known to, or understood by the Judeans themselves, at that period. The books of the Law were still being compiled in Babylon and, despite anything the priests may have told them, they clearly did not at that time realize that they were to be racially, as well as religiously, debarred from their fellow men.

The repulse of the Samaritans gave the first hint of what was to follow. The Samaritans were Israelites, probably infused with other blood. They practised Jehovah-worship but did not recognize the supremacy of Jerusalem and on that account alone would have incurred the hatred of the Levites, who probably saw in them the danger of an Israelite revival and absorption of Judah. Thus the Samaritans were put under the major ban; even by taking a piece of bread from a Samaritan a Judahite broke all the statutes and judgments of the Levites and abominably defiled himself.

After this first clash with their neighbours, the Judeans looked around them at ruined and depopulated Jerusalem. None of them, unless they were ancients, can have known it before. They were few in number: those who "returned" numbered about forty thousand, which was perhaps a tenth or twentieth of the total, for centuries self-dispersed in other lands.

It was not a happy or triumphant return for these people, though it was a major political success for the priesthood. The Levites met the same difficulty as the Zionists in 1903, 1929 and 1953: the chosen people did not want to go to the promised land. Moreover, the leaders did not intend to head "the return"; they wished to stay in Babylon (as the Zionist leaders today wish to stay in New York).

The solution found in 538 BC was similar to the one found in 1946: the zealots were ready to go, and a hapless few, who were too poor to choose, were rounded up to accompany them. Those who desired the privilege of remaining in Babylon (under their own prince, the Exilarch, in his own capital!) were mulcted in fines (just as the wealthy Jews of America are pressed today to provide funds for the Zionist state).

The Jewish nation was already and finally dispersed; obviously it could never again be reassembled in Canaan. That was a fact, unalterable and permanent; "from the exile the nation did not return, but a religious sect only", says Professor Wellhausen. But this symbolic "return" was of the utmost importance to the priesthood in establishing its mystic power over the scattered mass. It could be held up as the proof that "the Law" was true and valid, and that the destiny of the "special people" was to destroy and dominate.

The "return" meant quite different things to the few who returned and to the many who watched from the dispersion. To the few it meant the possibility to practise Jehovah-worship in the way and on the spot prescribed by "the Law". To the many it was a triumph of Judahite nationalism and the portent of the final triumph foreseen by the Law.

This watching mass had seen the means by which the success had been achieved, the conqueror undone and overthrown, and the "captivity" transformed into the "return". Segregation had proved effective, and the chief methods of enforcing this segregation were the ghetto and the synagogue. The ghetto (essentially a Levitical concept) had been tried out in Babylon, in the form of the closed-community in which thejudahites lived.

The collective reading of the law had also proved to be an effective substitute for the ritual of worship which, under the Law, could be performed only at the temple in Jerusalem (this was the beginning of the synagogue). The institutions of the ghetto and the synagogue were adopted by the communities of the dispersion, and gave them a feeling of union with the exiled Judahites and the returned Judeans.

Thus the "religious sect" which "returned" to an unknown Jerusalem was also the core of the nation-within-nations, state-within-states. The priesthood had shown itself able to maintain its theocracy without a territory of its own and under a foreign king. It had ruled its followers under its own Law; and of this Law as it was first imposed in exile on the Judahites in Babylon Dr. Kastein says: "Instead of the constitution of the defunct state, communal autonomy was established, and, instead of the power of the state, there came into being another power, more reliable and more enduring: the stem and inexorable regime enforced by the obligation to render unquestioning obedience to the regulations of the ritual."

The words deserve careful study; many of "the regulations of the ritual" have been quoted in this book. The Levites had succeeded, in "captivity" and on foreign soil, in "enforcing" a "stern and inexorable regime". The achievement is unique, and it has been a continuing one, from that time to our day.

"Strangers" are usually puzzled to imagine any means by which the ruling sect could keep so firm a hold over a community scattered about the world. This power is based, ultimately, on terror and fear. Its mysteries are kept hidden from the stranger, but by diligent study he may gain some idea of them.

The weapon of excommunication is a dreaded one, and the fear which it inspires rests to some extent on the literal Judaist's belief in the physical efficacy of the curses enumerated in Deuteronomy and other books; the Jewish Encyclopaedia testifies to this continuing belief. In this matter there is a strong resemblance to the African Native's belief that he will die if he is "tagati'd", and to the American Negro's fear of voodooist spells. Casting out of the fold is a much- feared penalty (and in the past was often a lethal one), of which examples may be found in the literature of our day.

Also, for pious (or for that matter superstitious) Judaists the Torah-Talmud is the only Law, and if they submit formally to the laws of countries where they dwell, it is with this inner reservation. Under that only-Law the priesthood wields all judicial and magisterial powers (and often has had these formally delegated to it by governments), and literally the Law includes capital punishment on numerous counts; in practice the priesthood in closed-communities of the dispersion has often exacted that penalty.

The Jerusalem to which a few returned was far from Babylon, in those times, and after their first coup (the repulse of the Samaritans' offer of friendship) the Levites apparently found themselves unable, from a distance, to restrain the normal impulses of human kind. The Judahites, in their impoverished fragment of land, began to settle down and intermarry with their neighbours for all that. They broke no law comprehended by them. The books of the Law were still being compiled in Babylon; they knew about Solomon's hundreds of wives and Moses's Midianite father-in-law, but did not yet know that Moses had been resurrected in order to exterminate all the Mdianites save the virgins. Thus they married their neighbours' sons and daughters and this natural intermingling continued for about eighty years after the return.

During that period the Levites in Babylon completed the Law, the impact of which all nations have felt ever since. Ezekiel of the High Priest's family was its chief architect and probably all five books of the Law, as they have come down, bear his mark. He was the founding- father of intolerance, of racialism and vengeance as a religion, and of murder in the name of God.

The book of Ezekiel is the most significant of all the Old Testament books. It is more significant than even Deuteronomy, leviticus and Numbers because it seems to be the fountainhead from which the dark ideas of those books of the Law first sprang. For instance, the student of the curses enumerated in Deuteronomy is bound to suspect that the deity in whose name they were uttered was of diabolic nature, not divine; the name, "God", in the sense which has been given to it, cannot be coupled with such menaces. In Ezekiel's book the student finds this suspicion expressly confirmed. Ezekiel puts into the very mouth of God the statement that he had made evil laws in order to inspire misery and fear! This appears in chapter 20 and gives the key to the whole mystery of "the Mosaic Law".

In this passage Ezekiel appears to be answeringjeremiah's attack on the Levites in the matter of sacrificing the firstborn: "And they have built the high places to burn their sons and daughters in the fire; which I commanded not, neither came it into my heart", Ezekiel is not much concerned about the lot of the sons and daughters but is clearly enraged by the charge that the Lord had not commanded the sacrifice of the firstborn, when the scribes had repeatedly ascribed this command to him. His retort is concerned only to show that God had so commanded and thus to justify the priesthood; the admission that the commandment was evil is casual and nonchalant, as if this were of no importance:

"I am the Lord your God; walk in my statutes and keep my judgments, and do them Notwithstanding the children rebelled against me; they walked not in my statutes, neither kept my judgments to do them then I said, I would pour out my fury upon them, to accomplish my anger against them in the wilderness Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the Lord,"

The ruling of Christian theologians, that the Old Testament is of "equal divine authority" with the New, presumably includes this passage! Ezekiel, in his day, forbade any protest by quickly adding, "And shall I be enquired of by you, O house of Israel? As I live, saith the Lord, I will not be enquired of by you".

Ezekiel experienced the Fall of Judah and the removal of the sect to Babylon, so that his book is in parts an eye-witness account of events. Its other, "prophetic" parts show this founding-father of literal Judaism to have been a man of dark, even demoniac obsessions; indeed, parts of the book of Ezekiel probably could not be publicly printed as anything but Scripture.

Early in it he portrays (in words which he also attributes to the Lord God) a siege of Jerusalem in which he, Ezekiel, to atone "for the iniquity of the people", is commanded to eat human excrement baked before his eyes. At his plea, that he has always scrupulously observed the dietary laws and never taken anything abominable in his mouth, this is mitigated to cow's dung. Then he threatens trangressors with cannibalism, a curse on which the Levites laid marked stress:

"... the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee and the sons shall eat their fathers a third part shall fall by the sword and I will scatter a third part unto all the winds famine and evil beasts pestilence and blood "

All this is to be the retribution for non-observance, not for evil deeds. Pages of cursings follow and Jehovah promises to use the Gentiles as the rod of chastisement: "Wherefore I will bring the worst of the heathen,., and they shall possess your houses".

Portraying what will happen to those who worship "other gods", Ezekiel in a characteristic vision sees "them that have charge over the city" (Jerusalem) "draw near, every man with his destroying weapon in his hand," One, with a writer's inkhorn by his side, is commanded by the Lord, "go through the midst of Jerusalem and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof (these are the zealots in "observance"). The foreheads having been marked, Ezekiel quotes the Lord, "in my hearing", as saying to the men, "Go ye through the city and smite; let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity; slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children and women; but come not near any man upon whom is the mark... and they went forth and slew in the city".

After Ezekiel's time men may have thought it wise to be seen sighing and crying in Jerusalem; hence, perhaps, the Wailing Wall. Chapter on chapter of menaces follow, always with the alluring proviso that if the transgressors turn from their wickedness towards observance, even worse things will then be visited on the heathen:

"I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God Assemble yourselves, and come; gather yourselves on every side to my sacrifice that I do sacrifice for you, even a great sacrifice for you, even a great sacrifice upon the mountains of Israel, that ye may eat flesh and drink blood. Ye shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the princes of the earth And ye shall eat fat till ye be full, and drink blood till ye be drunken and I will set my glory among the heathen, and all the heathen shall see my judgment that I have executed, and my hand that I have laid upon them".

While the school of scribes founded by Ezekiel continued for eighty years, in Babylon, to compile their Law, the repatriated Judahites in Jerusalem gradually developed normal relationships with their neighbours. They had never known the regime of bigotry and exclusion which was being prepared for them in Babylon. Many of the people still prayed to "other gods" for rain, crops, sun and herds, and to Jehovah in tribal feuds.

Then, in 458 BC, the Levites struck.

Their Law was ready, which was not by itself of much importance. The Persian King was ready to enforce it for them, and that was of the greatest importance, then and up to the present moment. For the first time the ruling sect accomplished the wonder which they have since repeatedly achieved: by some means they induced a foreign ruler, who was their ostensible master and to all outer appearances a mighty potentate in his own right, to put his soldiers and money at their disposal.

On this day in 458 BC the Judahites in Jerusalem were finally cut off from mankind and enslaved in a way they never knew in Babylon. This was the true "start of the affair". The story is told in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Levitical emissaries from Babylon who were sent to Jerusalem to enforce Ezekiel's law.

Ezra of the high priesthood came from Babylon to Jerusalem with some 1 500 followers. He came in the name of the Persian King Artaxerxes the Longhanded, with Persian soldiers and Persian gold. He arrived just as Dr. Chaim Weizmann arrived in Palestine in 1917, supported by British arms and British gold, and in 1947, supported by American money and power. Ezra was in legal form a Persian emissary (Dr. Weizmann, a Russian-born Jew, was in legal form a British emissary in 1917).

What means the sect found to bend King Artaxerxes to its will, none can now discover; after King Cyrus, he was the second potentate to play a puppet's part and in our century this readiness has become a strict qualification for public life.

Ezra brought the new racial Law with him. He enforced it first among his own travelling companions, allowing only those to accompany him who could prove that they were Judahites by descent, or Levites. When he reached Jerusalem he was "filled with horror and dismay" (Dr. Kastein) by the prevalence of mixed marriages. The Judahites were finding happiness in their fashion; "by tolerating miscegenation with neighbouring tribes they had established peaceful relations based on family ties".

Dr. Kastein (who was equally horrified by this picture many centuries afterwards) has to admit that the Judahites by this intermingling "observed their tradition as it was understood at the time" and broke no law known to them. Ezra brought Ezekiel's new Taw, which once more supplanted the old "tradition". In his status as emissary of the Persian king he had the Jerusalemites assembled and told them that all mixed marriages were to be dissolved; thenceforth "strangers" and everything foreign were to be rigorously excluded. A commission of elders was set up to undo all the wedlocks forged and thus to destroy the "peaceful relations based on family ties".

Dr. Kastein says that "Ezra's measure was undoubtedly reactionary; it raised to the dignity of a law an enactment which at that time was not included in the Torah" (which the Levites, in Babylon, were still writing down). Dr. Kastein's use of the word "dignity" is of interest in this connection; his book was published, in Berlin, in the year, twenty- four centuries later, when Hitler enacted exactly the same kind of law; it was then called "infamous" by the Zionists, and the armies of the West, reversing the role of the Persian soldiers of 458 BC, were mobilized to destroy it!

The effect of this deed was the natural one, in 458 BC as in 1917 AD: the neighbouring peoples were affronted and alarmed by the unheard-of innovation. They saw the threat to themselves and they attacked Jerusalem, tearing down the symbols of the inferiority imputed to them: its walls. By that time Ezra, like any Twentieth Century Zionist, had evidently returned to his home abroad, for once more the artificial structure began to crumble and natural tendencies were resumed: intermarriage began again and led anew to "peaceful relations based on family ties". Only force can prevent this from happening.

After thirteen years, in 445 BC, the elders in Babylon struck again. Nehemiah was another figure, as typical of our century as of that time in Babylon. He was of Judahite descent and stood high in the Persian king's favour (as Zionist "advisers" today habitually stand at the right hand of British Prime Ministers and American Presidents; the parallel could not be much closer). He was cupbearer to Artaxerxes himself. He arrived from Babylon in Jerusalem with dictatorial power and enough men and money to re-wall the city (at Persian expense; the parallel with today continues), and it thus became the first true ghetto. It was an empty one, and when the walls were ready Nehemiah ordered that one in ten of the Judahites be chosen by lot to reside in it.

Race thus became the supreme, though still unwritten tenet of the Law. Jehovah-worshippers who could not satisfy Persian officials and the Levite elders of their descent from Judah, Benjamin or Levi were rejected "with horror" (Dr. Kastein). Every man had to establish "the undisputed purity of his stock" from the registers of births (Hitler's Twentieth Century edict about the Aryan grandmothers was less extreme).

Then, in 444 BC, Nehemiah had Ezra embody the ban on mixed marriages in the Torah, so that at last what had been done became part of the much-amended "Law" (and David and Solomon presumably were posthumously cast out of the fold). The heads of clans and families were assembled and required to sign a pledge that they and their peoples would keep all the statutes and judgments of the Torah, with special emphasis on this new one.

In Leviticus the necessary insertion was made: "I have severed you from other people that ye should be mine". Thenceforth no Judahite might marry outside the clan, under penalty of death; every man who married a foreign woman committed a sin against God (Nehemiah, 13.27; this is the law in the Zionist state today). "Strangers" were forbidden to enter the city, so that the Judahites "might be purified from everything foreign".

Nehemiah and Ezra were both eye-witnesses. Nehemiah is the ideal, unchallengeable narrator: he was there, he was the dictator, his was the deed. He says that when Ezra for the first time read this new Law to the Jerusalemites:

"All the people wept when they heard the words of the Law".

These twelve words of contemporary journalism bring the scene as clearly before today's reader as if it had occurred twenty-four hours, not twenty-four centuries ago. He sees the weeping, ghettoized throng of 444 BC through the eyes of the man who, with Persian warriors at his side, forced them into their first true captivity, the spiritual one which thereafter was to enclose any man who called himself "Jew".

Nehemiah remained twelve years in Jerusalem and then returned to the Babylonian court. At once the artificial structure he had set up in Jerusalem began to disintegrate, so that some years later he descended again on the city, where once more mixed marriages had occurred. He "forcibly dissolved" these, also setting "the severest penalties" on further transgressions of the kind. Next, "with a view to applying rigorously the selective principle, he again carefully studied the register of births" and ejected all, including even Aaronite families, in whose descent the slightest flaw could be detected. Last, he "ruthlessly purged" the community of all who had failed in "unquestioning and unhesitating allegiance to the established order and the law" and made the entire people renew their pledge.

This is known as "the New Covenant" (as Deuteronomy was the Second Law; these qualifying words are the milestones of the supplanting heresy). It had to be signed, at Levite order and under Persian duress, by every man in Jerusalem singly, as if it were a business contract. Then Nehemiah finally departed for Babylon, his home, having "completed the task of isolation" and "left behind him a community which, agreed as it now was on all fundamental questions, was able to fend for itself. He had organized their everyday life for them and built up their spiritual foundations". These words are Dr. Kastein's; the reader has seen, also in his words, by what means these Jerusalemites were brought to "agree on all fundamental questions".

By this time about four hundred years had passed since the repudiation of Judah by Israel, and three hundred since the Assyrian conquest of Israel. This period of time the Levites had used to complete the perversion of the older tradition, to put their racio-religious Law in writing, and at last to clamp it, like shackles, on the Judahites in the little Persian province of Judea. They had succeeded in setting up their fantastic, tribal creed and in establishing their little theocracy. They had started the catalytic agent on its journey through the centuries.

For more than a hundred generations, since that day when the New Covenant was enforced by Persian arms, and the people who had wept were compelled to sign it anew, a mass of human beings, changing in blood but closely or loosely held in the bonds of this Law, have carried its burden and inheritance, in spiritual isolation from the rest of mankind. The singular paradox remains: though their enchainment was devised by the Levites the chains were Persian. On that day as ever since, though the fanatical sect has dictated their continuing captivity, foreign arms and foreign money have kept them in it.

Where does responsibility lie between those who incite to a deed and those who commit it? If the answer is that the greater and final responsibility lies with the perpetrator, then the verdict of history is incontestably, though strangely, that responsibility for the heresy of Judaism lies with the Gentiles, who from the time of the Persian kings to this century have done the bidding of the sect that devised it.

It was a heresy: On the day when King Artaxerxes's soldiers forced the Jerusalemites to sign Ezekiel's New Covenant, the perversion of the earlier Israelite tradition was made complete and the affirmation of God was supplanted by the denial of God.

No resemblance remained between the God of the moral commandments and Ezekiel's malevolent deity who boasted that he commanded men to kill their firstborn in order to keep them in awe of himself! This was not revealed God, but a man-made deity, the incarnation of primitive tribalism. What those ancient people signed under duress, in the New Covenant, was either the formal denial of God or the formal claim that God was Judah, and this in fact is the claim expressly made in many Zionist utterances of our time, so that the heresy is openly avowed:

"God is absorbed in the nationalism of Israel. He becomes the national ethos... He creates the world in the Hebrew language. He is the National God" (Rabbi Solomon Goldman).

"We and God grew up together... We have a national God... We believe that God is a Jew, that there is no English or American God" (Mr. Maurice Samuel).

"It was not God who willed these people and their meaning. It was this people who willed this God and this meaning" (Dr. Kastein).

These statements are explicit, and such phrases are easy to pen in this century, in New York or Chicago, London or Berlin. But at the start of this affair, as Nehemiah recorded:

"All the people wept when they heard the words of the Law" and since that day it has given very many cause to weep.

Chapter 7. THE TRANSLATION OF THE LAW

The most important event (as it proved) of the next four hundred years was the first translation of the Judaic scriptures (later to become known as the Old Testament) into a foreign tongue, Greek. This enabled, and still enables, "the heathen" to become partially acquainted with the Law that ordained their own enslavement and destruction and the supremacy of Judah. Save for this translation the nature of literal Judaism must have remained a matter of surmise, whereas the translation made it appear to be one of evidence and proof.

For that reason it is at first sight surprising that the translation was ever made (as tradition says, by seventy-two Jewish scholars at Alexandria between 275 and 150 BC.) Dr. Kastein explains that it was undertaken "with a definite object in view, that of making it comprehensible to the Greeks; this led to the distortion and twisting of words, changes of meaning and the frequent substitution of general terms and ideas for those that were purely local and national".

Dr. Kastein's words in this instance are carelessly chosen if they were intended to disguise what occurred: a matter is not made "comprehensible" to others by distorting and twisting it, changing its meaning, and substituting ambiguous terms for precise ones. Moreover, so learned a Judaic scholar must have known what the Jewish Encyclopaedia records, that the later Talmud even "prohibited the teaching to a Gentile of the Torah, anyone so teaching 'deserving death'." Indeed, the Talmud saw such danger in the acquirement by the heathen of knowledge of the Law that it set up the oral Torah as the last repository of Jehovah's secrets, safe from any Gentile eye.

If the Judaic scriptures were translated into Greek, then, this was not for the benefit of the Greeks (Dr. Kastein wrote for a largely Gentile audience). The reason, almost certainly, was that the Jews themselves needed the translation. The Judahites had lost their Hebrew tongue in Babylon (thereafter it became a priestly mystery, "one of the secret spiritual bonds which held the Judaists of the Diaspora together", as Dr. Kastein says), and spoke Aramaic. However, the largest single body of Jews was in Alexandria, where Greek became their everyday language; many of them could no longer understand Hebrew and a Greek version of their Law was needed as a basis for the rabbinical interpretations of it.

Above all, the elders could not foresee that centuries later a new religion would arise in the world which would take over their scriptures as part of its own Bible, and thus bring "the Mosaic Law" before the eyes of all mankind. Had that been anticipated, the Greek translation might never have been made.

Nevertheless, the translators were evidently reminded by the priests that their work would bring "the Law", for the first time, under Gentile scrutiny; hence the distortions, twistings, changes and substitutions mentioned by Dr. Kastein. An instance of these is apparently given by Deuteronomy 32.21; the translation which has come down to the heathen alludes vaguely to "a foolish nation", whereas the reference in the Hebrew original, according to the Jewish Encyclopaedia, is to "vile and vicious Gentiles".

What was translated? First, the five books of the Law, the Torah. After the "New Covenant" had been forcibly imposed on the Jerusalemites by Ezra and Nehemiah, the priesthood in Babylon had given the Torah yet another revision: "once again anonymous editors lent their past history, their traditions, laws and customs a meaning entirely in keeping with theocracy and applicable to that system of government The form which the Torah then received was the final and conclusive form which was not to be altered by one iota; no single thought, word or letter of it was to be changed."

When mortal men repeatedly "lend meaning" to something supposed already to be immutable, and force all spiritual tradition into the framework of their worldly political ambition, what remains cannot be an original revelation of God. What had happened was that the earlier, Israelite tradition had been expunged or cancelled, and in its place the Judaic racial law had assumed "final and conclusive form".

The same method was followed in the compilation of the other books, historical, prophetic or lyrical. The book of Daniel, for instance, was completed at about this time, that is to say, some four hundred years after the events related in it; small wonder that the anonymous author got all his historical facts wrong. Dr. Kastein is candid about the manner in which these books were produced:

"The editors who put the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings into their final form gathered every fragment" (of the old teachings and traditions) and "creatively interpreted them... It was impossible always definitely to assign particular words to particular persons, for they had so frequently worked anonymously, and, as the editors were more concerned with the subject matter than with philological exactitude, they were content with stringing the sayings of the prophets together as best they could". (This method might account for the attribution of the identical "Messianic" prophecy to two prophets, Isaiah 2, 2-4, and Micah 4, 1-4, and for the numerous repetitions to be found in other books).

The subject matter, then, was the important thing, not historical truth, or "philological exactitude", or the word of God. The subject matter was political nationalism in the most extreme form ever known to man, and conformity with this dogma was the only rule that had to be observed. The way in which these books were compiled, after Judah was cast off by Israel, and the reasons, are clear to any who study their origin.

The resultant product, the growth of five or six hundred years and the work of generations of political priests, was the book which was translated into Greek around 150 BC. After the lifetime of Jesus it, and the New Testament, was translated into Latin by Saint Jerome, when both "came to be regarded by the Church as of equal divine authority and as sections of one book" (from a typical modern encyclopaedia), a theological dictum which was formally confirmed by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century of our era and has been adopted by nearly all Protestant churches, although in this matter they might have found valid reason to protest.

In view of the changes which were made, at the translation, (see Dr. Kastein's words, above), none but Judaist scholars could tell today how closely the Old Testament in the Hebrew-Aramaic original compares with the version which has come down, from the first translation into Greek, as one of the two sections of Christendom's Bible. Clearly substantial changes were made, and quite apart from that there is the "oral Torah", and the Talmudic continuation of the Torah, so that the Gentile world has never known the whole truth of the Judaic Law.

Nevertheless, the essence of it is all in the Old Testament as it has come down to Christendom, and that is a surprising thing. Whatever may have been expunged or modified, the vengeful, tribal deity, the savage creed and the law of destruction and enslavement remain plain for all to ponder. The fact is that no amount of twisting, distortion, changing or other subterfuge could conceal the nature of the Judaic Law, once it was translated; although glosses were made, the writing beneath remains clear, and this is the best evidence that, when the first translation was authorized, the universal audience it would ultimately reach was not foreseen.

With that translation the Old Testament, as we now call and know it, entered the West, its teaching of racial hatred and destruction only a little muted by the emendations. That was before the story of the West even had truly begun.

By the time the West, and Christianity, were nineteen and a half centuries old, the political leaders there, being much in awe of the central sect of Judaism, had begun to speak with pious awe of the Old Testament, as if it were the better half of the Book by which they professed to live. Nevertheless it was, as it always had been, the Law of their peoples' destruction and enslavement, and all their deeds, under the servitude which they accepted, led towards that end.

Chapter 8. THE LAW AND THE IDUMEANS

While the Judaic scriptures, thus compiled, were on their way, thus translated, from the Alexandrine Jews to the Greeks and thereafter to the other heathen, Persian, Greek and Roman overlords followed each other in litde Judea.

These chaotic centuries brought in their course the second significant event of the period: the enforced conversion of the Idumeans to Jehovaism ("Judaism" is a word apparently first used by the Judean historian Josephus to denote the culture and way of life of Judea, as "Hellenism" described those of Greece, and originally had no religious connotation. For want of a better word it will now be used in this book to identify the racial religion set up by the Levites on their perversion of the "Mosaic Law".)

Only one other mass-conversion to Judaism is known to recorded history, and that one, which came about eight or nine centuries later, was of immediate importance to our present generation, as will be shown. Individual conversion, on the other hand, was at this period frequent, and apparently was encouraged even by the rabbis, for Jesus himself, according to Saint Matthew, told the scribes and pharisees, rebukingly, that they "compass sea and land to make one proselyte".

Thus, for some reason, the racial ban introduced by the Second Law and the New Covenant was not, at this time, being enforced. Presumably the explanation is the numerical one; if the racial law had been strictly enforced the small tribe of Judah would have died out and the priesthood, with its creed, would have been left like generals with a plan of battle, but no army.

Evidently there was much intermingling, for whatever reason. The Jewish Encyclopaedia says that "early and late Judah derived strength from the absorption of outsiders" and other authorities agree, so that anything like a purebred tribe of Judah must have disappeared some centuries before Christ, at the latest.

Nevertheless, the racial Law remained in full vigour, not weakened by these exceptions, so that in the Christian era proselytizing virtually ceased and the Judaists of the world, although obviously they were not descended from Judah, became again a community separated from mankind by a rigid racial ban. Racial exclusion remained, or again became, the supreme tenet of formal Zionism, and the Talmudic ruling was that "proselytes are as injurious to Judaism as ulcers to a sound body".

Fervent Zionists still beat their heads on a wall of lamentation when they consider the case of the Idumeans, which, they hold, proves the dictum just quoted. The problem of what to do with them apparently arose out of the priests' own sleight-of-hand feats with history and The Law. In the first historical book, Genesis, the Idumeans are shown as the tribe descended from Esau ("Esau the father of the Edomites"), who was own brother to Jacob-called-Israel. This kinsmanship between Judah and Edom was apparently the original tradition, so that the Idumeans' special status was still recognized when Deuteronomy was produced in 621 BC, the Lord then "saying unto Moses":

"And command thou the people, saying, Ye are to pass through the coast of your brethren the children of Edom... Meddle not with them; for I will not give you of their land, no, not so much as a foot breadth... And when we passed by from our brethren the children of Esau..."

When Numbers came to be written, say two hundred years later, this situation had changed. By then Ezra and Nehemiah, escorted by Persian soldiery, had enforced their racial law on the Judahites, and the Idumeans, like other neighbouring peoples, became hostile (for exactly the same reasons that cause Arab hostility today).

They learned, from Numbers, that, far from being "not meddled" with, they were now marked down for "utter destruction". Thus in Numbers Moses and his followers no longer "pass by our brethren the children of Esau"; they demand to pass through the Idumean land. The King of Idumea refuses permission, whereon Moses takes another route and the Lord promises him that "Edom shall be a possession".

From other passages in The Law the Idumeans were able to learn the fate of cities so taken in possession; in them, nothing was to be left alive that breathed. (The scribes dealt similarly with the Moabites; in Deuteronomy Moses is commanded "Distress not the Moabites, neither contend with them in battle; for I will not give thee of their land for a possession"; in Numbers, the divine command is that the Moabites be destroyed).

From about 400 BC on, therefore, the Judeans were distrusted and feared by neighbouring tribes, including the Idumeans. They were proved right in this, for during the brief revival of Judah under the Hasmoneans, John Hyreanus, who was king and high priest in Judea, fell on them and at the swordpoint forced them to submit to circumcision and the Mosaic Law. Of the two versions of The Law ("not to meddle" and "take possession") he obeyed the second, which might have been a satisfactory solution if the matter had ended there, for any good rabbi could have told him that either, neither or both of these decrees was right ("If the Rabbis call left right and right left, you must believe it": Dr. William Rubens).

But the matter did not end there. A law set up in this way throws up a new problem for each one that is solved. Having "taken possession", was John Hyreanus to "utterly destroy" and "save nothing alive that breatheth" of "our brethren, the children of Esau"? He disobeyed that law, and contented himself with the forcible conversion. But by so doing he made himself a capital transgressor, like Saul, the first king of the united kingdom of Israel and Judah, long before. For this very thing, stopping short of utter destruction (by sparing King Agag and some beasts), Saul had been repudiated, dethroned and destroyed (according to the Levitical version of history).

John Hyreanus had to deal with two political parties. Of these, the more moderate Sadducees, who supported the monarchy, presumably tendered the counsel to spare the Idumeans, and merely by force to make them Jews. The other party was that of the Pharisees, who represented the old despotic priesthood of the Levites and wished to restore it in full sovereignty.

Presumably these fanatical Pharisees, as heirs of the Levites, would have had him exact the full rigour of the Law and "utterly destroy" the Idumeans. They continued fiercely to oppose him (as Samuel opposed Saul) and to work for the overthrow of the monarchy. What is of particular interest today, they later claimed that from his clemency towards the Idumeans the entire ensuing catastrophe of Judea came! They saw in the second destruction of the temple and the extinction of Judea in AD 70 the prescribed penalty for John Hyrcanus's failure in observance; like Saul, he had "transgressed".

The Pharisees had to wait about 150 years for the proof of this argument, if proof it was to any but themselves. Out of the converted Idumeans came one Antipater who rose to high favour in the little court at Jerusalem (as the legendary Daniel had risen at the much greater courts of Babylon and Persia). The Pharisees themselves appealed to the Roman truimvir, Pompey, to intervene in Judea and restore the old priesthood, while abolishing the little monarchy. Their plan went agley; though the Hasmonean dynasty was in fact exterminated in the chaotic decades of little wars and insurrections that followed, Antipater the Idumean rose until Caesar made him procurator of Judea, and his son, Herod, was by Antony made king of Judea!

In the sequel, utter confusion reigned in the little province so that even the shadow of independence vanished and Rome, left no other choice, began directly to rule the land.

For this denouement the Pharisees, as the authors of Roman intervention, were apparently to blame. They laid the fault on "the half caste" and "Idumean slave", Herod. Had John Hyreanus but "observed the Law" and "utterly destroyed" the Idumeans, 1 50 years before, all this would not have come about, they said. It is illuminating to see with what bitter anger Dr. Josef Kastein, two thousand years later, took up this reproach, as if it were an event of the day before. A Twentieth Century Zionist, who wrote in the time of Hitler's advent to power in Germany, he was convinced that this offence against the racial law had brought the second calamity on Judea.

However, the calamity of Judea was also the victory of the Pharisees, as will be seen, and this is typical of the paradoxes in which the story of Zion abounds from its start.

Chapter 9. THE RISE OF THE PHARISEES

These Pharisees, who formed the most numerous political party in the little Roman province of Judea, contained the dominant inner sect, earlier represented by the Levite priesthood. They made themselves the carriers of the Levitical idea in its most fanatical form, as it had found expression in Ezekiel, Ezra and Nehemiah; they were sworn to "the strict observance of Levitical purity", says the Jewish Encyclopaedia,

As the Levites had triumphed over the Israelite remonstrants, and had succeeded in severing Judah from its neighbours, so did the Pharisees, their successors, stand ready to crush any attempt to reintegrate the Judeans in mankind. They were the guardians of the destructive idea, and the next chapter in the story of Zion was to be that of their victory; as in the case of the Levites, the background to it was to be that of Jerusalem destroyed.

Among the priests themselves, the passing generations had produced something of a revolt against the process of constant amendment of The Law, begun by the scribes of the school of Ezekiel and Ezra. These priests held that The Law was now immutable and must not be further "reinterpreted".

To this challenge (which strikes at the very root of Judaist nationalism) the Pharisees in deadly enmity opposed their reply: that they were the keepers of "the traditions" and o that oral Law, directly imparted by God to Moses, which must never be put in writing but which governed all the rest of The Law. This claim to possess the secrets of God (or, in truth, to be God) is at the heart of the mystic awe in which so many generations of Jews hold "the elders"; it has a power to affright which even enlightened beings on the far fringes of Jewry cannot quite escape.

Nevertheless, the instinctive impulse to break free from this thrall has at all times thrown up a moderate party in Judaism, and at this period it was that of the Sadducees, which represented the bulk of the priesthood and stood for "keeping the peace of the city" and avoiding violent conflict with the Roman overlords. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were bitter foes. This internal dissension among Jews has continued for twenty-five hundred years into our time.

It is chiefly of academic interest to the rest of mankind (though it has to be recorded) because history shows that whenever the dispute for and against "seeking the peace of the city" has reached a climax, the party of segregation and destruction has always prevailed, and the Judaist ranks have closed behind it. The present century has given the latest example to this. At its start the established Jewish communities of Germany, England and America (who may be compared with the Sadducees) were implacably hostile to the Zionists from Russia (the Pharisees), but within fifty years the extreme party had made itself the exclusive spokesman of "the Jews" with the Western governments, and had succeeded in beating down nearly all opposition among the Jewish communities of the world.

The Pharisees occupy the second place in the pedigree of the sect which has brought about such large events in our time. The line of descent is from the Levites in Babylon, through the Pharisees in Jerusalem, through the Talmudists of Spain and the rabbis of Russia, to the Zionists of today.

The name "Pharisee", according to the Judaist authorities, means "one who separates himself', or keeps away from persons or things impure in order to attain the degree of holiness and righteousness required in those who would commune with God. The Pharisees formed a league or brotherhood of their own, admitting to their inmost councils only those who, in the presence of three members, pledged themselves to the strict observance of Levitical purity. They were the earliest specialists in secret conspiracy, as a political science.

The experience and knowledge gained by the Pharisees may be plainly traced in the methods used by the conspiratorial parties which have emerged in Europe during the last two centuries, and particularly in those of the destructive revolution in Europe, which has been Jewish-organized and Jewish-led.

For instance, the Pharisees originally devised the basic method, resting on mutual fear and suspicion, by which in our day conspirators are held together and conspiratorial bodies made strong. This is the system of spies-on- spies and informers-among-informers on which the Communist Party is built (and its Red Army; the official regulations of which show the "political commissar" and "informer" to be a recognized part of the military structure, from the high-command level to the platoon one).

The Pharisees first employed this device, basing it on a passage in Leviticus: "Ye shall place a guard around my guard" (quoted by the Jewish Encyclopaedia from the Hebrew original, in use among Jews). The nature of the revolutionary machine which was set up in Europe in the Nineteenth Century cannot be understood at all unless the Talmudic knowledge and training be taken into account, which most of its organizers and leaders inherited; and the Pharisees were the first Talmudists. They claimed divine authority for any decision of their Scribes, even in case of error, and this is a ruling concept of the Talmud.

Under the domination of the Pharisees the Messianic idea first emerged, which was to have great consequences through the centuries. It was unknown to the earlier Israelite prophets; they never admitted the notion of an exclusive, master-race, and therefore they could not be aware of the later, consequential concept of a visitant who would come in person to set up the supreme kingdom of this exclusive master-race on earth.

The nature of this Messianic event is clear, in the Judaist authorities. The Jewish Encyclopaedia says the Pharisees' conception of it was that "God's kingship shall be universally recognised in the future... God's kingship excluded any other". As Jehovah, according to the earlier Torah, "knew" only the Jews, this meant that the world would belong to the Jews. The later Talmud confirmed this, if any doubt remained, by ruling that "the non-Jews are as such precluded from admission to a future world" (the former Rabbi Laible).

The mass of the Judeans undoubtedly expected that "the Anointed one", when he came, would restore their national glory; in the perfect theocratic state he would be their spiritual leader, but also their temporal one who would reunite the scattered people in a supreme kingdom of this world. The Messianic idea, as it took shape under the Pharisees, was not an expectation of any kingdom of heaven unrelated to material triumph on earth, or at any rate it was not this among the mass of the people.

The Messianic expectation, indeed, must in a sense have been the logical and natural result of the sect's own teaching. The Pharisees, like the Levites whose message they carried on, claimed to know all things, from the date of the world's creation, and its purpose, to the manner of the special people's triumph.

Only one thing they never stated: the moment of that glorious consummation. The burden of observance which they laid on the people was harsh, however, and it was but natural that, like prison inmates serving a term, the people should clamour to know when they would be free.

That seems to be the origin of Messianism. The people who once had "wept" to hear the words of the New Law, now had borne its rigour for four hundred years. Spontaneously the question burst from them: When? When would the glorious consummation come, the miraculous end? They were "doing all the statutes and judgments", and the performance of them meant a heavy daily task and burden. They were doing all this under "a covenant", which promised a specific reward. When would this reward be theirs? Their rulers were in direct communion with God, and knew God's mysteries; they must be able to answer this question, When?

This was the one question which the Pharisees could not answer. They seem to have given the most ingenious answer they could devise: though they would not say when, they would say that one day "the Messiah the Prince" would appear (Daniel), and then there would be given to him "dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him".

Thus the compressed, ghettoized Judean spirit was anaesthetized with the promise of a visitant; Messianism appeared and produced the recurrent outbreaks of frenzied anticipation, the latest of which our Twentieth Century is experiencing.

Such was the setting of the scene when, nearly two thousand years ago, the man from Galilee appeared. At that time those Judeans who remained in Judea had spent the six hundred years since their casting-off by Israel in what Dr. John Goldstein, in our day, calls "Jewish darkness", and at the end of this period had come to wait and hope for the liberating Messiah.

The visitant who then appeared claimed to point them the way to "the kingdom of heaven". He was the very opposite road from that, leading over ruined nations to a temple filled with gold, towards which the Pharisees beckoned them, crying "Observe!"

The Pharisees were strong and the foreign "governor" quailed before their menaces (the picture was very much like that of our day) and those of the people who saw in the newcomer the Messiah they awaited, despite his contempt for worldly rewards, put themselves in danger of death by saying so. They were "transgressing", and the Roman ruler, like the Persian king five hundred years earlier, was ready to enforce "the Law".

Evidently many of these people were only too ready to listen, if they were allowed, to any who could show them the way out of their darkness into the light and the community of mankind. However, victory lay with the Pharisees (as with the Levites of yore), so that, once more, many of these people had cause to weep, and the catalytic force was preserved intact.

Chapter 10. THE MAN FROM GALILEE

When Jesus was born the vibrant expectation that a marvellous being was about to appear was general among the Judeans. They longed for such proof that Jehovah intended to keep the Covenant with his chosen people, and the scribes, reacting to the pressure of this popular longing, gradually had introduced into the scriptures the idea of the anointed one, the Messiah, who would come to fulfil his bargain.

The Targams, the rabbinical commentaries on the Law, said: "How beautiful he is, the Messiah king who shall arise from the house of Judah. He will gird up his loins and advance to do battle with his enemies and many kings shall be slain".

This passage shows what the Judeans had been led to expect. They awaited a militant, avenging Messiah (in the tradition of "all the firstborn of Egypt" and the destruction of Babylon) who would break Judah's enemies "with a rod of iron" and "dash them in pieces like a potter's vase"; who would bring them empire of this world and the literal fulfilment of the tribal Law; for this was what generations of Pharisees and Levites had foretold.

The idea of a lowly Messiah who would say "love your enemies" and be "despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows" was not present in the public mind at all and would have been "despised and rejected", had any called attention to these words of Isaiah (which only gained significance after Jesus had lived and died).

Yet the being who appeared, though he was lowly and taught love, apparently claimed to be this Messiah and was by many so acclaimed!

In few words he swept aside the entire mass of racial politics, which the ruling sect had heaped on the earlier, moral law, and like an excavator revealed again what had been buried. The Pharisees at once recognized a most dangerous "prophet and dreamer of dreams".

The fact that he found so large a following among the Judeans shows that, even if the mass of the people wanted a militant, nationalist Messiah who would liberate them from the Romans, many among them must subconsciously have realised that their true captivity was of the spirit and of the Pharisees, more than of the Romans. Nevertheless, the mass responded mechanically to the Pharisaic politicians' charge that the man was a blasphemer and bogus Messiah.

By this response they bequeathed to all future generations of Jews a tormenting doubt, no less insistent because it must not be uttered (for the name Jesus may not even be mentioned in a pious Jewish home): Did the Messiah appear, only to be rejected by the Jews, and if so, what is their future, under The Law?

What manner of man was this? Another paradox in the story of Zion is that in our generation Christian divines and theologians often insist that "Jesus was a Jew", whereas the Judaist elders refuse to allow this (those Zionist rabbis who occasionally tell political or "interfaith" audiences that Jesus was a Jew are not true exceptions to this rule; they would not make the statement among Jews and seek to produce an effect among their non-Jewish listeners, for political reasons).*

* Rabbi Stephen Wise, the leading Zionist organizer in the United States during the 1910-1950 period, used this phrase for the obvious political motive, of confusing non-Jewish hearers. Speaking to such an "inter-faith" meeting at the Carnegie Hall at Christmastide 1925, he stated "Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian" (Christianity was born with the death of Jesus).

This public assertion, "Jesus was a Jew", is always used in our century for political purposes. It is often employed to quell objections to the Zionist influence in international politics or to the Zionist invasion of Palestine, the suggestion being that, as Jesus was a Jew, none ought to object to anything purporting to be done in the name of Jews. The irrelevance is obvious, but mobs are moved by such phrases, and the paradoxical result, once again, is that a statement, most offensive to literal Jews, is most frequently made by non-Jewish politicians and ecclesiastics who seek Jewish favour.

The English abbreviation, "Jew", is recent and does not correspond to anything denoted by the Aramaic, Greek or Roman terms for "Judahite" or "Judean", which were in use during the lifetime of Jesus. In fact, the English noun "Jew" cannot be defined (so that dictionaries, which are scrupulously careful about all other words, are reduced to such obvious absurdities as "A person of Hebrew race"); and the Zionist state has no legal definition of the term (which is natural, because the Torah, which is the Law, exacts pure Judahite descent, and a person of this lineage is hardly to be found in the entire world).

If the statement, "Jesus was a Jew", has meaning therefore, it must apply to the conditions prevailing in his time. In that case it would mean one of three things, or all of them: that Jesus was of the tribe of Judah (therefore Judahite); that he was of Judean domicile (and therefore Judean); that he was religiously "a Jew", if any religion denoted by that term existed in his time.

Race, residence, religion, then.

This book is not the place to argue the question of Jesus's racial descent, and the surprising thing is that Christian divines allow themselves some of the statements which they make. The reader should form his own opinion, if he desires to have one in this question.

The genealogy of Mary is not given in the New Testament, but three passages might imply that she was of Davidic descent; St. Matthew and St. Luke trace the descent of Joseph from David and Judah, but Joseph was not the blood father of Jesus. The Judaist authorities discredit all these references to descent, holding that they were inserted to bring the narrative into line with prophecy.

As to residence, St. John states that Jesus was born at Bethlehem in Judea through the chance that his mother had to go there from Galilee to register; the

For this he was excommunicated by the Orthodox Rabbis Society of the United States, but a Christian Ministers Association "hailed me as a brother". Rabbi Wise adds the characteristic comment: "I know not which was more hurtful, the acceptance of me as a brother and welcoming me into the Christian fold, or the violent diatribe of the rabbis".

Judaist authorities, again, hold that this was inserted to make the account agree with Micah's prophecy that "a ruler" would "come out of Bethlehem".

The Jewish Encyclopaedia insists that Nazareth was Jesus's native town, and indeed, general agreement exists that he was a Galilean, whatever the chance of his actual birthplace. Galilee, where nearly all his life was spent, was politically entirely separate from Judea, under its own Roman tetrarch, and stood to Judea in the relationship of "a foreign country" (Graetz). Marriage between a Judean and a Galilean was fobidden and even before Jesus's birth alljudeans living in Galilee had been forced by Simon Tharsi, one of the Maccabean princes, to migrate to Judah.

Thus, the Galileans were racially and politically distinct from the Judeans.

Was this Galilean, religiously, what might today be called "a Jew"? The Judaist authorities, of course, deny that most strenuously of all; the statement, often heard from the platform and pulpit, might cause a riot in the synagogue.

It is difficult to see what responsible public men can mean when they use the phrase. There was in the time of Jesus no "Jewish" (or even Judahite or Judaist or Judean) religion. There was Jehovahism, and there were the various sects, Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, which disputed violently between themselves and contended, around the temple, for power over the people. They were not only sects, but also political parties, and the most powerful of them were the Pharisees with their "oral traditions" of what God had said to Moses.

If today the Zionists are "the Jews" (and this is the claim accepted by all great Western nations), then the party which in Judea in the time of Jesus corresponded to the Zionists was that of the Pharisees. Jesus brought the whole weight of his attack to bear on these Pharisees. He also rebuked the Sadducees and the scribes, but the Gospels show that he held the Pharisees to be the foe of God and man and that he used an especial scarifying scorn towards them. The things which he singled out for attack, in them and in their creed, are the very things which today's Zionists claim to be the identifying features of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism.

Religiously, Jesus seems beyond doubt to have been the opposite and adversary of all that which would make a literal Jew today or would have made a literal Pharisee then.

None can say with certainty who or what he was, and these suggestive statements by non-Jewish politicians ring as false as the derisive and mocking lampoons about "the bastard" which circulated in the Jewish ghettoes.

What he did and said is of such transcendental importance that nothing else counts. On a much lesser scale Shakespeare's case is somewhat comparable. The quality of inspiration in his works is clear, so that it is of little account whether he wrote them, or who wrote them if he did not, yet the vain argument goes on.

The carpenter's son from Galilee evidently had no formal schooling: "The Jews marvelled, saying, How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?"

What is much more significant, he had known no rabbinical schools or priestly training. His enemies, the Pharisees, testify to that; had he been of their clan or kind they would not have asked, "Whence hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works".

What gives the teaching of this unlettered young man its effect of blinding revelation, the quality of light first discovered, is the black background, of the Levitical Law and the Pharisaic tradition, against which he moved when he went to Judea. Even today the sudden fullness of enlightenment, in the Sermon on the Mount, dazzles the student who has emerged from a critical perusal of the Old Testament; it is as if high noon came at midnight.

The Law, when Jesus came to "fulfil" it, had grown into a huge mass of legislation, stifling and lethal in its immense complexity. The Torah was but the start; heaped on it were all the interpretations and commentaries and rabbinical rulings; the elders, like pious silkworms, span the thread ever further in the effort to catch up in it every conceivable act of man; generations of lawyers had laboured to reach the conclusion that an egg must not be eaten on the Sabbath day if the greater part of it had been laid before a second star was visible in the sky.

Already the Law and all the commentaries needed a library to themselves, and a committee of international jurists, called to give an opinion on it, would have required years to sift the accumulated layers.

The unschooled youth from Galilee reached out a finger and thrust aside the entire mass, revealing at once the truth and the heresy. He reduced "all the Law and the Prophets" to the two commandments, Love God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself.

This was the exposure and condemnation of the basic heresy which the Levites and Pharisees, in the course of centuries, had woven into the Law.

Leviticus contained the injunction, "Love thy neighbour as thyself, but it was governed by the limitation of "neighbour" to fellow-Judeans. Jesus now reinstated the forgotten, earlier tradition, of neighbourly love irrespective of race or creed; this was clearly what he meant by the words, "I am not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil". He made his meaning plain when he added, "Ye have heard that it hath been said... hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemy". (The artful objection is sometimes made that the specific commandment, "Hate thine enemy", nowhere appears in the Old Testament. Jesus's meaning was clear; the innumerable injunctions to the murder and massacre of neighbours who were not "neighbours", in which the Old Testament abounds, certainly required hatred and enmity).

This was a direct challenge to The Law as the Pharisees represented it, and Jesus carried the challenge further by deliberately refusing to play the part of the nationalist liberator and conqueror of territory for which the prophecies had cast the Messiah. Probably he could have had a much larger following, and possibly the support of the Pharisees, if he had accepted that role.

His rebuke, again, was terse and clear: "My kingdom is not of this world... The kingdom of Heaven is within you... Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth... but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal".

Everything he said, in such simple words as these, was a quiet, but direct challenge to the most powerful men of his time and place, and a blow at the foundations of the creed which the sect had built up in the course of centuries.

What the entire Old Testament taught in hundreds of pages, the Sermon on the Mount confuted in a few words. It opposed love to hatred, mercy to vengeance, charity to malice, neighbourliness to segregation, justice to discrimination, affirmation (or reaffirmation) to denial, and life to death. It began (like the "blessings-or-cursings" chapters of Deuteronomy) with blessings, but there the resemblance ended.

Deuteronomy offered material blessings, in the form of territory, loot and slaughter, in return for strict performance of thousands of "statutes and judgments", some of them enjoining murder. The Sermon on the Mount offered no material rewards, but simply taught that moral behaviour, humility, the effort to do right, mercy, purity, peaceableness and fortitude would be blessed for their own sake and receive spiritual reward.

Deuteronomy followed its "blessings" with "cursings". The Sermon on the Mount made no threats; it did not require that the transgressor be "stoned to death" or "hanged on a tree", or offer absolution for non-observance at the price of washing the hands in the blood of a heifer. The worst that was to befall the sinner was that he was to be "the least in the kingdom of heaven"; and most that the obedient might expect was to be "called great in the kingdom of heaven".

The young Galilean never taught subservience, only an inner humility, and in one direction he was consistently and constantly scornful: in his attack on the Pharisees.

The name, Pharisees, denoted that they "kept away from persons or things impure". The Jewish Encyclopaedia says, "Only in regard to intercourse with the unclean and the unwashed multitude did Jesus differ widely from the Pharisees". Echo may answer, "Only!" This was of course the great cleavage, between the idea of the tribal deity and the idea of the universal god; between the creed of hatred and the teaching of love. The challenge was clear and the Pharisees accepted it at once. They began to bait their traps, in the very manner described by Jeremiah long before: "All my familiars watched for my halting, saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him".

The Pharisees watched him and asked, "Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners" (a penal offence under their Law). He was equally their master in debate and in eluding their baited traps, and answered, swiftly but quietly, "They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick... I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance".

They followed him further and saw his disciples plucking ears of corn to eat on the Sabbath (another offence under the Law), "Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the Sabbath day". They pursued him with such interrogations, always related to the rite, and never to faith or behaviour; "why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders, for they wash not their hands when they eat bread?". "Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophecy of you, saying, this people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments oj men" ,

This was the lie direct: The Law, he charged, was not God's law, but the law of the Levites and Pharisees: "the commandments of men"!

From this moment there could be no compromise, for Jesus turned away from the Pharisees and "called the multitude, and said unto them, Hear, and understand: Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man".

With these words Jesus cast public scorn on one of the most jealously- guarded of the priestly prerogatives, involving the great mass of dietary laws with the whole ritual of slaughter, draining of blood, rejection of "that which dieth of itself, and so on. All this was undoubtedly a "commandment of man", although attributed to Moses, and strict observance of this dietary ritual was held to be of the highest importance by the Pharisees, Ezekiel (the reader will recall) on being commanded by the Lord to eat excrement "to atone for the iniquities of the people", had pleaded his unfailing observance of the dietary laws and had had his ordeal somewhat mitigated on that account. Even the disciples were apparently so much under the influence of this dietary tradition that they could not understand how "that which cometh out of the mouth" could defile a man, rather than that which went in, and asked for an explanation, remarking that the Pharisees "were offended, after they heard this saying".

The simple truth which Jesus then gave them was abominable heresy to the Pharisees: "Do not ye understand, that what whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: these are the things which defile a man; but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man".

This last remark was another penal offence under the Law and the Pharisees began to gather for the kill. They prepared the famous trick questions: "Then went the Pharisees and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk". The two chief questions were, "To whom shall we render tribute?" and "Who then is my neighbour?" A wrong answer to the first would deliver him to punishment by the foreign ruler, Rome. A wrong answer to the second would enable the Pharisees to denounce him to the foreign ruler as an offender against their own Law, and to demand his punishment.

This is the method earlier pictured by Jeremiah and still in use today, in the Twentieth Century. All who have had to do with public debate in our time, know the trick question, carefully prepared beforehand, and the difficulty of answering it on the spur of the moment. Various methods of eluding the trap are known to professional debaters (for instance, to say "No comment", or to reply with another question). To give a complete answer, instead of resorting to such evasions, and in so doing to avoid the trap of incrimination and yet maintain the principle at stake is one of the most difficult things known to man. It demands the highest qualities of quickwittedness, presence of mind and clarity of thought. The answers given by Jesus to these two questions remain for all time the models, which mortal man can only hope to emulate.

"Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?" (the affable tone of honest enquiry can be heard). "But Jesus perceived their wickedness and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites?... Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's. When they heard these words, they marvelled, and left him and went their way".

On the second occasion, "a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him, saying, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" In his answer Jesus again swept aside the great mass of Levitical Law and restated the two essentials: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart... and thy neighbour as thyself". Then came the baited trap: "And who is my neighbour?"

What mortal man would have given the answer that Jesus gave? No doubt some mortal men, knowing like Jesus that their lives were at stake, would have said what they believed, for martyrs are by no means rare. But Jesus did much more than that; he disarmed his questioner like an expert swordsman who effortlessly sends his opponent's rapier spinning into the air. He was being enticed to declare himself openly; to say that "the heathen" were also "neighbours", and thus to convict himself of transgressing The Law. In fact he replied in this sense, but in such a way that the interrogator was undone; seldom was a lawyer so confounded.

The Levitical-Pharisaic teaching was that only Judeans were "neighbours", and of all the outcast heathen they especially abominated the Samaritans (for reasons earlier indicated). The mere touch of a Samaritan was defilement and a major "transgression" (this continues true to the present day). The purpose of the question put to him was to lure Jesus into some statement that would qualify him for the major ban; by choosing the Samaritans, of all peoples, for the purpose of his reply, he displayed an audacity, or genius, that was more than human:

He said that a certain man fell among thieves and was left for dead. Then came "a priest" and "likewise a Levite" (the usual stinging rebuke to those who sought the chance to put him to death), who "passed by on the other side". Last came "a certain Samaritan", who bound the man's injuries, took him to an inn, and paid for his care: "which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?"

The lawyer, cornered, could not bring himself to pronounce the defiling name "Samaritan"; he said, "He that showed mercy on him" and thereby joined himself (as he probably realized too late) with the condemnation of those for whom he spoke, such as "the priest" and "the Levite". "Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise". In these few words, and without any direct allusion, he made his interrogator destroy, out of his own mouth, the entire racial heresy on which the Law had been raised.

One moderate Judaist critic, Mr. Montefiore, has made the complaint that Jesus made one exception to his rule of "love thine enemies"; he never said a good word for the Pharisees.

Scholars may debate the point. Jesus knew that they would kill him or any man who exposed them. It is true that he especially arraigned the Pharisees, together with the scribes, and plainly saw in them the sect responsible for the perversion of the Law, so that the entire literature of denunciation contains nothing to equal this:

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye neither go in yourselves neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in... ye compass sea and land to

make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves ye

pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith... ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess... ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness... ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, if we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have partaken with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers..."

Some critics profess to find the last six words surprisingly harsh. However, if they are read in the context of the three sentences which precede them they are seen to be an explicit allusion to his approaching end, made by a man about to die to those who were about to put him to death, and at such a moment hardly any words could be hard enough. (However, even the deadly reproach, "Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers", had a later sequel: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do".)

The end approached. The "chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders" (the Sanhedrin) met under the high priest Caiaphas to concert measures against the man who disputed their

authority and their Law. The only Judean among the Galilean disciples, Judas Iscariot, led the "great multitude with swords and staves", sent by the "chief priests and elders of the people", to the garden of Gethsemane and identified the man they sought by the kiss of death.

This Judas deserves a passing glance. He was twice canonized in the Twentieth Century, once in Russia after the Bolshevist Revolution, and again in Germany after the defeat of Hitler, and these two episodes indicated that the sect which was more powerful than Rome, in Jerusalem at the start of our era, was once more supremely powerful in the West in the Twentieth Century.

According to St. Matthew, Judas later hanged himself and if he thus chose the form of death "accursed of God", his deed presumably brought him no happiness. To Zionist historians of Dr. Kastein's school Judas is a sympathetic figure; Dr. Kastein explains that he was a good man who became disappointed with Jesus and therefore "secretly broke" with him (the words "secretly broke" could only occur in Zionist literature).

The Pharisees, who controlled the Sanhedrin, tried Jesus first, before what would today be called "a Jewish court". Possibly "a people's court" would be a more accurate description in today's idiom, for he was "fingered" by an informer, seized by a mob, hailed before a tribunal without legitimate authority, and condemned to death after false witnesses had spoken to trumped-up charges.

However, the "elders", who from this point on took charge of events in exactly the same way as the "advisers" of our century control events, devised the charge which deserved death equally under their "Law" and under the law of the Roman ruler. Under "the Mosaic Law", Jesus had committed blasphemy by claiming to be the Messiah; under the Roman law, he had committed treason by claiming to be the king of the Jews.

The Roman governor, Pilate, tried one device after another, to avoid complying with the demand of these imperious "elders", that the man be put to death.

This Pilate was the prototype of the Twentieth Century British and American politician. He feared the power of the sect in the last resort, more than anything else. His wife urged him to have no truck with the business. He tried, in the politician's way, to pass the responsibility to another, Herod Antipas, whose tetrarchy included Galilee; Herod sent it back to him. Pilate next tried to let Jesus off with a scourging, but the Pharisees insisted on death and threatened to denounce Pilate in Rome: "Thou art not Caesar's friend".

This was the threat to which Pilate yielded, just as one British Governor after another, one United Nations representative after another, yielded in the Twentieth Century to the threat that they would be defamed in London or New York. Evidently Pilate, like these men nineteen centuries later, knew that his home government would disavow or displace him if he refused to do as he was bid.

The resemblance between Pilate and some British governors of the period between the First and Second World Wars is strong, (and at least one of these men knew it, for when he telephoned to a powerful Zionist rabbi in New York he jocularly asked, as he relates, that the High Priest Caiaphas be informed that Pontius Pilate was on the line).

Pilate made one other attempt to have the actual deed done by other hands: "Take ye him, and judge him according to your law". With the ease of long experience it was foiled: "it is not lawful for us to put any man to death".

After that he even tried to save Jesus by giving "the people" the choice between pardoning Jesus or Barabbas, the robber and murderer. Presumably Pilate had small hope from this quarter, for "the people" and "the mob" are synonyms and justice and mercy never yet came from a mob, as Pilate would have known; the function of the mob is always to do the will of powerful sects. Thus, "the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus".

In this persuasion of the multitude the sect is equally powerful today.

The longer the time that passes, the more brightly glow the colours of that unique final scene. The scarlet robe, mock sceptre, crown of thorns and derisive pantomime of homage; only Pharisaic minds could have devised that ritual of mockery which today so greatly strengthens the effect of the victim's victory. The road to Calvary, the crucifixion between two thieves: Rome, on that day, did the bidding of the Pharisees, as Persia, five hundred years before, had done that of the Levites.

These Pharisees had taught the people of Judea to expect a Messiah, and now had crucified the first claimant. That meant that the Messiah was still to come. According to the Pharisees the Davidic king had yet to appear and claim his empire of the world, and that is still the situation today.

Dr. Kastein, in his survey of Judaism from its start, devotes a chapter to the life of Jesus. After explaining that Jesus was a failure, he dismissed the episode with the characteristic words, "His life and death are our affair".

Chapter 11. THE PHARISAIC PHOENIX

Then comes the familiar, recurrent paradox; the catastrophe of Judea, which followed within a few decades of the death of Jesus, was the triumph of the Pharisees, for it left them supreme in Jewry. By the crucifixion of Jesus they rid themselves of a "prophet and dreamer" who would have cast down their Law. The brief remaining years of Judea rid them of all other parties that contended with them for power under that Law.

After the death of Jesus the Pharisees, according to the Jewish Encyclopaedia, found "a supporter and friend" in the last Herodian king of Judea, Agrippa I. Agrippa helped dispose of the Sadducees, who disappeared from the Judean scene, leaving all affairs there in the hands of the Pharisees (whose complaint about the Idumean line, therefore, seems to have little ground). They were thus left all-powerful in Jerusalem, like the Levites after the severance of Judah from Israel, and as on that earlier occasion disaster at once followed. In rising, phoenix-like, from the ashes of this, the Pharisees also repeated the history of the Levites.

During the few remaining years of the tiny and riven province the Pharisees once more revised "the Law", those "commandments of men" which Jesus had most scathingly attacked. Dr. Kastein says, "Jewish life was regulated by the teachings of the Pharisees; the whole history of Judaism was reconstructed from the Pharisaic point of view... Pharisaism shaped the character of Judaism and the life and the thought of the Jew for all the future... It makes 'separatism' its

chief characteristic".

Thus, in the immediate sequel to Jesus's life and arraignment of the "commandments of men", the Pharisees, like the Levites earlier, intensified the racial and tribal nature and rigour of the Law; the creed of destruction, enslavement and dominion was sharpened on the eve of the people's final dispersion.

Dr. Kastein's words are of especial interest. He had earlier stated (as quoted) that after the infliction of the "New Covenant" on the Judahites by Nehemiah, the Torah received a "final" editing, and that "no word" of it was thereafter to be changed. Moreover, at the time of this Pharisaic "reconstruction" the Old Testament had already been translated into Greek, so that further changes made by the Pharisees could only have been in the original.

It seems more probable that Dr. Kastein's statement refers to the Talmud, the immense continuation of the Torah which was apparently begun during the last years of Judea, although it was not reduced to writing until much later. Whatever happened, "the life and the thought of the Jew" were once again settled "for all the future", and "separatism" was reaffirmed as the supreme tenet of the Law.

In AD 70, perhaps thirty-five years after the death of Jesus, all fell to pieces. The confusion and disorder in Judea were incurable and Rome stepped in. The Pharisees, who had originally invited Roman intervention and were supreme in Judea under the Romans, remained passive.

Other peoples of Palestine, and most especially the Galileans, would not submit to Rome and after many risings and campaigns the Romans entered and razed Jerusalem. Judea was declared conquered territory and the name vanished from the map. For long periods during the next nineteen hundred years no Jews at all lived in Jerusalem (the Samaritans, a tiny remnant of whom have survived all the persecutions, are the only people who have lived continuously in Palestine since Old Testamentary times).

Dr. Kastein calls the seventy years which ended with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem "The Heroic Age", presumably because of the Pharisaic triumph over all others in the contest for the soul of Judaism. He can hardly intend to apply the adjective to the fighting against the Romans, as this was so largely done by the alien Galileans, of whom he is no admirer.

Chapter 12. THE LIGHT AND THE SHADOW

Before Jerusalem fell in 70 AD two bands of travellers passed through its gates. The disciples bore a new message to mankind, for Christianity had been born. The Pharisees, foreseeing the fate which they had brought on Jerusalem, removed to a new headquarters from which (as from Babylon of yore) the ruling sect might exercise command over "the Jews", wherever in the world they lived.

These two small groups of travellers were the vanguard of parties of light and of darkness which, like a man and his shadow, have gone ever since through the centuries, and ever westward.

The crisis of "the West" today traces directly back to that departure from doomed Jerusalem nineteen centuries ago, for the two groups bore into the West ideas that could never be reconciled. One had to prevail over the other, sooner or later, and the great bid for victory of the destructive idea is being witnessed in our generation.

In the centuries between the story of the West was always, in essentials, that of the struggle between the two ideas. When "the Law" according to the Levites and Pharisees was in the ascendant, the West made slaves of men, brought heretics before an inquisition, put apostates to death, and yielded to primitive visions of master-racehood; thus the Twentieth Century was the time of the worst backsliding in the West. When the West made men and nations free, established justice between them, set up the right of fair and open trial, repudiated master-racehood and acknowledged the universal fatherhood of God, it followed the teaching of him who had come to "fulfil the Law".

The Romans, when they took Jerusalem, struck medals with the inscription, "Judaea devicta, Judaea capta". This was a premature paean; Jerusalem might be ruined and Judea be empty of Jews, but the ruling sect was free and victorious. Its opponents around the temple had been swept away by the conqueror and it was already established in its new "centre", to which it had withdrawn before the fall of the city.

The Pharisees were as supreme in this new citadel as the Levites once in Babylon, but in the outer world they espied a new enemy. The sect which believed that the Messiah had appeared, and called itself Christian, did not acknowledge this enmity; on the contrary, its ruling tenet was "love your enemies". But as the first tenet of the Pharisaic law was "hate your enemies", this was in itself a deliberate affront and challenge to the elders in their retreat.

They saw from the start that the new religion would have to be destroyed if their "Law" were to prevail, and they were not deterred by the warning voices which (at this juncture as on all earlier and later occasions) were heard within their own ranks; for instance, Gamaliel's words when the high priest and council were about to have Peter and John scourged for preaching in the temple: "Consider well what you are about to do. If this be the work of men, it will soon fall to nothing; but if it be the work of God you cannot destroy it". The majority o the Pharisees felt strong enough, in their own manmade Law, to "destroy it", and if necessary to work for centuries at that task.

Thus the Pharisees, when they left the surviving Judeans to their fate and set up their new headquarters at Jamnia (still in Palestine), took their dark secrets of power over men into a world different from any before it.

Previously their tribal creed had been one among many tribal creeds. Blood vengeance had been the rule among all men and clans. The neighbouring "heathen" might have been alarmed by the especial fierceness and vindictiveness of the Judaic creed, but had not offered anything much more enlightened. From this time on, however, the ruling sect was confronted by a creed which direcdy controverted every tenet of their own "Law", as white controverts black. Moreover, this new idea in the world, by the manner and place of its birth, was forever a rebuke to themselves.

The Pharisees in their stronghold prepared to vanquish this new force that had risen in the world. Their task was larger than that of the Levites in Babylon. The temple was destroyed and Jerusalem was depopulated. The tribe of Judah had long since been broken up; now the race of Judeans was dissolving. There remained a "Jewish nation", composed of people of many admixtures of blood, who were spread all over the known world, and had to be kept united by the power of the tribal idea and of the "return" to a land "promised" to a "special people"; this dispersed nation had also to be kept convinced of its destructive mission among the nations where it dwelt.

"The Law", in the form that was already becoming known to the outer world, could not again be amended, or new historical chapters be added to it. Moreover, Jesus had addressed his rebukes specifically to the falsification of these "commandments of men" by the scribes. He had been killed but not controverted or even (as the growth of the Christian sect showed) given his quietus. Thus his arraignment of the Law stood and was so conclusive that not even the Pharisees could expect to convince anybody simply by calling him a transgressor of it.

Nevertheless, the Law needed constant reinterpretation and application to the events of changing times, so that the "special people" could always be shown that each and every event, however paradoxical at first sight, was in fact one of Jehovan fulfilment. The Pharisees at Jamnia invoked once more their claim to possess the oral secrets of God and began, under it, to reinterpret the "statutes and commandments" so that these could be shown to apply to Christianity. This was the origin of the Talmud, which in effect is the anti-Christian extension of the Torah.

The Talmud became, in the course of centuries, "the fence around the Law"; the outer tribal stockade around the inner tribal stockade. The significance lies in the period at which it was begun: when Judea was gone, when "the people" were scattered among all nations, and when a new religion was taking shape which taught that God was the father of all men, not merely the patron of a selected tribe.

Looking back from this distance of time, the task which the Pharisees undertook looks hopeless, for the wish to become part of mankind must surely have had strong appeal to a scattered people.

The Pharisees, as the event has proved, were successful in their huge undertaking. The Talmud was effective in interposing a fence between the Jews and the forces of integration released by Christianity.

Two examples from our present time illustrate the effect of the Talmud, many centuries after its compilation. The brothers Thoreau in their books give the diligent student some rare glimpses behind the Talmudic walls; in one book they depict the little Jewish boy in Poland who had been taught to spit, quite mechanically, as he passed the wayside Calvary and to say, "Cursed be thou who created another religion". In 1953, in New York, a young missionary of the Moravian Church in Jerusalem described the seizure by the Zionists of the Moravian leper home there, called "The Jesus Mission"; their first act was to putty over the name "Jesus" which for more than a hundred years had been inscribed above its door.

Such incidents as these (and the ban on the mention of the name Jesus) derive directly from the teaching of the Talmud, which in effect was another "New Law" with a specifically anti-Christian application. For this reason the next period in the story of Zion is best described as that of the Talmudists, the former ones being those of the Pharisees and of the Levites.

While the Pharisaic Talmudists, in their new academy at Jamnia, worked on the new Law, the tidings of Jesus's life and lesson spread through the territories of Rome.

A Pharisee gready helped to spread them; Saul of Tarsus set out from Jerusalem (before its fall) to exterminate heretics in Damascus and before he arrived there became a follower of Christ. He preached to Jew and Gentile alike, until he was prevented, and he told the Jews, "It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you; but seeing that ye put it from you and judge yourselves worthy of everlasting life, we turn to the Gentiles".

Dr. Kastein says of Saul, named Paul, that "he made all those whom he persuaded to believe in his prophecy renegades in the widest sense, whether they were Jew or Gentile".

However, what Paul (and others) said was in fact inevitable at that point in time, because men everywhere were groping towards the universal God and turned to the teaching of Jesus as growing things to the light. Possibly this impulse in men was also the reason why Jesus had to appear among the Judeans; the Judaic creed was tribalism in its most fanatical form, even at that time, and, as every action produces its reaction, the counter-idea was bound to appear where the pressure was greatest.

This was a fateful moment for that great area, then little known or populated, which today is called The West. Had not the disciples turned their faces westward, the term, "the West", and that which it denotes, might never have come about.

What is called "Western civilization" cannot be conceived without Christianity. During the nineteen hundred years which followed the death of Jesus the West improved so greatly that it left the rest of the world behind. In material things its advance was so great that at the time when this book was written it was on the brink of the conquest of space; it was about to open the universe to exploration by man. But that was much the lesser part of its achievement.

Its greatest improvement was in the field of the spirit and of man's behaviour towards man. The West established men's right to public charge and open trial, or release, (a right which was again in jeopardy in the Twentieth Century) and this was the greatest advance in the entire history of man; on the survival or destruction of this achievement depends his future.

The shadow that followed the disciples out of the gates of Jerusalem, before the Romans entered, also followed Christianity into the West and the Talmudic sect dogged it during all those centuries. The West, in the Twentieth Century, became the scene of the struggle between the nations which had risen with Christianity and the sect dedicated to the destructive idea.

Not only the West is involved in its issue. About five hundred years after the life of Jesus the instinctive impulse of men to seek one God produced another challenge to Talmudic racialism, and this time it came from among the Semitic masses. The Arabs, too, attained to the concept of one God of all men.

Muhammad (dismissed by Dr. Kastein as "a half-educated Bedouin"), like Saul on the road to Damascus, had a vision of God. His teaching in many ways resembled that of Jesus. He held Jesus to have been, like Abraham and Moses, a prophet of God (not the Messiah). He regarded himself as the successor of Moses and Jesus and as the prophet of God, whom he called Allah. There was but one God, Allah, the creator of mankind, and Allah was not the tribal god of the Arabs, but the God of all men.

This religion, like Christianity, taught no hatred of other religions. Muhammad showed only reverence for Jesus and his mother (who are both the subjects of profane derision in Talmudic literature).

However, Muhammad held the Jews to be a destructive force, self-dedicated. The Koran says of them, "Oft as they kindle a beacon fire for war, shall God quench it. And their aim will be to abet disorder on the earth; but God loveth not the abettors of disorder". All down the centuries the wisest men spoke thus of the tribal creed and the sect, until the Twentieth Century of our era, when public discussion of this question was virtually suppressed.

Thus was Islam born, and it spread over the meridianal parts of the known world as Christianity spread over the West and Buddhism, earlier, over the East. Great streams began to move, as if towards a confluence at some distant day, for these universal religions are in no major tenet as oil and water, and in the repudiation of master-racehood and the destructive idea they agree.

Christianity and Islam spread out and embraced great masses of mankind; the impulse that moved in men became clear. Far behind these universal religions lay Judaism, in its tribal enclosure, jealously guarded by the inner sect.

In the Twentieth Century this powerful sect was able to bring the masses of Christendom and Islam to the verge of destructive battle with each other. If the present generation sees that clash, the spectacle will be that of one great universal religion contending with another for the purpose of setting up the creed of the "master-race".

Towards this strange denouement, nineteen centuries ahead, the two parties of men set out from Jerusalem long ago.

Chapter 13. THE FENCE AROUND THE LAW

The story of Zion, from its start, falls into five distinct phases: those of the Levites, the Pharisees, the Talmudists, the "emancipation" interlude and the Zionists. This narrative has now reached the third phase.

The Levitical phase was that of isolated Judah, the Babylonian "captivity" and "return", and the production and enforcement of "the Mosaic Law". The Pharisaic phase, which followed and roughly coincided with the Roman overlordship of the province of Judea, ended with the second destruction of Jerusalem, the dispersion of the last Judeans, the Pharisaic supremacy and the withdrawal of the "government" to its new "centre" at Jamnia.

The third, Talmudic phase was much the longest for it lasted seventeen centuries, from 70 AD to about 1800 AD. During this period the Jews entered the West and the "government", from a succession of "centres", worked tirelessly to keep the dispersed nation under its control, subject to "the Law", and separate from other peoples.

As this was also the period of Western civilization and of the rise of Christianity, it was inevitable that Christendom specifically (and not merely the generic "heathen", or "strangers", or "other gods") should become the chief target of the Law's destructive commands.

In the eyes of the dominant sect and its devotees, this period, which seems so long and important to Western minds, was essentially as insignificant as the Babylonian period. The fact that the one lasted seventeen centuries and the other fifty years made no real difference: both were merely periods of "exile" for the special people; and under the Law the long Western episode, like the short Babylonian one, was ordained to terminate in disaster for the "captors", a Jewish triumph and a new "return", all of which some new Daniel would interpret in those terms.

The seventeen centuries represented a new "captivity", under the Law, which laid down that wherever the chosen people dwelt outside Jerusalem they were in captivity, and that this captivity was in itself "persecution".

To a literal Zionist like Dr. Kastein, therefore, the seventeen centuries which saw the rise of Christendom form a page of history which is blank save for the record of "Jewish persecution" inscribed on it. The rest was all sound and fury, signifying nothing; it was a period of time during which Jehovah used the heathen to plague the Jews while he prepared the triumph of his special people; and for what they did the heathen have yet to pay (he cries). The one positive result of the seventeen Christian centuries, for him, is that the Jews emerged from them still segregated from mankind, thanks to their Talmudic governors.

Certainly this was an astounding feat; in the entire history of negative achievement, nothing can approach the results obtained by the elders of Zion. In the Talmud they built that "fence around the Law" which successfully withstood, during seventeen hundred years, all the centrifugal forces which attracted the Jews towards mankind.

While they reinforced their stockade, European men, having accepted Christianity, toiled through the centuries to apply its moral law to daily life, by abolishing serfdom and slavery, reducing privilege and inequality and generally raising the dignity of man. This process was known as "emancipation" and by the year 1800 it was about to prevail over the system of absolute rulers and privileged castes.

The Jews, directed by their Talmudic rulers, took a leading part in the struggle for emancipation. That in itself was fair enough. The masses of Christendom held from the start that the liberties to be won should ultimately accrue to all men, without distinction of race, class or creed; that was the very meaning of the struggle itself, and anything else or less would have made it meaningless.

Nevertheless, in the case of the Jews there was an obvious paradox which repeatedly baffled and alarmed the peoples among whom they dwelt: The Jewish Law expressed the theory of the master-race in the most arrogant and vindictive form conceivable to the human imagination; how then could the Jews attack nationhood in others? Why did the Jews demand the levelling of barriers between men when they built an ever stronger barrier between the Jews and other men? How could people, who claimed that God had made the very world itself for them to rule, and forbade them to mix with lesser breeds, complain of discrimination?

Now that another hundred and fifty years have passed, the answer to such questions has been given by events.

It was true that the Jewish clamour for emancipation was not truly concerned with the great idea or principle at issue: human liberty. The judaic Law denied that idea and principle. The Talmudic governors of Jewry saw that the quickest way to remove the barriers between themselves and power over nations was to destroy legitimate government in these nations; and the quickest way to that end was to cry "emancipation!".

Thus the door opened by emancipation could be used to introduce the permanent revolutionary force into the life of nations; with the destruction of all legitimate government, the revolutionaries would succeed to power, and these revolutionaries would be Talmud-trained and Talmud-controlled. They would act always under the Mosaic Law, and in this way the end of Babylon could be reproduced in the West.

The evidence of events in the Twentieth Century now shows that this was the plan to which the Talmudic elders worked during the third phase of the story of Zion, from 70 AD to about 1800 AD. Thus there was the widest possible difference in the understanding of "emancipation" by the Christianized European peoples among whom the Jews dwelt and among the Talmudic rulers of the Jews. For the great mass of peoples emancipation represented an end: the end of servitude. For the powerful, secret sect it represented a means to the opposite end; the imposition of a new and harsher servitude.

One great danger attended this undertaking. It was, that the destruction of barriers between men might also destroy the barrier between the Jews and other men; this would have destroyed the plan itself, for that force would have been dispersed which was to be used, emancipation once gained, to "pull down and destroy" the nations.

This very nearly happened in the fourth phase of the story of Zion; the century of emancipation (say, from 1800 to 1900 AD) brought the peril of "assimilation". In the century of "freedom" a great number of Jews, in Western Europe and in the new "West" oversea, did evince the desire to cast off the chains of the Judaic Law and to mingle themselves with the life of peoples. For that reason our Zionist historian, Dr. Kastein, considers the Nineteenth Century to be the darkest age in all Jewish history, fraught with the deadly peril of involvement in mankind, which happily was averted. He cannot contemplate without horror the destruction, through assimilation, of the Judaic barriers of race and creed. Thus he calls the Nineteenth Century movement towards emancipation "retrograde" and thanks God that "the Zionist ideology" preserved the Jews from the fate of assimilation.

That led to the fifth phase, the one which began in about 1900 and in which we live. The Talmudic stockade held fast and at the end of the fourth phase the Jews, fully "emancipated" in the Western understanding, were still segregated under their own Law. Those who tended to escape, towards "assimilation", were then drawn back into the tribal enclosure by the mystic power of nationalism.

Using the power over governments which it had gained through emancipation, the ruling sect achieved a second "return" to the chosen land, and thus reestablished the Law of 458 BC, with its destructive and imperial mission. A chauvinist fever, which yet must run its course, was injected into the veins of world Jewry; the great power wielded over Western governments was used to a co-ordinated end; and the whole destructive ordeal of the West in the Twentieth Century was related to and dominated by the ancient ambition of Zion, revived from antiquity to become the dogma of Western politics.

This fifth phase is about fifty-five years old as the present book is written, and its first results are formidable. The "Mosaic Law" has been superimposed on the life of Western peoples, which in fact is governed by that law, not by any law of their own. The political and military operations of two world wars have been diverted to promote the Zionist ambition and the life and treasure of the West have been poured out in support of it.

Forty years of continuous bloodshed in Palestine have obviously been but the prelude to what is yet to come there. Any third world war may begin and spread outward from Palestine, and if one were to start elsewhere it would in its course foreseeably revolve around and turn on the ambition of Zion, which will not be fulfilled until a much greater area in the Middle East has been conquered, "other Gods" have been thrown down, and "all nations" have been enslaved.

Dr. Kastein sees in this fifth phase the golden age when "history may be resumed" (after the meaningless interregnum known as the Christian era) and Zionism, as "the possessor of a world mission", will re-enter into a destined inheritance, culminating in world dominion, of which it was criminally dispossessed in AD 70 (when "history" was interrupted).

This narrative has now reached the third of these five phases, the long one when the Talmudic scribes in the Academy at Jamnia began with infinite industry to spin The Law into a much greater web, of endless ramifications, from which a Jew could hardly escape without dire penalty. By means of it the seemingly impossible was achieved: a breed of people dispersed throughout the world was for seventeen hundred years kept apart from mankind and was trained for a destructive task in the Twentieth Century of the Christian era.

Some account of that remarkable period of preparation and organization, when a fence was built around the Judaic Law, so that "liberty" should not absorb the special people or weaken their destructive force, is here appropriate.

Chapter 14. THE MOVABLE GOVERNMENT

The Pharisaic elders who moved to Jamnia from Jerusalem before its destruction in 70 AD intended, like the Levites in Babylon earlier, to set up a centre of power and remote-control, from which they might keep in subjection a tribal organization, by that time distributed over the earth. They took with them to Jamnia the accumulated experience of Jerusalem and Babylon and the stored secrets of ages and they succeeded in establishing a mobile government which has continued to exercise authority over the Jews until the present day.

Before the last battles with Rome (says Dr. Kastein) "a group of teachers, scholars and educators repaired to Jamnia, taking the fate of their people on their shoulders so as to be responsible for it through the ages... At Jamnia the central body for the administration of the Jewish people was established... As a rule, when a nation has been utterly routed as the Jews were on this occasion, they perish altogether. But the Jewish people did not perish... They had already learnt how to change their attitude during the Babylonian captivity... And they followed a similar course now".

At Jamnia the Old Sanhedrin, the source of all legislative, administrative and judicial authority, was established under a new name. In addition, an academy was created for the further development of The Law. In it, the scribes continued the revelation of Jehovah's mind and the interpretation of The Law, so often said to have been put in its final form. In fact, as the dogma is that the Law governs every act of human life in circumstances which continually change, it never could or can be finally codified and must ever be expanded.

Apart from that permanent reason for revision, the new factor, Christianity, had arisen and the Law's application to it had to be defined. Thus the Torah (the Law) began to receive its huge supplement, the Talmud, which was of equal or greater authority.

From Jamnia the Law was administered which "raised an insuperable barrier against the outside world", enforced a discipline "rigid to the point of deadliness", and "kept proselytes at arm's length". The aim was to "make the life of the Jew utterly different from that of the Gentiles". Any law that received a majority of votes of the Sanhedrin became enforcible throughout the dispersed Judaist communities everywhere; "opponents were threatened with the ban, which meant being excluded from the community".

In this way, "the centre of the circle was finally fixed, and the circle itself fully described in the form of the law and the hedge that was set about the people". During this period (before Christianity became the religion of Rome) the secret edict went out from "the centre" at Jamnia, authorizing Jews to pretend denial of their creed and profess conversion to "pagan religions", if circumstances made this expedient.

The period of government from Jamnia lasted for about a century, and then it was transferred to Usha in Galilee, where the Sanhedrin was re-established. "Judaism set limitations about itself and grew ever more exclusive"; at this time the special curse on Jewish Christians was pronounced. In 320 AD the Roman Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity, and enacted laws which forbade marriages between Christians and Jews and forbade Jews to keep Christian slaves. These were the natural response to the Law of exclusion and "stranger"-slavery administered by the Talmudic government at Usha, but they were held to be "persecution" and to escape their reach "the centre" was moved back to Babylonia, where the Judean colony, which eight centuries earlier had preferred to stay there rather than "return" to Jerusalem, "was still intact". The Talmudic government was set up at Sura, and academies were established there at Pumbedita.

The Talmud, begun at Jamnia and Usha, was completed at Sura and Pumbedita. "A ring of vast proportions and colossal elasticity" was built around the Jews everywhere; the mystic circle of fear and superstition was drawn tighter. From Sura an Exilarch (prince of the captivity of the house of David), ruled, but in time he became a figurehead. Thereafter "the president of the academy" (in effect, the high priest and prime minister) "laid down the rules and regulations not only for the Babylonian Jews but for the whole of Judaism... The Jews throughout the world recognized the academies in Babylonia as the authoritative centre of Judaism, and regarded any laws they passed as binding".

Thus the nation-within-nations, the state-within-states, was enfettered and ruled by the Talmudic government in Babylonia.

The core of dogma remained as Ezekiel, Ezra and Nehemiah had shaped and enforced it; but the Talmud, in effect, had taken the place of the Torah, as the Torah earlier had supplanted the "oral traditions". The heads of the academies of Sura and Pumbedita were called Gaonim and began to exercise autocratic power over the scattered Jews. The shadowy Exilarchs (later Nasim, or princes) were dependent on their approval and the Sanhedrin surrendered its functions to them, or was deprived of these. When doubt arose among Jews, anywhere in the world, about the interpretation or application of the Law in any matter of the day, the question was referred to the Gaonate. The verdicts and judgments returned (in the name of Jehovah) from the distant government were the Gaonic Reponses, or laws enacted from Babylonia, to which Jews everywhere submitted, or incurred danger of excommunication.

In this manner the Talmudic thrall spread round the dispersed Jews, wherever they dwelt, "like a closely woven net... over ordinary days and holidays, over their actions and over their prayers, over their whole lives and every step they took... Nothing in their external lives was any longer allowed to be the sport of arbitrary settlement or of chance". This is the picture of an absolute despotism, different from other despotisms only in the element of distance between the despots and their subjects. Given a benevolent mission, a community of people so closely controlled might immensely fructify the life of peoples; given a destructive one, their presence among others is like that of a blasting charge in rock, operated by a distant hand on a plunger.

For six hundred years the Talmudic government, at Jamnia, Usha, and Sura, remained in or near to its native, oriental climate, where its nature was comprehended by other peoples; they knew how to cope with and counter the savage tribal creed and, as long as they were not hampered or constrained by foreign powers in their dealings with it, they were always able to find a workaday compromise, which enabled all to live in practical amity side by side.

Then came the event which has produced such violent results in our time: the Talmudic government moved into Christianized Europe and established itself among peoples to whom the nature of its dogma and its methods were strange and even incomprehensible. This led, in the course of many centuries, to the recurrent clash of the alien ambition and creed against native interest, which our century is again experiencing.

The nature of Westerners (more especially in the northern latitudes) is to be candid, to declare purposes, and to use words to express intention, and Christianity developed these native traits. The force which appeared among them was of the opposite character, oriental, infinitely subtle, secretive, conspiratorial, and practised in the use of language to disguise real purposes. Therein lay its greatest strength in the encounter with the West.

The removal to Europe came about through the Islamic conquests. The Arabs, under the Prophet's banner, drove the Romans from Palestine. By this means the native inhabitants of Palestine, who had inhabited it some two thousand years before the first Hebrew tribes entered, became the rulers of their own country, and remained so for nine hundred years (until 1517, when the Turks conquered it). An instructive comparison may be made between the Islamic and the Judaic treatment of captives:

The Caliph's order to the Arab conquerors in 637 AD was, "You shall not act treacherously, dishonestly, commit any excess or mutilation, kill any child or old man; cut or burn down palms or fruit trees, kill any sheep, cow or camel, and shall leave alone those whom you find devoting themselves to worship in their cells". Jehovah's order, according to Deuteronomy 20.16, is, "Of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shall save alive nothing that breatheth".

From Palestine, Islam then spread its frontiers right across North Africa, so that the great mass of Jews came within the boundaries of the same external authority. Next, Islam turned towards Europe and invaded Spain. Therewith the shadow of Talmudic Zionism fell across the West. The Moorish conquest was "supported with both men and money" by the Jews, who as camp-followers were treated with remarkable favour by the conquerors, city after city being handed to their control! The Koran itself said, "Their aim will be to abet disorder on the earth"; the Islamic armies certainly facilitated this aim.

Christianity thus became submerged in Spain. In these propitious circumstances the Talmudic government was transferred from Babylonia to Spain, and the process began, the results of which have become apparent in our generation. Dr. Kastein says:

"Judaism, dispersed as it was over the face of the globe, was always inclined to set up a fictitious state in the place of the one that had been lost, and always aimed, therefore, at looking to a common centre for guidance... This centre was now held to be situated in Spain, whither the national hegemony was transferred from the East. Just as Babylonia had providentially taken the place of Palestine, so now Spain opportunely replaced Babylonia, which, as a centre of Judaism, had ceased to be capable of functioning. All that could be done there had already been accomplished; it had forged the chains with which the individual could bind himself, to avoid being swallowed up by his environment: the Talmud".

The reader will observe the description of events: "individuals" do not commonly bind themselves, of choice, with chains forged for them. Anyway, the Jewish captivity was as close as ever, or perhaps had been made closer. That was for the Jews to ponder.

What was to become of vital importance to the West was that the Jewish government was now in Europe, The directing centre and the destructive idea had both entered the West.

The Talmudic government of the nation-within-nations was continued from Spanish soil. The Gaonate issued its directives; the Talmudic academy was established at Cordova; and sometimes, at least, a shadow)' Exilarch reigned over Jewry.

This was done under the protection of Islam; the Moors, like Babylon and Persia before, showed remarkable benevolence towards this force in their midst. To the Spaniards the invader came to bear more and more a Jewish countenance and less and less a Moorish one; the Moors had conquered, but the conqueror's power passed into Jewish hands. The story which the world had earlier seen enacted in Babylon, repeated itself in Spain, and in later centuries was to be re-enacted in every great country of the West.

The Moors remained in Spain for nearly eight hundred years. When the Spanish reconquest, after this long ordeal, was completed in 1492 the Jews, as well as the Moors, were expelled. They had become identified with the invaders' rule and were cast out when it ended, as they had followed it in.

The "centre" of Talmudic government was then transferred to Poland.

At that point, less than four centuries before our own generation, a significant mystery enters the story of Zion: why was the government set up in Poland? Up to that stage the annals reveal no trace of any large migration of Jews to Poland. The Jews who entered Spain with the Moors came from North Africa and when they left most of them returned thither or went to Egypt, Palestine, Italy, the Greek islands and Turkey. Other colonies had appeared in France, Germany, Holland and England and these were enlarged by the arrival among them of Jews from the Spanish Peninsula. There is no record that any substantial number of Spanish Jews went to Poland, or that any Jewish mass-migration to Poland had occurred at any earlier time.

Yet in the 1500's, when the "centre" was set up in Poland, "a Jewish population of millions came into being there ", according to Dr. Kastein. But populations of millions do not suddenly "come into being". Dr. Kastein shows himself to be aware that something needs explanation here, and to be reluctant to go into it, for he dismisses the strange thing with the casual remark that the size of this community, of which nothing has previously been heard, "was more due to immigration, apparently from France, Germany and Bohemia, than to any other cause". He does not explain what other cause he might have in mind and, for a diligent scholar, is on this one occasion strangely content with a random surmise.

But when a Zionist historian thus slurs over something the seeker after knowledge may be fairly sure that the root of the matter may by perseverance be found.

So it is in this case; behind Dr. Kastein's artless conjecture the most important fact in the later story of Zion is concealed. The "centre" of Jewish government was at this time planted among a large community of people who were unknown to the world as Jews and in fact were not Jews in any literal sense. They had no Judahite blood at all (for that matter; Judahite blood must by this time have been almost extinct even among the Jews of Western Europe) and their forefathers had never known Judea, or any soil but that of Tartary.

These people were the Khazars, a Turco-Mongolian race which had been converted to Judaism in about the 7th century of our era. This is the only case of the conversion of a large body of people of quite distinct blood to Judaism (the Idumeans were "brothers"). The reason why the Talmudic elders permitted or encouraged it can only be guessed; without it, however, the "Jewish question" would by now have joined the problems that time has solved.

This development (which will be further discussed in a later chapter) was of vital, and perhaps even mortal importance to the West. The natural instinct of Europe was always to expect the greatest danger to its survival from Asia. From the moment when "the centre" was transferred to Poland these Asiatics began to move towards, and later to enter the West in the guise of "Jews" and they brought Europe to its greatest crisis. Though their conversion had occurred so long before they were so remote that the world might never have known of them, had not the Talmudic centre been set up among them, so that they came to group themselves around it.

When they became known, as "Eastern Jews", they profited by the confusing effect of the contraction of the word Judahite, or Judean, to "Jew"; none would ever have believed that they were judahites or Judeans. From the time when they took over the leadership of Jewry the dogma of "the return" to Palestine was preached in the name of people who had no Semitic blood or ancestral link with Palestine whatever!

From this period the Talmudic government operated with a masse de manoeuvre of a different Asiatic order.

Once again, a virtually independent state was formed within the Polish state, which like so many states before and after showed the greatest benevolence to the nation-within-nations that took shape within its gates. As in the earlier and later cases this in no wise mitigated the hostility of the Talmudic Jews towards it, which was proverbial.

Dr. Kastein gives the picture of this independent Jewish government during the Polish phase. The Talmudists were allowed to draw up "a constitution", and through the 1500's and 1600's the Jews in Poland lived under "an autonomous government". This administered "an iron system of autonomy and an iron religious discipline, which inevitably resulted in the formation of an oligarchic body of administrators and the development of an extreme form of mysticism" (this gives the picture of the training, under rigid discipline in close confinement, which produced the Communist and Zionist revolutionaries of our century).

This autonomous Talmudic government was called the Kahal. In its own territory the Kahal was a fully-empowered government, under Polish suzerainty. It had independent authority of taxation in the ghettoes and communities, being responsible for payment of a global sum to the Polish government. It passed laws regulating every action and transaction between man and man and had power to try, judge, convict or acquit.

This power only nominally stopped short of capital punishment: Professor Salo Baron says, "In Poland, where the Jewish court had no right to inflict capital punishment, lynching, as an extra-legal preventive, was encouraged by rabbinical authorities such as Solomon Luria". (This quotation reveals the inner meaning of Dr. Kastein's frequent, but cautious, allusions to "iron discipline", "inexorable discipline", "discipline rigid to the point of deadliness", and the like).

In effect, a Jewish state, Talmud-ruled, was recreated on the soil of Poland.

As Dr. Kastein says, "Such was the constitution of the Jewish state, planted on foreign soil, hemmed in by a wall of foreign laws, with a structure partly self-chosen and partly forced upon it... It had its own Jewish law, its own priesthood, its own schools, and its own social institutions, and its own representatives in the Polish government... in fact, it possessed all the elements which go to form a state". The achievement of this status was due "in no small measure to the co-operation of the Polish Government".

Then, in 1772, Poland was partitioned and this great community of "Eastern Jews", organized as a state-within-the-state, was divided by national boundaries, most of it coming under Russian rule. At that point, for the first time in more than 2500 years and less than two hundred years before our own day, the "centre" of Jewish government disappears from sight. Up to 1772 there had always been one: in Poland, Spain, Babylonia, Galilee, Judea, Babylon and Judah.

Dr. Kastein says that "the centre ceased to exist". The suggestion is that the centralized control of Jewry at that moment ended, but the length and strength of its earlier survival, and the significant events of the ensuing century, confute that. In a later passage Dr. Kastein himself reveals the truth, when he jubilantly records that in the Nineteenth Century "a Jewish international took shape".

Clearly "the centre" continued, but from 1772 in secret. The reason for the withdrawal into concealment may be deduced from the shape of later events.

The century which followed was that of the revolutionary conspiracy, Communist and Zionist, culminating in the open appearance of these two movements, which have dominated the present century. The Talmudic "centre" was also the centre of this conspiracy. Had it remained in the open the source of conspiracy would have been visible, and the identification of the Talmudic, Eastern Jews with it obvious.

In the event this only became clear when the revolution of 1917 produced an almost all-Jewish government in Russia; and by that time power over governments in the West was so great that the nature of this new regime was little discussed, a virtual law of heresy having come into force there. Had the visible institution continued, the masses of the West would in time have become aware that the Talmudic government of Jewry, though it led the clamour for "emancipation", was also organizing a revolution to destroy all that the peoples might gain from this emancipation.

The Russians, among whom this largest single community of Jews at that time dwelt, knew what had happened. Dr. Kastein says, "The Russians wondered what could possibly be the reason why the Jews did not amalgamate with the rest of the population, and came to the conclusion that in their secret Kahals they possessed a strong reserve, and that a 'World KahaP existed". Dr. Kastein later confirms what the Russians believed, by his own allusion to the "Jewish international" of the Nineteenth Century.

In other words, the "government" continued, but in concealment, and probably in the different form suggested by Dr. Kastein's word "international". The strong presumption is that the "centre" today is not located in any one country and that, although its main seat of power is evidently in the United States, it now takes the form of a directorate distributed among the nations and working in unison, over the heads of governments and peoples.

The Russians, who at the time of the disappearance of "the centre" from public view were better informed than any others about this matter, have been proved right.

The manner in which this international directorate gains and wields its power over Gentile governments is no longer quite mysterious; enough authentic, published information has come out of these last fifty years to explain that, as this book will later show.

The mystery of its agelong hold over "Jews" is more difficult to penetrate. How has a sect been able to keep people, distributed around the globe, in the clutch of a primitive tribalism during twenty-five centuries?

The next chapter seeks to give some insight into the methods used during the third and longest phase of the story of Zion, the Talmudic period which lasted from AD 70 to about 1800. These methods have so much of the Orient and of Asia in them that they are puzzling to Western minds and are best comprehended by those whose own experience took them much among the communities of "Eastern Jews" before the Second World War, and into secret-police states, where rule is also by fear and terror.

Chapter 15. THE TALMUD AND THE GHETTOES

Whatever else is in dispute, one thing is incontestable: that great force must repose in a Law which for nineteen centuries obtains obedience from people scattered over the earth, when by an effort of will they could escape its thrall. The Talmud was (and is) such a law, and the only one of its kind.

"The Talmud was regarded almost as the supreme authority by the majority of Jews... Even the Bible was relegated to a secondary place" (the Jewish Encyclopaedia). "The absolute superiority of the Talmud over the Bible of Moses must be recognized by all" (the Archives Israelites, quoted by Mgr. Landrieux). "The words of the elders are more important than the words of the Prophets" (the Talmud, Treatise Berachofh, i.4.).

The compilation of the Talmud began at Jamnia, the part played in Babylon by Ezekiel and Ezra being played in this new revision of the Law, by the rabbi known as Judah the Holy or the Prince.

It was in effect a massive addition to the "statutes and judgments" of Deuteronomy, Eeviticus and Numbers. All the laws which "the centre" enacted were appended to the Torah as the "Oral Torah", having equal divine origin. Then they were written down in the Mishna. Later again (under the oft-used pretext of "completing" the work) immense records of rabbinical discussions and rulings were added in the Gemara, but as the Gemara was the product of two distinct Jewish communities, those of Jerusalem in the fifth and of Babylon in the seventh century, there are two Talmuds, known as the Palestinian and the Babylonian.

The Talmud, which thus was produced during the Christian era, is anti-Christian. It is supposed to derive from the same original source as the Torah; the priestly scribes who compiled it once more claimed to revise or expand under powers "orally" bestowed on Mount Sinai.

The copy of the Christian Bible which I have states that "the churches of all denominations receive and accept" the Old Testament "as given by inspiration of God, therefore being for them a Divine rule or guide of faith and practice", a ruling which comes down from the Council of Trent. A question therefore arises: in what way was the inspiration of the Talmud different from that of the Torah? If it was not different, then why should not the anti-Christian Talmud be added to the Christian Bible?

If that were done the entire work would extend along several shelves of a library, and the New Testament would be a tiny pamphlet, lost among and excommunicated by the Talmudic mass, the teaching of which is thus summarized by the Talmudic scholar Drach:

"The precepts of justice, of equity, of charity towards one's neighbours, are not only not applicable with regard to the Christian, but constitute a crime in anyone who would act differently... The Talmud expressly forbids one to save a non-Jew from death... to restore lost goods, etc., to him, to have pity on him".

The theological decision about the "equal divine authority" of the Torah seems to have introduced an element of confusion into the Christian lesson from which Christianity itself in the end might not recover.

The Talmudic precepts just quoted are not essentially different in nature from those included in Deuteronomy when that "second Law" was made public a thousand years before the Palestinian Talmud was completed; they are merely given a specifically anti-Christian application.

Why was the Talmud necessary at all? The reasons seem clear. The Judeans had been finally dispersed about the world, or at any rate until such time as these "exiles" should be "in-gathered" and congregate again around the temple. The world where they were scattered contained a new "enemy" in the form of a religion which had been born in the very declaration that Phariseeism was heresy: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" Moreover, the Judaic Law had become known through translation to the heathen world, which had even found some things in it that it could use. Thus the special people, if they were to be kept apart, needed a new Law of their own, which could be kept from the eyes of the Gentiles. The Torah needed "a hedge" about it, strong enough to preserve the exiles both from absorption by other peoples and from "a- whoring after other gods".

The Talmud was essentially the hostile answer to Christianity, the order-of-battle revised in the light of "the enemy's" new dispositions. The lay encyclopaedias (which in our generation have been made untrustworthy on subjects related to Judaism) disguise this fact from Gentile readers. The one now before me, for instance, says, "The Talmud has been attacked by Christians at times - quite unfairly - as anti-Christian". The insertion of two suggestive words by some partisan Scribe causes this volume to purvey demonstrable untruth and to convert a factual statement into a propagandist one. The attack on Christianity gave the Talmud its distinctive tone and is indeed the only new thing in the Talmud. Its other teaching remains that of Ezekiel and the Pharisees.

The Jewish Encyclopaedia says, "It is the tendency of Jewish legends in the Talmud, the Midrash" (the sermons in the synagogues) "and in the Life of Jesus Christ (Toledoth Jeshud) that originated in the Middle Ages to belittle the person of Jesus by ascribing to him illegitimate birth, magic and a shameful death". He is generally alluded to as "that anonymous one", "liar", "impostor" or "bastard" (the attribution of bastardy is intended to bring him under The Law as stated in Deuteronomy 23.2: "A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord"). Mention of the name, Jesus, is prohibited in Jewish households.

The work cited by the Jewish Encyclopaedia as having "originated in the Middle Ages" is not merely a discreditable memory of an ancient past, as that allusion might suggest; it is used in Hebrew schools today. It was a rabbinical production of the Talmudic era and repeated all the ritual of mockery of Calvary itself in a different form. Jesus is depicted as the illegitimate son of Mary, a hairdresser's wife, and of a Roman soldier called Panthera. Jesus himself is referred to by a name which might be translated "Joey Virgo". He is shown as being taken by his stepfather to Egypt and there learning sorcery.

The significant thing about this bogus life-story (the only information about Jesus which Jews were supposed to read) is that in it Jesus is not crucified by Romans. After his appearance in Jerusalem and his arrest there as an agitator and a sorcerer he is turned over to the Sanhedrin and spends forty days in the pillory before being stoned and hanged at the Feast of the Passover; this form of death exactly fulfils the Law laid down in Deuteronomy 21.22 and 17.5, whereas crucifixion would not have been in compliance with that Judaichaw. The book then states that in hell he suffers the torture of boiling mud.

The Talmud also refers to Jesus as "Fool", "sorcerer", "profane person", "idolater", "dog", "child of lust" and the like more; the effect of this teaching, over a period of centuries, is shown by the book of the Spanish Jew Mose de Leon, republished in 1880, which speaks of Jesus as a "dead dog" that lies "buried in a dunghill". The original Hebrew texts of these Talmudic allusions appear in Laible's Jesus Christus im Talmud. This scholar says that during the period of the Talmudists hatred of Jesus became "the most national trait of Judaism", that "at the approach of Christianity the Jews were seized ever and again with a fury and hatred that were akin to madness", that "the hatred and scorn of the Jews was always directed in the first place against the person of Jesus" and that "the Jesus-hatred of the Jews is a firmly-established fact, but they want to show it as little as possible".

This wish to conceal from the outer world that which was taught behind the Talmudic hedge led to the censoring of the above-quoted passages during the seventeenth century. Knowledge of the Talmud became fairly widespread then (it was frequently denounced by remonstrant Jews) and the embarrassment thus caused to the Talmudic elders led to the following edict (quoted in the original Hebrew and in translation by P.L.B. Drach, who was brought up in a Talmudic school and later became converted to Christianity):

"This is why we enjoin you, under pain of excommunication major, to print nothing in future editions, whether of the Mishna or of the Gemara, which relates whether for good or evil to the acts of Jesus the Nazarene, and to substitute instead a circle like this: O, which will warn the rabbis and schoolmasters to teach the young these passages only viva voce. By means of this precaution the savants among the Nazarenes will have no further pretext to attack us on this subject" (decree of the Judaist Synod which met in Poland in 1631. At the present time, when public enquiry into such matters, or objection to them, has been virtually forbidden by Gentile governments, these passages, according to report, have been restored in the Hebrew editions of the Talmud).

This vilification of the founder of another religion sets Judaism apart from other creeds and the Talmud from other literature published in the name of religion. Muslims, Buddhists, Confucians, Christians and others do not hate other creeds or their founders as such. They are content to differ and to believe that the paths may one day meet, God deciding the meeting-point.

For instance, the Koran describes Jesus as "strengthened with the Holy Spirit" and the Jews are reproached with rejecting "the Apostle of God", to whom was given "the Evangel with its guidance and light". Of his mother, the Koran says, "O Mary! verily hath God chosen thee and purified thee, and chosen thee above the women of the world", and, "Jesus, the son of Mary, illustrious in this world, and in the next, and one of those who have near access to God".

The central message of the Talmud, the newest "new Law", is plain: it specifically extended the Law to apply to Christianity and left no doubt about the duty of a Jew towards it.

Another motive for the new compendium was the problem created for the inner sect by the fact that the Gentiles had found much in the translated Torah that appealed to them (despite the obvious fact that it was lethally directed against them). The earlier Levitical scribes could not foresee that (because they could not foresee the translation itself). The ruling sect needed a new Law of its own, into which "stranger" eyes could not pry, and it needed to make the Jews understand that, though the heathen inexplicably had bound the racio-religious Law into the Christian Bible, this Law nevertheless still was the Law of the Jews alone, and inexorably in force.

Thus the Talmud set out to widen the gap and heighten the barrier between the Jews and others. An example of the different language which the Torah spoke, for Jews and for Gentiles, has previously been given: the obscure and apparently harmless allusion to "a foolish nation" (Deuteronomy, 32.21). According to the article on Discrimination against Gentiles in the Jewish Encyclopaedia the allusion in the original Hebrew is to "vile and vicious Gentiles", so that Jew and Gentile received very different meanings from the same passage in the original and in the translation. The Talmud, however, which was to reach only Jewish eyes, removed any doubt that might have been caused in Jewish minds by perusal of the milder translation; it specifically related the passage in Deuteronomy to one in Ezekiel, 23.20, and by so doing defined Gentiles as those "whose flesh is as the flesh of asses and whose issue is like the issue of horses"! In this spirit was the, "interpretation" of The Law continued by the Talmudists.

The Talmudic edicts were all to similar effect. The Law (the Talmud laid down) allowed the restoration of a lost article to its owner if "a brother or neighbour", but not if a Gentile. Book-burning (of Gentile books) was recommended (book-burning is a Talmudic invention, as the witch-hunt was prescribed by the Torah). The benediction, "Blessed be Thou... who has not made me a goi", was to be recited daily. Eclipses were of bad augury for Gentiles only. Rabbi Levi laid down that the injunction not to take revenge (Leviticus 19.18) did not apply to Gentiles, and apparently invoked Ecclesiastes 8.4 in support of his ruling (a discriminatory interpretation then being given to a passage in which the Gentile could not suspect any such intention).

The Jew who sells to a Gentile landed property bordering on the land of another Jew is to be excommunicated. A Gentile cannot be trusted as witness in a criminal or civil suit because he could not be depended on to keep his word like a Jew. A Jew testifying in a petty Gentile court as a single witness against a Jew must be excommunicated. Adultery committed with a non-Jewish woman is not adultery "for the heathen have no lawfully wedded wife, they are not really their wives". The Gentiles are as such precluded from admission to a future world.

Finally, the Talmudic interpretation of the original moral commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart", is that "man shall occupy himself with the study of Holy Scripture and of the Mishna and have intercourse with learned and wise men". In other words, the man who best proves his love of God is he who studies the Talmud and shuns his Gentile fellow-man.

An illustrative glimpse from our present time sometimes best shows the effect produced on human minds by centuries of Talmudic rule. In 1952 a Mr. Frank Chodorov published this anecdote: "One very cold night the rabbi tottered into our house in a pitiful condition; it took half a dozen glasses of boiling tea to thaw him out. He then told how a sympathetic goy had offered him a pair of gloves and why he had refused the gift; a Jew must not be the instrument of bringing a mitvah, or blessing, on a non-believer. This was the first time, I believe, that I came smack up against the doctrine of the 'chosen people', and it struck me as stupid and mean".

So much for the "hedge" which the Talmud set up between the Jews and mankind, and for the feeling of contempt and hatred for "strangers" which it set out to instil in the Jews. What did it do to the Jews themselves? Of this, the Jewish Encyclopaedia says, "The Talmudists made the Torah into a penal code". For once, in this painstakingly accurate work, the meaning is not quite clear; the Torah already was a penal code (as perusal of it today will show), and its penalties had sometimes been applied (by Ezra and Nehemiah against the Jews; and for that matter by the Romans, at the behest of the Sanhedrin, against the "prophet and dreamer of dreams", Jesus). Possibly the meaning is that, under the Talmudists, the penal code was regularly enforced, and its provisions strengthened.

That is certainly true; the rabbinical practice, previously cited, of "encouraging lynching as an extra-legal preventive", because they were not allowed by host-governments to pronounce death sentences, shows in how real a sense the Talmud could be applied as "a penal code". It was a very far cry from the few moral commandments of remote tradition to the multitudinous laws and regulations of the Talmud, which often forbade moral behaviour and assigned drastic punishments for "transgressions". Observance of these laws, not moral behaviour, remained the basis.

The Talmudic Law governed every imaginable action of a Jew's life anywhere in the world: marriage, divorce, property settlements, commercial transactions, down to the pettiest details of dress and toilet. As unforeseen things frequently crop in daily life, the question of what was legal or illegal (not what was right or wrong) in all manner of novel circumstances had incessantly to be debated, and this produced the immense records of rabbinical dispute and decisions in which the Talmud abounds.

Was it as much a crime to crush a flea as to kill a camel on the sacred day? One learned rabbi allowed that the flea might be gently squeezed, and another thought its feet might even be cut off. How many white hairs might a sacrificial red cow have and yet remain a red cow? What sort of scabs required this or that ritual of purification? At which end of an animal should the operation of slaughter be performed? Ought the high priest to put on his shirt or his hose first? Methods of putting apostates to death were debated; they must be strangled, said the elders, until they opened their mouths, into which boiling lead must be poured. Thereon a pious rabbi urged that the victim's mouth be held open with pincers so that he not suffocate before the molten lead enter and consume his soul with his body. The word "pious" is here not sardonically used; this scholar sought to discover the precise intention of "the Law".

Was Dr. Johnson acquainted with or ignorant of the Talmud; the subject might prove a fascinating one for a literary debating society. He gave one argument its quietus by declaring, "There is no settling the point of precedence between a louse and a flea". Precisely this point had been discussed, and settled, among the Talmudic scholars. Might a louse or a flea be killed on the Sabbath? The Talmudic reponse was that the first was allowed and the second was a deadly sin.

"The Talmud became the unbreakable husk around a kernel determined to survive; it encased the heart of the Jew with a spirituality which though cold as ice was strong as steel to protect... The Talmud, which they carried with them everywhere, became their home", A home made of ice and steel, behedged and walled around, with all the windows stopped and the doors barred; the picture is Dr. Kastein's.

In this home the Jews, "owing to the acceptance of the idea of the Chosen People, and of salvation... could interpret everything that happened only from the standpoint oj themselves as the centre". The planet swam in space, among the myriad stars, only to enthrone them on a mound of gold in a temple surrounded by heathen dead; "the Law raised an insuperable barrier against the outside world".

No Jew, save a Talmudic scholar, could know all of this huge compendium. Probably no Gentile could gain access to an unedited version. A college of specialists and a lifetime of work would be needed to compare such translations as have been made with the originals, if they were made available. Many students, until recently, found the lack of translations significant, but the present writer cannot see that this is important. Enough is known of the Talmud (and most of this from Jewish or converted-Jewish sources) for its nature to be clear, and nothing is gained by heaping proof endlessly on proof. Ample enlightenment can be obtained from the Jewish Encyclopaedia, the German translation of the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds (Zurich 1880 and Leipzig 1889), William Ruben's Der alte und der neue Glaube im ]udentum, Strack's Einleitung in den Talmud, Laible's Jesus Christus im Talmud, Drach's De I'Harmoni entre I'Eglise et la Synagogue, and Graetz's History of the Jews.

The Talmud is admittedly manmade. The Torah was attributed to the voice of Jehovah, recorded by Moses. This is of great significance.

The reason for the difference is obvious: Mosaic manuscripts "hoary with the dust of ages" could not be indefinitely discovered. The scribes had to accept the responsibility, simply declaring that in doing so they used the absolute power of interpretation "orally" given to the first of their line. Thus they revealed the truth: that They, and none other, were God!

Dr. Kastein was accurate in saying, "It was not God who willed these people and their meaning; it was this people who willed this God and this meaning", or he would have been accurate had he said, "these scribes" instead of "this people". The earlier generation of scribes had willed the revelation made in Deuteronomy; the later one willed the Talmudic God and demanded that "these people" accept the Talmud as a continuation of the revelation earlier "willed".

When the Talmud was completed the question which the future had to answer was whether the central sect would succeed in imposing this New Law on the scattered Jews, as Ezra and Nehemiah, with Persian help, had inflicted the New Covenant on the Judahites in Jerusalem in 444 BC.

They did succeed. In 1898, at the Second World Zionist Congress at Basel, a Zionist from Russia, Dr. Mandelstamm of Kieff, declared, "The Jews energetically reject the idea of fusion with other nationalities and cling firmly to their historical hope, i.e., of world empire".

The Twentieth Century is witnessing the attempt to consummate that hope. Probably the institution of the ghetto chiefly helped the Talmudists to this success.

In the Twentieth Century the masses have been misled to think of "the ghetto" as a kind of concentration camp for Jews set up by Gentile persecutors. The same operation on fact has been performed on the entire history of oppression in the West; in the Twentieth Century all else has been drained away until what remains is presented solely as "the Jewish persecution".

The many persecutions of men during the last 1 900 years have involved the Jews in proportion to their numbers, so that their share of the total mass of suffering was small (in the most notorious case of the present century, that of Russia, they were the oppressors, not the oppressed). I do not know if I should ever have elicited this fact, had not my own experience confronted me so sharply with it.

The ghetto was not something inflicted on the Jews by the Gentiles. It was the logical product of the Talmudic Law, and derived directly from the experiment in Babylon. Dr. Kastein describes the Talmud as "the home" which the Jews took everywhere with them. However, for physical life they also needed four walls and a roof. The Talmud itself decreed that the Gentiles were not "neighbours" and that a Jew might not sell landed property adjoining that of a Jew to a Gentile. The express object of such provisions as these was the segregation of Jews from others and their isolation in ghettoes.

The first ghetto was that which the Babylonian rulers allowed the Levites to set up in Babylon. The next was the Jerusalem around which Nehemiah, backed by the Persian king's soldiers, built new walls, wherefrom he drove out all non-Judahites. From those models the European ghetto took its shape. This institution is probably the most onerous part of the modern Jew's spiritual inheritance:

"The ghetto, friend, the ghetto, where all hopes at birth decay".

Jews who never saw a ghetto carry a half-conscious memory of it within them like a haunting fear, yet it was essentially a Talmudist conception, to which their ancestors surrendered. It was the perfect means of corralling a scattered congregation, imprisoning people's minds, and wielding power over them.

The demand for a ghetto often came from the Talmudists (that is to say, outside Poland, where all Jewish life, of course, was ghetto-life). The modern suggestion that the ghetto signified inferiority is part of the legend of "persecution", which is chiefly meant to intimidate Jews, so that they shall always fear to venture outside the fold; today's myth of "antisemitism" is intended to produce the same effect on them.

In ancient Alexandria (the New York of its day) and in medieval Cairo and Cordova the Jewish quarters were established at the insistence of the rabbis, intent on keeping their flock isolated from others. In 1084 the Jews of Speyer petitioned the ruling German prince to set up a ghetto; in 1412, at Jewish request, a ghetto law was enacted throughout Portugal. The erection of the ghetto walls in Verona and Mantua was for centuries celebrated annually by the Jews there in a festival of victory (Purim). The ghettoes of Russia and Poland were an essential and integral part of theTalmudic organization and any attempt to abolish them would have been denounced as persecution.

When the Roman ghetto was destroyed at Mussolini's order in the early 1930's the Jewish press (as Mr. Bernard J. Brown records) lamented the event in such words as these:

"One of the most unique phenomena of Jewish life in Goluth is gone. Where but a few months ago a vibrant Jewish life was pulsating, there now remains a few half-destroyed buildings as the last vestige of the quondam ghetto. It has fallen victim to the Fascist passion for beauty and under Mussolini's order the ghetto has been razed...".

The implication of this is that the razing of the ghetto was "Fascism", just as the original creation of ghettoes (at Jewish demand) is presented as persecution by the Zionist historians of today.

With emancipation the ghetto disappeared; its maintenance would too blatantly have shown that the rulers of Jewry had no true intention of sharing in emancipation on an equal basis.

The Jewish Encyclopaedia recorded in its 1903 edition that "in the whole civilized world there is now not a single ghetto, in the original meaning of the word: The qualification is important, because in many places and ways the Jews continue the closed-community life, though without the identifying walls, and the law forbidding the sale of neighbour-land to Gentiles, without permission, has not lapsed (to give one instance, illustrative to those who know the city: in Montreal an entire district east of the Mountain has by such methods been made almost as solidly Jewish as if it were a ghetto).

The decline of the ghetto, during the century of emancipation, was a blow to the main prop of Talmudic power. A substitute had to be found unless the ghetto-spirit (as distinct from the physical ghetto) was to disintegrate altogether, and one was found in Zionism, which is the new method devised to re-corral the communities:

"There are many who desire greater control over Jews by Jews, and who resent the dissolution of this control in Russia, where once a ghetto made such control easy and absolute" (Rabbi Elmer Berger). "Only the intellectually blind can fail to note that the promotion of group life, centered around ancient religious traditions and cultures, is a return to the ghetto... There can be no glory in a group of people striving to perpetuate ghetto life... Even a cursory reading of history shows that the Jew built his own ghettoes" (Mr. Bernard J. Brown).

Zionism is the true revival of Talmudic ghettoism, as these two Jewish authorities state. It is designed to undo the work of emancipation, to re-segregate the Jews, and to reimpose the creed of "severance" on them in full force. The chauvinist appeal of conquest and empire in the Middle East is being used to disguise this true meaning of the process.

The direction in which Jews were moving before Zionism set out to recapture them may be seen in this quotation from the article on The Attitude of Modem Judaism in the Jewish Encyclopaedia, 1916:

"Modern Judaism as inculcated in the catechism and explained in the declarations of the various rabbinical conferences, and as interpreted in the sermons of modern rabbis, is founded on the recognition of the unity of the human races; the law of righteousness and truth being supreme over all men, without distinction of race, or creed, and its fulfilment being possible for all.

Righteousness is not conditioned by birth. The Gentiles may attain unto as perfect a righteousness as the Jews... In the modern synagogues, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour like thyself (Leviticus 29) signified every human being".

Much has changed since 1916, and in 1955 these words are but the picture of what might have been. No doubt individual rabbis continue to "interpret their sermons" in this sense, but unless they are of the stuff of which heroes and martyrs are made they cannot long defy their congregations, and these have been taken back centuries by the appeal of Zionism.

The Zionists have gained political control over Gentile governments and the Jewish masses alike, so that what the individual remonstrant says is of little weight. The Zionists have restored the Levitical Law, in its Pharisaic and Talmudic interpretations, in full force. Their actions towards others in the past have been and in the future will be guided by that, and not by what "the attitude of modern Judaism" was in 1916.

The great change came in the year, 1917, which followed the publication of the words quoted above. The tradition of the Talmud and the ghettoes was still too strong, among the masses of Jewry, for "the attitude of modern Judaism" to prevail over the fanatical elders who then appeared.

Chapter 16. THE MESSIANIC LONGING

The Talmudic regime in the close confinement of the ghettoes was in its nature essentially rule by terror, and employed the recognizable methods of terror: spies-on-spies, informers, denunciants, cursing and excommunication, and death. The secret-police and concentration-camp regime of the Communist era evidently took its nature from this model, which was familiar to its Talmudic organizers.

During the many centuries of Talmudist government the terror, and the dogma which it enclosed, produced two significant results. These were recurrent Messianic outbursts, which expressed the captives' longing to escape the terror; and recurrent protests against the dogma, from the Jews themselves.

These were latterday symptoms of the feeling expressed on the ancient day when "the people wept" at the reading of The Law. The Talmud forbade the Jew almost every activity other than the amassing of money ("they only conceded just enough to the people about them to make their economic activities possible"; Dr. Kastein) and the study of the Talmud ("whenever the Law could not be unequivocally applied to the relations of life, they endeavoured to discover its interpretation").

The energies of the people were directed to spinning ever more tightly about themselves the net in which they were enmeshed: "They not only set a hedge about the Law, but, by cutting themselves off more definitely than ever from the outside world, and by binding themselves more exclusively to a given circle of laws, they set a hedge about themselves". With every breath they drew and movement they made, they had to ask themselves, "Does the Talmud allow or forbid this", and the ruling sect decided.

Even the most docile in time questioned the credentials of such a Law, asking "Can it be really true that every new edict and ban derives from God's revelation at Sinai?" That was their rulers' claim: "according to the Jewish view God had given Moses on Mount Sinai alike the oral and written Law, that is, the Law with all its interpretations and applications' ', says Mr. Alfred Edersheim. The people submitted to, but could not always inwardly accept so obviously political a claim, and this inner rebellion against something outwardly professed often led to strange happenings.

For instance, a Portuguese Marrano (a converted, or sometimes a secret Jew) called Uriel da Costa was once reconverted to Judaism, and then became appalled by the Talmud. In 1616, at Hamburg, he published his Thesis against Tradition in which he attacked "the Pharisees", charging that the Talmudic laws were their creation and not of any divine origin. The treatise was addressed to the Jews of Venice and the rabbi there, one Leo Modena, thereon by command pronounced the dreaded "Ban" on da Costa. At Rabbi Modena's death papers found among his effects showed that he had held exacdy the same view as da Costa, but had not dared to declare that for which he excommunicated da Costa.

As a Communist Leo Modena would be a familiar figure in our own century. In effect, he sentenced to death the man whose beliefs he shared. Da Costa returned to the attack in 1624 with his Test of the Pharisaical Tradition by Comparing it with the Written Taw. The Talmudists of Amsterdam, where da Costa then was, denounced him to the Dutch courts on the ground that his treatise was subversive of the Christian faith, and it was burned at the order of these Gentile authorities, who thus carried out the Talmudic Law!

This act of Gentile submission to the ruling sect recurs through all history from the time of Babylon to the present day. Da Costa was literally hounded to death and in 1640 shot himself.

Jewish history shows many such episodes. The student of this subject walks with terror as he turns its pages. The "Great Ban" was in effect a death sentence, and was so intended. It called down on the victim the "cursings" enumerated in Deuteronomy, and cursing was (and by the literal devotees of this sect still is) held to be literally effective.

The article on "Cursing" in the Jewish Encyclopaedia says, "Talmudic literature betrays a belief, amounting to downright superstition, in the mere power of the word... Not only is a curse uttered by a scholar unfailing even if undeserved... Scholars cursed sometimes not only with their mouths, but by an angry, fixed look. The unfailing consequence of such a look was either immediate death or poverty".

This is recognizably the practice known today as "the evil eye", of which my encyclopaedia says, "This superstition is of ancient date, and is met with among almost all races, as it is among illiterate people and savages still". The Jewish Enyclopaedia shows that it is a prescribed legal penalty under the Judaic Law, for this same authority (as earlier quoted) states that "even the Bible" is secondary to the Talmud. Moreover, Mr. M.L. Rodkinson, the scholar who was selected to make an English translation of the Talmud, says that "not a single line" of the Talmud has been modified. For that matter, the Talmud, in this case, only carries on the law of cursing as earlier laid down, by the Levites, in the practice of cursing and of the evil eye, therefore, is still part of "The Law", as the quotations given above show. (The student may find a present-day example of the Talmudic "angry, fixed look" in operation if he refer to Mr. Whittaker Chambers's description of his confrontation with the attorneys of Mr. Alger Hiss; and the student may form his own opinion of the fact that soon afterwards Mr. Chambers felt himself driven to commit suicide, failing in this attempt only through a chance).

Thus excommunication was a deadly thing. Mr. Rodkinson makes this remarkable reference to it:

"We can conceive their" (the Talmudic rabbinate's) "terrible vengeance against an ordinary man or scholar who ventured to express opinions in any degree at variance with their own, or to transgress the Sabbath by carrying a handkerchief or drinking of Gentile wine, which in their opinion is against the law. Who, then, could resist their terrible weapon of excommunication, which they used for the purpose of making a man a ravening wolf whom every human being fled from and shunned as the plague-smitten? Many who drank of this bitter cup were driven to the grave and many others went mad".

This fate befell some of the great remonstrants. Moses Maimonides (born at the Talmudic centre, Cordova, in 1135) drew up a famous code of the principles of Judaism and wrote, "It is forbidden to defraud or deceive any person in business. Judaist and non-Judaist are to be treated alike... What some people imagine, that it is permissible to cheat a Gentile, is an error, and based on ignorance... Deception, duplicity, cheating and circumvention towards a Gentile are despicable to the Almighty, as 'all that do unrighteously are an abomination unto the Lord thy God'".

The Talmudists denounced Maimonides to the Inquisition, saying, "Behold, there are among us heretics and infidels, for they were seduced by Moses Ben Maimonides... you who clear your community of heretics, clear ours too". At this behest his books were burned in Paris and Montpellier, the book-burning edict of the Talmudic law thus being fulfilled. On his grave the words were incised, "Here lies an excommunicated Jew".

The Inquisition, like the Gentile rulers of the earlier period and the Gentile politicians of our day, often did the bidding of the inveterate sect. The falsification of history, insofar as it relates to this particular subject, has left the impression on Gentile minds that the Inquisition was primarily an instrument of "the Jewish persecution".

Dr. Kastein's presentation is typical: he says the Inquisition persecuted "heretics and peoples of alien creeds" and then adds, "that is to say, princpally Jews", and from that point on he conveys the impression of a solely Jewish persecution. (In the same way, in our century, Hitler's persecution was through four stages of propagandist misrepresentation transformed from one of "political opponents" into one of "political opponents and Jews", then of "Jews and political opponents", and last, "of Jews").

The Inquisition sometimes burned the Talmud; it would have done better to translate and publish the significant parts, and that would still be wise. However, it also burned remonstrances against the Talmud, at the demand of the ruling sect. For instance, in 1240 the Talmud was denounced to it by a converted Jew, the Dominican Nicholas Donin, in Paris, and nothing was done, but in 1232, at the denunciation of the Talmudists, it had ordered the anti-Talmudic work of Maimonides to be publicly burned!

Another great expostulant against the Talmud was Baruch Spinoza, born at Amsterdam in 1632. The ban pronounced on him by the Amsterdam rabbinate derives directly from the "cursings" of Deuteronomy:

"By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we anathematise, cut off, curse and execrate Baruch Spinoza, in the presence of these sacred books with the six hundred and thirteen precepts which are written therein, with the anathema wherewith Joshua anathematized Jericho; with the cursing wherewith Elisha cursed the children; and with all the cursings which are written in the Torah; cursed be he by day and cursed by night; cursed when he goeth out, and cursed when he cometh in; the Lord pardon him never; the wrath and fury of the Lord burn upon this man; and bring upon him all the curses which are written in the Torah. The Lord blot out his name under the heaven. The Lord set him apart for destruction from all the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the firmament which are written in the Torah. There shall be no man to speak to him, no man write to him, no man show him any kindness, no man stay under the same roof with him, no man come nigh unto him".

Spinoza was banished from Amsterdam and exposed to "a persecution which threatened his life", as one encyclopaedia puts it. In fact it took his life, in the way depicted by Mr. Rodkinson (as previously quoted). Shunned and destitute, he died at forty-four in a Gentile city, far from the centre of Talmudic government but not far enough to save him.

Two hundred years later, during the century of emancipation, Moses Mendelssohn proclaimed the heresy that Jews, while retaining their faith, ought to become integrated with their fellow men. That meant breaking free from the Talmud and returning to the ancient religious idea of which the Israelite remonstrants had glimpses. His guiding thought was, "Oh, my brethren, follow the example of love, as you have till now followed that of hatred". Mendelssohn had grown up in the study of the Talmud. He prepared for his children a German translation of the Bible, which he then published for general use among Jews.

The Talmudic rabbinate, declaring that "the Jewish youth would learn the German language from Mendelssohn's translation, more than an understanding of the Torah", put it under ban: "All true to Judaism are for bidden under penalty of excommunication to use the translation". They then had the translation publicly burned in Berlin.

The great remonstrants of Judaism always stirred Jewry, but always failed; the ruling sect always prevailed. There were two reasons for this: the invariable support given by Gentile governments to the dominant sect and its dogma, and an element of self-surrender among the Jewish masses. In this the Jewish mass, or mob, was not different from all mobs, or masses, at all periods in history. The mass passively submitted to the revolution in France, to Communism in Russia, to National Socialism in Germany, its inertia being greater than any will to resist or the fear of ensuing danger. So it has always been with the Jews and the Talmudic terror.

In our century remonstrant Jews affirmed, too soon, that the terror was no longer potent. In 1933 Mr. Bernard J. Brown wrote, "The bite of excommunication has lost its sting... The rabbis and the priests have lost their grip on human thought and men are free to believe as they please without let or hindrance"; and in 1946 Rabbi Elmer Berger said, "The average Jew is no longer subject to the punishment of excommunication".

Both were premature. The years which followed these statements show that the paramount sect was still able to enforce the submission of Jews throughout the world.

Nevertheless, the fierceness of the Talmudic rule, within the ghettoes, often produced a weeping, groaning and rattling of chains. This caused the Talmudists enough concern for them to introduce what seemed to be a mitigation. In about 900 AD "discussion about the Talmud and religious dogma became allowable" (Dr. Kastein). On the face of it this appeared to be in itself a reversion of the dogma, whereunder no dot or comma of any rabbinical ruling might be called in question, or any doubt expressed about the derivation from Mount Sinai.

Genuine debate would have let fresh air into the ghettoes, but if any intention to allow that had existed, Maimonides and Spinoza need never have been persecuted. What was actually permitted in the synagogues and schools was a unique form of dialectics, designed still further to strengthen the edifice of The Law. The disputants were merely allowed to prove that anything was legal under the Talmud; one debater would state a proposition and another the contrary, each demonstrating that The Law allowed it!

This practice (the brothers Thoreau give glimpses of it in their books) was called "pilpulism". It gives the key to a mystery which often baffles Gentiles: the agility with which Zionists are often able to justify, in themselves, precisely what they reproach in others. A polemist trained in pilpulism would have no difficulty in showing the Judaic law ordaining the enslavement of household Gentiles to be righteous and the Roman ban on the enslavement of Christians by Jewish masters to be "persecution"; the Judaic ban on intermarriage to be "voluntary separation" and any Gentile counter-ban to be "discrimination based in prejudice" (Dr. Kastein's terms); a massacre of Arabs to be rightful under The Law and a massacre of Jews to be wrongful under any law.

An example of pilpulism is provided by Dr. Kastein's own description of pilpulism: "A species of spiritual gymnastics which is frequently practised where men's intellects, menaced with suffocation by the pressure of the outside world, find no outlet for creative expression in real life".

The italicised words are the pilpulist's suggestive interjection; these debaters were stifled by pressure from within their communities, not from "the outside world" (which their Law excluded).

These pilpulist "discussions of the Talmud" may have given the closed communities a slight, and illusory, sense of participation in the despotism that ruled them (like the vote, which may be cast only for one party, in today's dictatorship states). Their real yearning, to escape from their captivity, found its outlet in the Messianic outbreaks; possibly the permission to "discuss the Talmud" was granted in the hope of checking these.

Ever and again the cry went up from the communities, held fast within the tribal palisade, "We are doing all the statutes and judgments; now give us the promised, miraculous End!" Thus the series of Messiahs appeared, and each time whipped the communities into a frenzy of anticipation. They were always denounced as "false Messiahs" (they had to be so denounced, as the ruling sect could not effect the triumphant enthronement in Jerusalem which The Law promised), and the people in the ghettoes fell back into hope deferred.

Early Messiahs were Abu Isa of Ispahan in the seventh, Zonarias of Syria in the eighth, and Saadya ben Joseph in the tenth century. The most famous of all was Sabbatai Zevi of Smyrna, who in 1648 proclaimed that the Millennium was at hand by pronouncing the dread name of God in the Synagogue, whereon the Ban was put on him and "to escape its effects" he fled, and stayed away for many years. However, his effect on the Jewish communities, pining for the promised End, was immense. They agreed that he was the Messiah; so that he returned to Smyrna in 1665 in defiance of the Talmudists, who in him perceived the greatest threat to their authority in many centuries.

Sabbatai Zevi next declared himself to be the Messiah. The desire to exchange the chains of the Talmud for the triumphant fulfilment in Jerusalem was so great that the congregation in Smyrna, followed by the Jewish masses all over the world, brushed aside the Talmudists' ban and acclaimed him. He then proclaimed that 1666 was to be the Messianic year, distributed the crowns of the world among his friends, and set out for Constantinople to dethrone the Sultan of Turkey (then ruler of Palestine). Jews everywhere began to sell their businesses, homes and chattels in preparation for "the return" and the day of world dominion. In London (as Samuel Pepys recorded in February 1666) bets were made among Jews on the prospects of his being acclaimed "King of the World and the true Messiah".

As was to be expected, he was arrested when he reached Constantinople and cast in jail. This merely increased his renown and following; the prison was besieged by clamorous throngs, so that he was removed to a fortress in Gallipoli, which in turn was transformed into a royal residence by gifts from Jews. Mass-emotions were fully aroused; in the imagination of a scattered nation, long isolated from mankind, he was the King of the World, come to liberate them by setting them over all mankind.

At that instant Sabbatai Zevi had done exactly what the elders of the sect them selves had done: he had promised what he could not fulfil (this is the basic flaw in the creed, which must eventually destroy it). Unlike the wary elders, he had set himself a time limit: the last day of the year 1666! As the year approached its end (and the Talmudic government in Poland, now sure of the outcome, through an emissary denounced him to the Sultan as "a false Messiah"), he decided, in his prison-palace, to save himself. With great ceremony he had himself converted to Islam and ended his days at the Sultan's court, like any present-day Zionist in New York. For a while he had shaken even the Talmudic government, which then put "the great Ban" on his followers. A tiny remnant of them survive to this day; they believe that Sabbatai will return and that his example must be copied, including conversion to Islam.

Zionism in our time is recognisably a new form of Messianism, leading to the same inevitable disappointment. After the passing of Sabbatai Zevi, and the hope they had put in him, the Jewish masses relapsed into the captivity of the ghettoes. Deprived of the hope of liberation, they reverted, beneath the stern gaze of their masters, to the study of The Law and its destructive message. They were being prepared for a task.

Chapter 17. THE DESTRUCTIVE MISSION

The study of hundreds of volumes, during many years, gradually brought realization that the essential truth of the story of Zion is all summed-up in Mr. Maurice Samuel's twenty-one words: "We Jews, the destroyers, will remain the destroyer forever... nothing that the Gentiles will do will meet our needs and demands".

At first hearing they sound vainglorious or neurotic, but increasing knowledge of the subject shows them to be honestly meant and carefully chosen. They mean that a man who is born and continues a Jew acquires a destructive mission which he cannot elude. If he deviates from this "Law" he is not a good Jew, in the eyes of the elders; if he wishes or is compelled to be a good Jew, he must conform to it.

This is the reason why the part played by those who directed "the Jews" in history was bound to be a destructive one; and in our generation of the Twentieth Century the destructive mission has attained its greatest force, with results which cannot even yet be fully foreseen.

This is not an opinion of the present writer. Zionist scribes, apostate rabbis and Gentile historians agree about the destructive purpose; it is not in dispute among serious students and is probably the only point on which agreement is unanimous.

All history is presented to the Jew in these terms: that destruction is the condition of the fulfilment of the Judaic Law and of the ultimate Jewish triumph.

"All history" means different things to the Jew and the Gentile. To the Gentile it means, approximately, the annals of the Christian era and any that extend further back before they begin to fade into legend and myth.

To the Jew it means the record of events given in the Torah-Talmud and the rabbinical sermons, and this reaches back to 3760 BC, the exact date of the Creation. The Law and "history" are the same, and there is only Jewish history; this narrative unfolds itself before his eyes exclusively as a tale of destructive achievement and of Jewish vengeance, in the present time as three thousand or more years ago.

By this method of portrayal the whole picture of other nations' lives collapses into almost nothing, like the bamboo-and-paper framework of a Chinese lantern. It is salutary for the Gentile to contemplate his world, past and present, through these eyes and to find that what he always thought to be significant, worthy of pride, or shameful, does not even exist, save as a blurred background to the story of Zion. It is like looking at himself through the wrong end of a telescope with one eye and at Judah through a magnifying glass with the other.

To the literal Jew the world is still flat and Judah, its inheritant, is the centre of the universe. The ruling sect has been able, in great measure, to impose this theory of life on the great nations of the West, as it originally inflicted The Law on the Judahites themselves.

The command, "destroy", forms the very basis of the Law which the Levites made. If it be deleted, what remains is not "the Mosaic Law", or the same religion, but something different; the imperative, "destroy", is the mark of identity. It must have been deliberately chosen. Many other words could have been used; for instance, conquer, defeat, vanquish, subdue; but destroy was chosen, It was put in the mouth of God, but obviously was the choice of the scribes.

This was the kind of perversion which Jesus attacked: "teaching for doctrine the commandments of men".

It comes first at the very start of the story, being attributed direcdy to God in the original promise of the promised land: "I will... destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come". Even before that the first act of destruction has been imputed to God, in the form of the first "vengeance" on the heathen: "I will stretch out my hand and smite Egypt... I will smite all the first born in the land of Egypt... And Pharaoh's servants said unto him... knowest thou not yet that Egypt is destroyed?" (Exodus)

From that beginning the teaching, "destroy", runs through all The Law, first, and all the portrayal of historical events, next. The act of destruction is sometimes the subject of a bargain between God and the chosen people, on an "If and "Then" basis; either God offers to destroy, or the chosen people ask him to destroy. In each case the act of destruction is depicted as something so meritorious that it demands a high equivalent service. Thus:

"If thou shalt indeed... do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies... and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come" (Exodus). (In this case God is quoted as promising destruction in return for "observance"; chief among the "statutes and judgments" to be observed is, "Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served other Gods"; Deuteronomy).

Conversely: "And Israel vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, "thou wilt indeed deliver this people into my hand, then I will utterly destroy their cities; And the Lord hearkened to the voice of Israel, and delivered up the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their cities".

As will be seen, the bargain about "destruction" is conditional, in both cases, on performance of a counter-service by the people or by God.

The command, "utterly destroy", being high among the tenets of the inflexible Law, any exercise of clemency, or other shortcoming in utter destruction, is a grave legal offence, not merely an error of judgment. For this very crime (under this Law it is a crime, not a misdemeanour) Saul, the first and only true king of the united kingdom of Israel and Judah, was dethroned by the priests and David, the man of Judah, put in his place. This reason for David's elevation is significant, as the "king of the world", yet to come, is to be of the house of David. The same lesson is repeatedly driven home in the books of The Law, particularly by the allegorical massacre of the Midianites which concludes Moses's narrative.

This was the basis on which all The Law, and all history of that time and later times, was built. From the moment when Israel rejected them and they were left alone with the Levites, the Judahites were ruled by a priesthood which avowed that destruction was Jehovah's chief command and that they were divinely chosen to destroy. Thus they became the only people in history specifically dedicated to destruction as such. Destruction as an attendant result of war is a familiar feature of all human history. Destruction as an avowed purpose was never before known and the only discoverable source of this unique idea is the Torah-Talmud.

The intention clearly was to organize a destructive force; therein lies the great truth of Mr. Samuel's words in our time.

As long as any large body of people, distributed among the nations, submitted to such a Law their energies, wherever they were, were bound to be directed to a destructive end. Out of the experience of 458-444 BC, when the Levites with Persian help clamped down their law on a weeping people, the nation was born which ever since has performed its catalytic function of changing surrounding societies while remaining itself unchanged.

The Jews became the universal catalyst, and the changes they produced were destructive. This process caused much tribulation to the Gentiles (which they brought on themselves by their sentience to the ruling sect) and no true gratification to the Jews (who inherited a melancholy mission).

The Gentiles have survived and will survive; despite the Daniels and Mordecais. and their latterday successors, the "full end" of those nations "whither I have driven thee" is further off than ever.

The Law specifically enjoined the chosen people to ruin other peoples among whom Jehovah "scattered" them as punishment for their own "transgressions".

For instance, Exodus cannot be regarded as more than a legend which received a priestly re-editing in Jerusalem and Babylon many centuries after any time at which anything resembling the events described in it could have occurred. Therefore the scribes had no need to attribute to the Egyptians fear of the destructive purpose nursed by the sojourners in their midst. If they did this, in the very first chapter of Exodus. ("Come, let us deal wisely with them; lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies and fight against us...") it was evidently to fix the idea of this destructive mission in the minds of the people over whom they ruled.

Here the idea that "the people" should join with their hosts' enemies, in order to destroy their hosts, first appears. When the story reaches a more or less verifiable event (the fall of Babylon) it is portrayed in such a way as to foster this same notion. The Judahites are depicted as joining with the enemies of Babylon and exultantly welcoming the Persian invader. The destruction of Babylon is shown as an act of vengeance wreaked by Jehovah on behalf of the Judahites, exclusively; this vengeance is extended also to a king and the manner of his death (both apparently invented, but valid as historical precedents).

The presentation of history in the Old Testament ends with the next act of vengeance, on the Persian liberators! Western political leaders of our century, who often were flattered to be compared by Zionist visitors to good King Cyrus of Persia, the liberator of the Judahites, may not have read "The Law" with attention or have noted what then befell the Persians. Logically the Persians in their turn had to suffer for having Judahites among them.

For the purpose of this allegorical anecdote, a symbolic heathen "persecutor", Haman, was created, who advised the Persian king Ahasuerus: "There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of thy kingdom and their laws are diverse from those of every people; neither keep they the king's laws; therefore it profiteth not the king to suffer them" {Esther J). Thus far, Haman's words are not much different from the opinion which any statesman might, and many statesmen through the centuries until our day did, proffer in respect of the "severed" people and their unique Law. But then, according to Esther, Haman adds, "If it please the king, let it be written that they may be destroyed ", and king Ahasuerus gives the order. (Haman has to speak so, and king Ahasuerus to act so, in order that the ensuing Jewish vengeance may come about.) Letters go out to all provincial governors that all Jews are to be killed in one day, "even upon the thirteenth day of the twelfth month".

The later scribes who composed the book of Esther apparently wished to vary the theme of the powerful J udahite at the court of the foreign king, and conceived the character of Esther the secret Jewess, the favourite concubine of the Persian king who was raised to be his consort. At Esther's intercession the king cancels the order and has Haman and his ten sons hanged on gallows which Haman had built for Mordecai the Jew (Esther's cousin and guardian). The king also gives Mordecai carte blanche, whereon Mordecai instructs the governors of the "hundred twenty and seven provinces" from India unto Ethiopia to have the Jews in every city "gather themselves together and to stand for their life, to destroy, to slay and to cause to perish all the power of the people... both little ones and women..."

This countermanding decree being published, "the Jews had joy and gladness, a feast and a good day" and (a detail of interest) "many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them".

Then, on the appointed day, the Jews "smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and slaughter, and destruction, and did what they would unto those that hated them, slaying of their foes "seventy and five thousand". Mordecai then ordered that the fourteenth and fifteenth days of the month Adar should in future be kept as "days of feasting and joy", and so it has been, ever since.

Apparently Haman, Mordecai and Esther were all imaginary. No "king Ahasuerus" historically exists, though one encyclopaedia (possibly from the wish to breathe life into the veins of the parables) says that Ahasuerus "has been identified with Xerxes". In that case he was father of the king Artaxerxes who sent soldiers with Nehemiah to Jerusalem to enforce the racial "New Covenant", and in that event, again, Artaxerxes so acted after witnessing in his own country a massacre of 75,000 Persian subjects by Jews!

No historical basis for the story can be discovered and it has all the marks of chauvinist propaganda.

The perplexing fact remains that, if it was invented, it could be true in every detail today, when The Law founded on such anecdotes has been imposed on The West. Today people cannot "become Jews" (or very rarely), but a familiar picture of our time is conveyed in the words, "many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them"; in our generation they become "Zionist sympathizers" from the same motive.

How faithful a portrait of the 20th Century politician in Washington or London is given in the passage, "and all the rulers of the provinces, and the lieutenants, and the deputies, and officers of the king, helped the Jews; because the fear of Mordecai fell upon them". If neither king Ahasuerus nor "Mordecai sitting in the king's gate" truly lived in 550 BC, nevertheless Mordecai in our century is real and powerful and two generations of public men have administered their offices from fear of him more than from care of their peoples' interest.

It is our today which makes this remote, implausible yesterday so plausible. On the face of it, Belshazzar and Daniel, Ahasuerus and Mordecai seem to be symbolic figures, created for the purpose of the Levitical political programme, not men who once lived. But... the massacre of the Czar and his family, in our century, was carried out according to verse 30, chapter 5 of Daniel: the hanging of the Nazi leaders followed the precept laid down in verses 6 and 10, chapter 7, and verses 13 and 14, chapter 9, of Esther,

Whether these anecdotes were fact or fable, they have become The Law of our century. The most joyful festivals of the Jewish year commemorate the ancient legends of destruction and vengeance on which The Law is based: the slaying of "all the firstborn of Egypt", and Mordecai's massacre.

Perhaps, then, it is even true that within fifty years of their conquest by Babylon the Jews brought about the destruction of that kingdom by Persia; and that within fifty years of their liberation by the Persian king they had in turn possessed themselves of the Persian kingdom, to such an extent that the king's governors "from India to Ethiopia" from fear of the Jews carried out a pogrom of 75,000 people, and that the death "accursed of God" was inflicted on some selected "enemies". In that case the Persian liberator fared rather worse at the captives' hands than the Babylonian captor, earlier.

As this tale goes along, with its inevitable allusions to "the Jews", it is important to remember that there have always been two minds in Judaism, and quotations from our time serve to illustrate this.

A Chicago rabbi, Mr. Solomon B. Freehof, quoted by Mr. Bernard J. Brown, considered the story of Haman, Mordecai and Esther to be "the essence of all the history of the Jewish people"; whereas Mr. Brown himself (also of Chicago) says the celebration of Purim ought to be discontinued and forgotten, being in the present time "a travesty" even of "the festivals which were so disgusting" to the Israelite prophets. (Purim had not been invented when Isaiah and Hosea made their impassioned protests against the "appointed seasons" and "feast days").

Mr. Brown wrote in 1933 and the event of 1946, when the Nazi leaders were hanged on a Jewish feast day, showed that his remonstrance was as vain as the ancient remonstrances cited by him. In 1946, as twenty-seven centuries earlier, the view expressed by Rabbi Freehof prevailed. The essential features of the event commemorated by Purim are those which invariably recur in earlier and later stages of the story of Zion: the use of a Gentile ruler to destroy Gentiles and give effect to the Judaic vengeance.

From the time of Mordecai, as the Old Testament provides no more history, the student must turn to Judaist authorities to learn whether later events also were presented to Jews in the same light; namely, as a series of Jewish ordeals suffered at the hands of "the heathen", each leading to the ruination of the heathen nation concerned and to a Judaic vengeance.

This research leads to the conclusion that all history, to the present time, is so seen by the elders of the sect and so presented to the Jewish masses. In the same way that Egypt, Babylon and Persia, in the Old Testament, exist only insofar as they capture, oppress or otherwise behave towards Jews, who are then avenged by Jehovah, so in the scholars' presentation of the later period does all else fall away. Rome, Greece and all subsequent empires have life and being, in this depictment, only to the extent that the behaviour of Jews towards them or their behaviour towards Jews gives them existence.

After Babylon and Persia, the next nation to feel the impact of the catalytic force was Egypt. The Jewish community in Alexandria (which had been large even before its reinforcement by fugitives from the Babylonian invasion) was at this period the largest single body of Jews in the known world; Egypt was in that respect in the position of Russia before the 1914-1918 war and of the United States today. The attitude of the Jews, or at all events of the elders, towards the Egyptians was the same as their earlier attitude towards the Persians and Babylonians.

Dr. Kastein says, first, that Egypt was "the historic refuge" for Jews, which sounds like a grateful tribute until subsequent words show that "a refuge" is a place to be destroyed. He describes the feeling of the Jews towards the Egyptians in words very similar to those concerning the Jews which Exodus attributes to the Egyptians in respect of the earlier "captivity". He says, the Jews in Egypt "constituted a closed community... they led a secluded life and built their own temples... the Egyptians felt that the religious exclusiveness of the Jews showed that they despised and spurned their own form of faith". He adds that the Jews "naturally" upheld the Persian cause because Persia had formerly "helped them restore Judah.

Thus the fact that Egypt had given shelter, and was "the historic refuge" did not entitle Egypt to any gratitude or loyalty. Hostility to the host-people took the form of support for the Egyptians' enemy and therefore awoke Egyptian suspicion: "Other causes of hostility were the determination Shown by the Jews not to become assimilated with the people about them or identify themselves with the country of their adoption... The profound spiritual necessity of keeping in touch with every branch of the nation, the call for loyalty towards every group of their own people, however fragmentary, was bound to affect the integrity of their citizenship of a particular state",

"As in Babylon of yore", concludes Dr. Kastein, the Jews in Egypt extended "open arms" to the Persian conqueror. Yet Egypt had shown the Jews only hospitality.

Babylon, Persia, Egypt... then came Greece. In 332 BC. Greece conquered Persia and the Greek rule of Egypt began; Alexandria became the Greek capital. Many Alexandrine Jews would fain have followed Jeremiah's counsel to "seek the peace of the city". The power of the sect and the destructive teaching prevailed.

Dr. Kastein, the sect's devotee, says of Greece and its civilization merely that, "it was intellectually brilliant... but the prototype of everything that was mendacious, cruel, slanderous, cunning, indolent, vain, corruptible, grasping and unjust". He dismisses the episode of Greece with the triumphant note. "The Alexandrian jews brought about the disintegration of Hellenic civilisation".

Babylon, Persia, Egypt, Greece... Up to the start of the Christian era, therefore, history back to the Creation was presented to the Jews, by their scriptures and their scholars, as an exclusively Jewish affair, which took note of "the heathen" only insofar as they impinged on Jewish life, and as a record of destruction achieved against these heathen, in peace and war.

Was this portrayal true, of events in the pre-Christian era, and did it continue true of later events, down to our day?

The inference of our own generation, of which it is certainly true, is that is has always been true. In our century conflicts between nations, on the Babylonian-Persian model, even though they seemed at their start to be concerned with issues remote from any Jewish question, were turned into Judaic triumphs and Judaic vengeances, so that the destruction which accompanied them became an act of fulfilment under The Judaic Law, like the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn, the destruction of Babylon, and Mordecai's pogrom.

Rome followed Greece, and when Rome rose Cicero evidently shared the opinion, about the part played by the Jews in the disintegration of Greek civilization, which a Dr. Kastein was to express twenty centuries later, for at the trial of Flaccus Cicero looked fearfully behind him when he spoke of Jews; he knew (he said) that they all held together and that they knew how to ruin him who opposed them, and he counselled caution in dealing with them.

Fuscus, Ovid and Persius uttered similar warnings, and, during the lifetime of Jesus, Seneca said, "The customs of this criminal nation are gaining ground so rapidly that they already have adherents in every country, and thus the conquered force their laws upon the conqueror". At this period too the Roman geographer Strabo commented on the distribution and number of the Jews (which in our time is patently so much greater than any statistics are allowed to express), saying that there was no place in the earth where they were not.

Greece and Rome, in the common Gentile view, created enduring values on which the civilization of Europe was built. Out of Greece came beauty and Greek foundations lie beneath all poetry and art; out of Rome came law and Roman ones lie beneath Magna Charta, Habeas Corpus and the right of a man to fair and public trial, which was the greatest achievement of The West.

To the Zionist scholar Greece and Rome were just transient heathen manifestations, equally repellent. Dr. Kastein says disdainfully that in Rome "from the very beginning Judea quite rightly saw merely the representative of unintellectual and stupid brute force".

For three hundred years after the lifetime of Jesus, Rome persecuted the Christians. After the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 320 AD, the Jews were forbidden to circumcize their slaves, keep Christian ones, or intermarry; this application of the Judaic Law in reverse is held by Dr. Kastein to be persecution.

After the division of the Roman Empire in 395 Palestine became part of the Byzantine Empire. The ban on Jews in Jerusalem had only been lifted after Rome became predominantly Christian, so that the city might still have been empty of Jews, but for Christianity. However, when the Persians in 614 carried their war against Byzantium into Palestine, the Jews "flocked to the Persian army from all sides" and then participated, "with the fury of men bent on avenging themselves for three hundred years of oppression", in "a wholesale massacre of Christians", (again according to Dr. Kastein, to whom, as above shown, the ban on the enslavement of Christians is oppression).

Enthusiasm for the Persians died with the vengeance on Christians; fourteen years later the Jews "were only too ready to negotiate with the Byzantine emperor Heraclitus", and to help him to reconquer Jerusalem.

Then came Muhammad and Islam. Muhammad shared the view of Cicero and other, earlier authorities; his Koran, in addition to the allusion previously cited, says, "Thou shalt surely find the most violent of all men in enmity against the true believers to be the Jews and the idolaters..."

Nevertheless, Islam (like Christianity) showed no enmity against the Jews and Dr. Kastein has a relatively good word for it: "Islam allowed the infidel absolute economic freedom and autonomous administration... Islam certainly practised toleration towards those of other faith... Judaism was never offered such fine chances, such fine opportunities to flourish, from Christianity".

These "opportunities to flourish" were provided by Islam for the Jews on the soil of Europe, in Spain, as previously told; this was the entrance into the West, made possible by Islam to "the most violent of all men". In the wake of the Islamic conqueror the Talmudic government (after the Caliph Omar had taken Jerusalem in 637 and swept on westward with his armies) moved into Spain!

The Visigoth kings there had already developed similar feelings, about the Jews in their midst, to those expressed by Cicero, Muhammad and others. One of their last, Euric, at the Twelfth Council of Toledo, begged the bishops" to make one last effort to pull this Jewish pest out by the roots" (about 680). After that the Visigoth era quickly came to an end, the Islamic invader establishing himself in southern and central Spain in 712.

Dr. Kastein says, "The Jews supplied pickets and garrison troops for Andalusia". Professor Graetz more fully describes this first encounter between the Jews and peoples of Northern European stock:

"The Jews of Africa... and their unlucky co-religionists of the Peninsula made common cause with the Mohammedan conqueror, Tarik... After the battle of Xeres, July 711, and the death of Roderic, the last Visigoth king, the victorious Arabs pushed onward and were everywhere supported by the Jews. In every city that they conquered, the Moslem generals were able to leave but a small garrison of their own troops, as they had need of every man for the subjection of their country; they therefore confided them to the safekeeping of the jews. In this manner the Jews, who but lately had been serfs, now became the masters of the towns of Cordova, Granada, Malaga and many others. When Tarik appeared before the capital, Toledo, he found it occupied by a small garrison only... While the Christians were in church, praying for the safety of their country and religion, the Jews flung open the gates to the victorious Arabs, receiving them with acclamations and thus avenged themselves for the many miseries which had befallen them... The capital also was entrusted by Tarik to the custody of the Jews... Finally when Musa Ibn Nossair, the Governor of Africa, brought a second army into Spain and conquered other cities, he also delivered them into the custody of the jews..."

The picture is identical with that of all earlier historical, or legendary, events in which the Jews were concerned: a conflict between two "stranger" peoples was transformed into a Judaic triumph and a Judaic vengeance.

The Jews (as in Babylon and Egypt) turned against the people with whom they lived and once more "flung open the gates" to the foreign invader. The foreign invader, in his turn, "delivered" the cities taken by him to the Jews.

In war the capital city and the other great cities, the power and control over them, are the fruits of victory; they went to the Jews, not to the victor. The Caliph's generals evidently paid as little heed to the Koran's warnings as Western politicians of today pay to the teaching of the New Testament.

As to "the miseries" for which the Jews thus took vengeance, Professor Graetz specifically states that the cruellest of these was the denial of the right to keep slaves: "the most oppressive of them was the restraint touching the possession of slaves; henceforward the Jews were neither to purchase Christian slaves nor to accept them as presents"!

If the Arab conquerors counted on thankfulness from those to whom they had "entrusted the capital" and the great cities, they misreckoned. After the conquest Judah Halevi of Cordova sang:

"... how fulfil my sacred vows, deserve my consecration, While Zion still remains Rome's thrall, and I an Arab minion? As trash to me all Spanish treasure, wealth or Spanish good, When dust as purest gold I treasure, where once our temple stood!"

This spirit disquietened the Caliph's advisers, as it had disquietened the Visigoth kings, Muhammad and the statesmen of Rome. Abu Ishak of Elvira spoke to the Caliph at Cordova in words which again recall those of Cicero:

"The Jews... have become great lords, and their pride and arrogance know no bounds... Take not such men for thy ministers... for the whole earth crieth out against them; ere long it will quake and we shall all perish... I came to Granada and I beheld the Jews reigning. They had parcelled out the provinces and the capital between them; everywhere one of these accursed ruled. They collected the taxes, they made good cheer, they were sumptuously clad, while your garments, O Muslims, were old and worn-out. All the secrets of state were known to them; yet is it folly to put trust in traitors!"

The Caliph, nevertheless, continued to select his ministers from among the nominees of the Talmudic government of Cordova. The Spanish period shows, perhaps more clearly than any other, that the Jewish portrayal of history may be nearer to historical truth than the narrative according to the Gentiles; for the conquest of Spain certainly proved to be Judaic rather than Moorish. The formal Moorish domination continued for 800 years and at the end, in keeping with precedent, the Jews helped the Spaniards expel the Moors.

Nevertheless, the general feeling towards them was too deeply distrustful to be assuaged. This popular suspicion particularly directed itself against the converses, or Marranos. The genuineness of their conversion was not believed, and in this the Spaniards were right, for Dr. Kastein says that between the Jews and Marranos "a secret atmosphere of conspiracy" prevailed; evidently use was being made of the Talmudic dispensation about feigned conversion.

In spite of this public feeling the Spanish kings, during the gradual reconquest, habitually made Jews or Marranos their finance ministers, and eventually appointed one Isaac Arrabanel administrator of the state finances with instructions to raise funds for the reconquest of Granada. The elders, at this period, were dutifully applying the important tenet of The Law about "lending to all nations and borrowing from none", for Dr. Kastein records that they gave "financial help" to the Christian north in its final assault on the Mohammedan south.

After the reconquest the stored-up feeling of resentment against the Jews, born of the 800 years of Moorish occupation and of their share in it, broke through; in 1492 the Jews were expelled from Spain and in 1496 from Portugal.

Today's Zionist historians show a remarkable hatred of Spain on this account, and a firm belief in a Jehovan vengeance not yet completed. The overthrow of the Spanish monarchy nearly five centuries later, and the civil war of the 1930's, are sometimes depicted as instalments on account of this reckoning. This belief was reflected in the imperious words used by Mr. Justice Brandeis of the United States Supreme Court, a leading Zionist, to Rabbi Stephen Wise in 1933: "Let Germany share the fate of Spain!* The treatment accorded to Spain in the subsequent decades of this century, in particular its long exclusion from the United Nations, has to be considered in this light.

At that point fifteen hundred years of the Christian era had passed and events had conformed to the pattern of the pre-Christian era, as laid down in the historical parts of the Old Testament, and to the requirements of the Judaic Law. The Jews in their impact on other peoples had continued, under Talmudic direction, to act as a destructive force...

"Captive" and "persecuted" everywhere they went (under their own Law, not through the fault of the peoples with whom they sojourned) their part was always what this Law ordained that it should be: to "pull down and destroy" , They were indeed used by their rulers to "abet disorder" between others, as the Koran said, and through the disorders thus abetted their rulers achieved civil power, wreaked vengeances, supported invaders and financed counter-blows.

During all this time this was the behest of their Talmudic masters, and constantly Jews rose to protest against it; but The Law was too strong for them. There was no happiness or fulfilment for the Jews in this mission, but they could not escape it.

At the end of this first encounter with the West, after eight centuries, the land "spewed them out".

This was the moment, so decisive for our present generation, to which a previous chapter alluded. But for the secret which was stored in the depths of Russia, this might have been the end of the catalytic force.

The experience of this expulsion was a very hard one for the body of Jews who experienced it, and they and their descendants gave many signs that they accepted the inference and would in time find some way to remain Jews and yet to become involved in mankind. That would have meant the end of the destructive idea and of the sect that fostered it.

Instead, the destructive idea survived and was projected into the affairs of the world through a new group of people, who had no physical descent from any Hebrews, or "children of Israel", or the tribe of Judah. They used the name "Jew" merely as a sign of allegiance to a political programme. The point now reached, in following the course of the destructive idea through the centuries, calls for some further description of these people (mentioned in the chapter on The Movable Even at the start of the 800 years in Spain (from 711 to 1492) the Jews there (the largest single community of Jews) were no longer J udahite or Judeans; not even they could claim to be of the pure line of Judah, or of Palestinian ancestry. Professor Graetz says of them, "The first settlement of Jews in beautiful Hesperia is buried in dim obscurity", and adds that the Jews there "desired to lay claim to high antiquity" for their ancestry, so that they simply asserted that "they had been transported thither after the destruction of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar".

Through many centuries the processes of nature and of man had enforced a mingling. The idea of a people chosen to rule the world over the bodies of fallen heathen appealed to primitive tribespeople in many places; the already-circumcized Arab could become a Jew and hardly notice any change; Rabbis in north African deserts and towns were remote from the "centre" and gladly extended their congregations. When the Roman emperors began to persecute "pagan religions" Judaism never fell under a general prohibition, so that many worshippers of Isis, Baal and Adonis, if they did not become Christians, entered the synagogues. The fierce law of tribal segregation could not at that time be enforced in places far from Babylon.

Thus the Jews who entered Spain with the Moors were, racially, already a mixed throng. During the 800 years in Spain the racial teaching was more strictly enforced, the "government" having been transferred to Spain, and in this way the "Sephardic" Jews took shape as a distinct national type. Then, at the expulsion from Spain, the government, as already told, was suddenly transplanted to Poland. What became, at that point, of these Sephardic Jews, who alone may have retained some faint trace of original Judahite or Judean descent?

The Jewish Encyclopaedia is explicit: "The Sephardim are the descendants of the Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal and who settled in Southern France, Italy, North Africa, Asia Minor, Holland, England, North and South America, Germany, Denmark, Austria and Hungary". Poland is not mentioned; the Talmudic Government went there, but the mass of these Sephardic Jews distributed themselves in Western Europe; they moved westward, not eastward. The "government" was suddenly separated from the people and the mass began to dissolve.

The Jewish Encyclopaedia says, of the Sephardim who were thus dispersed: "Among these settlers were many who were the descendants or heads of wealthy families and who, as Marranos, had occupied prominent positions in the countries they had left... They considered themselves a superior class, the nobility of Jewry, and for a long time their co-religionists, on whom they looked down, regarded them as such... The Sephardim never engaged in chaffering occupations nor in usury and they did not mingle with the lower classes. Although the Sephardim lived on peaceful terms with other Jews they rarely intermarried with them... In modern times the Sephardim have lost the authority which for several centuries they exercised over other Jews", The Sephardim, then, neither went to Poland nor mingled with other Jews, when they left the Spanish Peninsula and spread over Western Europe. They remained aloof and apart, "looked down" on others professing to be Jews, and lost their authority. (The Judaists reference works also give curious estimates of the decline in their proportion of Jewry, from a large minority to a small minority; these seem beyond biological explanation and probably are not trustworthy).

Thus, at this removal of "the centre", the body of people, in whose name it had asserted authority for two thousand years, abruptly changed its nature as by magic.

The Jews hitherto known to the world, who had just emerged from their first impact between their Law and the peoples of the West, and were in reflective mood, suddenly began to lose caste in Jewry and to dwindle in numbers!

The Talmudic government set out to prepare its second encounter with the West from a new headquarters, planted among an Asiatic people, the Khazars, converted to Jehovah worship many centuries before. The ruling sect was thenceforward to operate through this different body of people; they were wild folk who had not known the cautionary experience in Spain.

In 1951 a New York publisher who contemplated issuing one of the present writer's books was strongly advised not to do this by the head of a Jewish political bureau, and was told, "Mr. Reed invented the Khazars".

However, the Judaist authorities agree about their existence and conversion, and the historical atlases show the development of the Khazar kingdom, which at its greatest extent reached from the Black Sea to the Caspian (around 600 AD). They are described as a Tartar or Turco-Mongolian people and the Jewish Enyclopaedia says that their chagan, or chieftain, "with his grandees and a large number of his heathen people embraced Judaism, probably about 679 AD".

The fact is attested by correspondence between Hasdai ibn Shapnet, Foreign Minister to Abdel Rahman, Sultan of Cordova, and King Joseph of the Khazars, exchanged about 960 AD. The Jewish Enyclopaedia says that the Judaist scholars had no doubts as to the genuineness of this correspondence, in which the word Ashkenazi first occurs as denoting this sharply-outlined, hitherto unknown group of "Eastern Jews" and as indicating Slav associations.

This community of Turco-Mongolian Ashkenazim, then, was distinct in every element save that of the creed from the Jews previously known to the Western world, the Sephardim.

The hold of the Talmudic government, in the centuries that followed, became looser over the scattered communities of the West; but it ruled this new compact community in the East with a rod of iron.

The Jew of Semitic physiognomy became ever rarer (today the typical countenance of the Jew has Mongolian traits, as is natural).

No Gentile will ever know why this one mass-conversion of a numerous "heathen" people to Talmudic Judaism was permitted, thirteen hundred years ago. Was it chance, or were these elders able to foresee every mortal possibility? At all events, when the Sephardim were scattered and the destructive idea received, in Spain, its sharpest setback, this reserve force lay ready to hand and for the purpose of the destructive mission it was the best possible material.

Long before their conversion to Judaism the Khazars were hostile to the immigrant Russ from the north who eventually conquered them, established the Russian monarchy and accepted Christianity.

When the Khazars became converted the Talmud was complete, and after the collapse of their kingdom (in about 1000 AD) they remained the political subjects of the Talmudic government, all their resistance to Russia being governed by the Talmudic, anti-Christian Law. Thereafter they moved about in Russia, particularly to Kieff (the traditional "holy city" of Russian Christianity), elsewhere in the Ukraine, and to Poland and Lithuania.

Though they had no Judahite blood, they became under this Talmudic direction the typical nation-within-the-nation in Russia. The areas where they congregated, under Talmudic direction, became the centres of that anti-Russian revolution which was to become "the world revolution"; in these parts, and through these people, new instruments of destruction were forged, specifically for the destruction of Christianity and the West.

These savage people from the inmost recesses of Asia lived within the Talmud like any Babylonian or Cordovan Jew and for centuries "observed the Law" in order that they might "return" to a "promised land" of which their ancestors probably never heard, there to rule the world. In the Twentieth Century, when the politicians of the West were all agog with this project of the return, none of them had ever heard of the Khazars. Only the Arabs, whose lives and lands were directly at stake, knew of them, and vainly tried to inform the Peace Conference of 1919 and the United Nations in 1947.

After 1 500, therefore, the Jews fell into two distinct groups: the scattered communities of the West, who were Sephardic in origin, and this closely corralled mass of Talmudic, Slav "Jews" in the East. Time had to show if the Talmudic centre would be able to make out of the Ashkenazim a destructive force as potent in the future as the earlier one in the past, and whether it could keep its hold over the communities in the West, with their different tradition and their memory of the Iberian expulsion.

About the year 1 500, then, the Talmudic government moved from Spain to Poland, establishing itself among a body of "Jews" hitherto unknown to the West and relaxing its hold on the Sephardic Jews, who began to dwindle in numbers and to disintegrate as a cohesive force (in the judgment of the Judaic elders). Only about 450 years separate that event and that point in time from our present day, when the effects of the removal of the Talmudists to Poland have shown themselves, and have answered the two questions raised in the last paragraph.

These 450 years saw the visible Talmudic "centre" cease to exist (in Dr. Kastein's words) and the destructive idea simultaneously enter Europe in a new form, which bore the name "revolution".

The 450 years have seen three of these "revolutions" (counting only the chief ones). Each was more destructive than the last. Each was recognizable as the heir of the former one by its chief characteristics, and these, again, were the chief characteristics of the Judaic Law as laid down in the Torah-Talmud. The main assault in each case was on legitimate government, nationhood and Christianity. Under the Judaic Law the only legitimate government is that of Jehovah and the only legitimate nation is that of Jehovah's chosen people; under the Talmudic supplement of that Law Christianity is specifically the chief of those "other gods", after whom the chosen are for bidden to "go a-whoring"; and "destruction", as has been shown, is a supreme tenet of that Law.

When these revolutions began they were supposed to be aimed at "kings and priests", as the symbolic figures of oppression. Now that the power of kings and priests is gone, but the revolution is established in permanence, it may be seen that these were false words, chosen to delude "the multitude". The attack was on nationhood (the murdered king being in each case the symbol) and on religion (the destruction of churches being the symbolic act).

These were recognizable marks of authorship. The Torah-Talmud is the only original fount of such ideas that research can discover. "He shall deliver their kings into thine hand and thou shalt destroy their name from them... ye shall utterly destroy all the places wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods". At the very moment when the Talmudic government vanished from sight, after setting itself among a barbaric Asiatic people, this creed of destruction entered Western Europe and began its ruinous march.

These three revolutions, then, like the historic events of the pre-Christian era depicted in the Old Testament, and of the Christian era up to the expulsion from Spain, also conformed with and fulfilled the Judaic Law. All three of them bear the common hallmark of a Judaic triumph, as their outcome. Were they originally instigated, organized and directed by the Talmudists?

In that respect there is a great difference between the first two and the last one. Talmudic incitement and control of the English and French revolutions cannot be discovered, at any rate by the present writer's research. In each case the results bore the familiar signs of the Judaic triumph (the "return" of the Jews to England; the emancipation of the Jews in France), although at the start of both revolutions the Jewish question had not been present in the public mind as an issue at stake. As far as the student can ascertain at this distance of time, the projection of "the Jewish question" into these issues, and its elevation to a chief place among them, was something achieved while the revolutions went along, and the Judaic elders who accomplished this did not actually bring about the revolutions.

The third case, that of the Russian revolution, is entirely different. It culminated in the greatest Judaic triumph and Judaic vengeance on record, either in Old Testamentary history or in later history, and was organized, directed and controlled by Jews who had grown up in the Talmud-controlled areas. This is a fact of our present day, demonstrable and undeniable, and it is the most significant fact in the whole story of Zion, illuminating all the past and giving the key to all the future.

For our century, which produced that event has also seen the word "revolution" given a new meaning, or more accurately, given its true meaning: destruction without end until The Law is fulfilled. When the word "revolution" first became current in the West it was held to mean a limited thing: a violent uprising in a definite place caused by specific conditions there at a certain time. Unbearable oppression produced an explosive reaction, rather in the manner of a kettle blowing off its lid: that was the popular conception, instilled in "the multitude" by elders who knew better.

The Russian revolution revealed that the revolution had been organized as a permanent thing: a permanently destructive force, permanently organized with a permanent headquarters and staff, and worldwide aims.

Thus, it had nothing to do with conditions here or there, or now and then, or local oppression. It stood for destruction as an aim in itself, or as a means of removing all legitimate government from the world and putting in its place some other government, other governors. Who could these be but the Talmudists themselves, given the Talmudic nature of the revolution in Russia and the obviously Talmudic aims of "the world revolution"?

What was aimed at was plainly the final consummation of The Law, in its literal form: "Thou shalt reign over every nation but they shall not reign over thee... the Lord thy God shall set thee on high above all nations of the earth".

Without this motive the three revolutions would never have taken the course they took; the course they took prefigures the shape of the future. They represent stages in and steps towards the fulfilment of The Law, and, once again, those who in their day seemed to be great or powerful men in their own right, like King Cyrus and the mysterious King Ahasuerus, now look like mere puppets in the great drama of Judaic history as it moves towards its miraculous end in Jerusalem.

Cromwell was another such. To the average English schoolboy he lives only as the man who beheaded a king and brought back the Jews to England. Add to that his vaunted massacre of priests at Drogheda (an event which has not its like in British history) and what remains but a typical puppet-figure of Zionist history, created merely to help fulfil The Law?

Cromwell was one of the first of those many who since his day have called them selves Old Testamentary Christians, which figure of speech disguises the fact of anti-Christianity, as God and Mammon, on the best authority, cannot both be served. He forbade the celebration of Christmas Day, burned churches and murdered priors, and for an instant was a candidate for the Jewish Messiahship!

He was in power at the time when Sabbatai Zevi was whipping the Jewish masses into a frenzy of Zionist anticipation and shaking the Talmudic government to its foundations. Indeed, the alarm of the Talmudists about Sabbatai Zevi may have prompted the idea that they should use Cromwell to destroy him. In any case Jewish emissaries from Amsterdam were urgently despatched to England to discover whether Cromwell might be of Judaic decent! Had their research yielded positive results, Cromwell might have been proclaimed the Messiah, for he had one qualification most appealing to the elders: his zeal in "utter destruction". (If ever a Messiah should be proclaimed, the choice may prove surprising; when I was in Prague in 1939 a rabbi there was preaching that Hitler was the Jewish Messiah, so that a worried Jewish acquaintance asked me what I thought of this.)

Cromwell's pedigree disclosed no descent from David, or he would probably have been glad to play the part. His sword-and-Bible followers claimed by their bloodthirsty deeds to be fulfilling prophecy, and by restoring the Jews to England to be accomplishing the prescribed steps preparatory to the Millennium. They even proposed, on that account, that Cromwell's Council of State should follow the model of the ancient Sanhedrin and be composed of seventy members! (Cromwell himself had some contempt for these his "Mllenarians", but as a "practical politician" of the kind familiar in our century he was glad to orate about "religious freedom" and the fulfilment of prophecy, while hunting down priests and clergymen).

For his part, Cromwell's real purpose was to enlist the financial support of the rich Amsterdam Jews (the entire history of the West seems to have been made under that tenet of the Judaic Law which commands lending unto all nations and borrowing from none). Mr. John Buchan says of the Amsterdam Jews that "they controlled the Spanish, Portuguese and much of the Levant trade... they commanded the flow of bullion; they would help him in the difficult finances of his government". Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel from Amsterdam (who had been foretelling the advent of the Messiah and the return of the Jews to Palestine) came to London and the matter was arranged.

Manasseh ben Israel's petition to Cromwell is reminiscent of the kind of argument, formally respectful and implicitly menacing, which was used in this century by Dr. Chaim Weizmann in his dealings with British Prime Ministers and American Presidents; he asked for "the readmission" of the Jews to England in one breath, alluded darkly in the next to the Jehovan retribution awaiting those who resisted such demands, and then depicted the rewards which would follow compliance. The picture is closely comparable with that of a New York Zionist informing an American presidential candidate in our generation that he can only expect the "New York State vote" if he commits himself to uphold the Zionist state in peace and war, by money and arms.

What was demanded from Cromwell was in fact an act of public submission to the Judaic Law, not "the readmission" of the Jews, for they had never left England! They had been expelled on paper but had remained where they were, and a formal legalization of that situation was required. Cromwell was prevented by public opposition from doing this (although according to a Judaist authority, Mr. Margoliouth, he was offered £500,000 to sell to the Jews England's greatest Christian monument, Saint Paul's Cathedral, with the Bodleian Library thrown in!)

Then Cromwell's brief Interregnum came to an end (nevertheless, the popular mind insists on remembering him as the man who readmitted the Jews!) and at this first bid in the West the destructive idea gained little ground. England was able to digest its revolution as if nothing very much had happened and to go on its way, if not refreshed, at any rate little the worse. Legitimate government was at once restored and religion was at all events not damaged more by this alien attempt on it than by the native inertia which began to weaken it at that time.

Nevertheless, this new phenomenon "revolution" had entered Europe, and 150 years after the expulsion from Spain "the Jewish question" dominated the event.

The sequel to Cromwell's Interregnum deserves brief comment because of the way the restored king was used for the Jewish purpose, as if nothing had happened. At Cromwell's death the Jews transferred their financial aid to Charles II who, soon after his restoration, made the necessary amendments, formally legalizing the position of the Jews in England. This did not in the least avail his dynasty, for the Amsterdam Jews next financed the expedition of William of Orange against his brother and successor, James II, who was dethroned and fled to France, the Stuart dynasty then coming virtually to an end. Thus the answer to the question, "Who has won?", as between Cromwell and the Stuarts, seems to have been, the Jews.

After a hundred and fifty years the revolution struck again, this time in France. It seemed a separate, different revolution at the time, but was it truly so? It bore the same distinctive features as the English revolution, earlier (and the Russian revolution, later): nationhood and religion were attacked under the pretext of curbing the tyranny of "kings and priests", and when that was done a much harsher despotism was set up.

At that time, after the partition of Poland, the Talmudic government had just "ceased to exist" (in Dr. Kastein's words), but obviously was operating from concealment; its activity would not have so abruptly ended after more than 2,500 years. Because of this withdrawal into obscurity today's student cannot trace what part it played, if any, in inciting and organizing the French revolution, through its followers in France. However, the revolution in Russia, 120 years later, gave proof of direct Talmudic-Jewish control in a measure never before suspected, so that this influence may have been greater, in the preparatory stages of the revolution in France, than history now reveals.

What is certain is that the French revolution, while it was brewing, was supposed to be for "the rights of man" (which presumably meant all men, equally), but when it began "the Jewish question", as by magic, at once came to the fore. One of the earliest acts of the revolution (1791) was the complete emancipation of the Jews (just as the law against "anti-semitism" was one of the first acts of the revolution in Russia).

Therefore the French revolution, in retrospect, assumes the look, common to its English predecessor and to so many violent events in history, of a Jewish triumph in its outcome; if it was not that in truth, then "history" has made it so. Presumably the masses concerned expected something quite different at its outset (and in that respect they resemble the masses which later were engaged in the two Twentieth Century wars).

The emancipation of the Jews was one enduring result of a revolution which achieved little else of permanence and left France in a condition of spiritual apathy from which it has never truly rallied. The history of France since the revolution is one of a long interregnum, in the course of which it has experimented, with almost every form of government known to man but has not until now again found happiness or stability.

From the downfall of Babylon to the revolution in France the ruling Talmudic Jews always acted as a destructive force among the peoples "whither I have driven thee". This was inevitable, given the creed to which they adhered and the fact that this religion was also The Law governing every act of their daily lives. Under the Judaic Law they could not act differently, and were indeed condemned to remain "the destroyers forever": "See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdom, to root out, and to pull down and to destroy".

The story of the Jews, under this control, was the same in Babylon, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Spain, and could not be anything else, given the unique Judaic Law.

Nevertheless not all "the Jews" wrote this story, nor is the story that of all "the Jews"; to omit this qualification would be like condemning "the Germans" for National Socialism or "the Russians" for an essentially alien Communism.

Resistance to the Law of destruction has been continual in Jewry, as this account has shown. At all times and places the Jews have given out a more embittered protest against this destiny of destruction, forced on them, than the Gentiles have made against the threat of destruction, aimed at them.

The words, "the Jews", wherever used in this discussion, need always to be read with this qualification.

Within three hundred years of the expulsion from Spain, then, "the Jewish question" twice came to the forefront during violent civil conflicts which seemed, when they began, to have been caused by the clash of native interests: the revolutions in England and France (this narrative will in its later course come to the all-significant matter of the revolution in Russia, and the Jewish part in it).

The aftermath of the revolution in France produced a man who also tried to settle the controversy of Zion. History records attempts to solve "the Jewish question" by almost every imaginable method, from force and suppression to placation, compromise and capitulation. They all failed, leaving this question still a thorn in the side of the Gentiles (and, for that matter, of the Jews, who were somewhat in the condition of people sent into the world with a burr beneath their skins).

The method he chose was the simplest conceivable and possibly for that reason is remembered even now with some consternation by the devotees of Zion; this upstart was very nearly too clever for them!

He failed, apparendy because this question cannot be solved by man at all, only by God in his good time.

The man was Napoleon, whose attempt needs to be considered before the study of the revolution which threw him up is resumed.

Chapter 18. THE NAPOLEONIC INTERROGATION

When Napoleon reached his dizzy peak of power he presumably hoped to do great things for France and the French, as well as for himself (and his family).

Very soon after he became Emperor (or possibly even before) he found that one of the most difficult problems which would confront him was not a French affair at all but an alien one: "the Jewish question"! It had racked the lives of the people for centuries; no sooner was the Pope persuaded, and the imperial crown on Napoleon's head, than it popped up from behind Napoleon's throne, to harass him.

In Napoleonic manner he took it by the throat and tried to extract an answer from it to the eternal question: did the Jews truly desire to become part of the nation and to live by its law, or did they secretly acknowledge another law which commanded them to destroy and dominate the peoples among whom they dwelt?

However, this famous Interrogation was Napoleon's second attempt to solve the Jewish riddle and the tale of the little known earlier one should briefly be told.

Napoleon was one of the first men to conceive the idea of conquering Jerusalem for the Jews and thus "fulfilling prophecy", in the currently fashionable phrase. He thus set an example imitated in the present century by all those British and American leaders who probably would most dislike to be compared with him: Messrs. Balfour and Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and Sir Winston Churchill.

Napoleon's venture was so shortlived that history says almost nothing of it or of his motives. As he was at the time not yet ruler of France, only the commander in chief, he may have hoped by it merely to gain military support from the Jews of the Middle East for his campaign there. If he already pictured himself as First Consul and Emperor, he may (like Cromwell) have looked for monetary support from the Jews of Europe in that greater ambition.

In any case, he was the first European potentate (as supreme military commander he was really that) to court the favour of the Jewish rulers by promising them Jerusalem! In doing this he espoused the theory of separate J ewish nationhood which he later arraigned.

The story is authentic but brief. It rests entirely on two reports published in Napoleon's Paris Moniteur in 1799, when he was in command of the French expedition sent to strike at English power through Egypt.

The first, dated from Constantinople on April 17, 1799, and published on May 22, 1799, said: "Buonaparte has published a proclamation in which he invites all the Jews of Asia and of Africa to come and place themselves under his flag in order to re-establish ancient Jerusalem. He has already armed a great number and their battalions are threatening Aleppo".

This is explicit; Napoleon was undertaking to "fulfil prophecy" in the matter of "the return".

The second report appeared in the Moniteur a few weeks later and said, "It is not solely to give Jerusalem to the Jews that Buonaparte has conquered Syria; he has vaster designs..."

Possibly Napoleon had received news of the effect which the first report had produced in France, where this intimation that the war against England (like the revolution against "kings and priests") might be turned chiefly to Jewish advantage was not well received; alternatively, it may have done the English more good, among the other peoples of Arabia, than it could ever do Buonaparte among the Jews.

The bubble evaporated at that point, for Napoleon never reached Jerusalem. Two days before the first report was published by the distant Moniteur, he was already in retreat towards Egypt, thwarted by an obstinate Englishman at Acre.

Today's student feels somewhat resentful that Napoleon's Zionist bid was soon cut short, for if he had been able to press on with it a deputation of Zionist elders might soon have been examining his ancestry (like Cromwell's, earlier) for some trace of Davidic descent which would qualify him to be proclaimed the Messiah.

Thus all that remains today of this venture of Napoleon's is a significant comment made on it in our time by Mr. Philip Guedalla (1925): "An angry man had missed, as he thought, his destiny. But a patient race still waited; and after a century, when other conquerors had tramped the same dusty roads, it was seen that we had not missed ours".

The reference is to the British troops of 1917, who in this typical Zionist presentation of history are merely instruments in the fulfilment of Jewish destiny, a part missed by Napoleon. Mr. Guedalla uttered these words in the presence of Mr. Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister of 1917 who had sent those soldiers along those same "dusty roads". Mr. Lloyd George thus was able to sun himself in the approving gaze of an audience which looked on him as "an instrument in the hands of the Jewish God" (Dr. Kastein).

In 1804 Napoleon was crowned Emperor; and by 1806 "the Jewish question" was so large among his cares that he made his renowned second attempt to solve it.

Amid all his campaigns he was engrossed by it, like many potentates before him, and now he tried the reverse method of settling it: having briefly undertaken to restore "ancient Jerusalem" (and thus the Jewish nation), he now demanded that the Jews choose publicly between separate nationhood and integration in the nation wherein they dwelt.

He was in bad odour with the French at this time because of the favour which (they said) he showed to Jews. Complaints and appeals for protection against them poured in on him, so that he told the Council of State, "These Jews are locusts and caterpillars, they devour my France... They are a nation within the nation". Even Orthodox Judaism at that time strenuously denied this description.

The State Council itself was divided and in doubt, so that Napoleon summoned 112 leading representatives of Judaism, from France, Germany and Italy, to come to Paris and answer a list of questions.

The strange world in which Napoleon thus set foot is little understood by Gentiles. It is illumined by the following two quotations:

"Owing to the acceptance of the idea of the Chosen People and of salvation, the Jewish world was Judeocentric, and the Jews could interpret everything that happened only from the standpoint of themselves as the centre" (Dr. Kastein).

'The Jew constructed a whole history of the world of which he made himself the centre; and from this moment, that is, the moment when Jehovah makes the covenant with Abraham, the fate of Israel forms the history of the world, indeed, the history of the whole cosmos, the one thing about which the Creator of the world troubles himself. It is as if the circles always become narrower; at last only the central point remains: the Ego" (Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain).

One of these authorities is a Zionist Jew and the other is what the first would call an anti-semite; the reader will see that they are in perfect agreement about the essence of the Judaic creed.

Indeed, the student of this question finds that there is really no disagreement about such matters between the Talmudic-Jewish scholars and those objectors whom they accuse of prejudice; what the Jewish extremists really complain of is that any criticism should be made from quarters "outside the law"; this is to them intolerable.

The questions devised by Napoleon show that, unlike the British and American politicians of this century who have taken up Zionism, he perfectly understood the nature of Judaism and the problem of human relationships thrown up by it. He knew that, according to the Judaic Law, the world had been created, at a date precisely determined, solely for the Jews and everything that happened in it (including such an episode as that of his own fame and power) was calculated simply to bring about the Jewish triumph.

Napoleon in his day comprehended the Judaic theory as it is expounded, in this century, by Dr. Kastein in relation to King Cyrus of Persia and his conquest of Babylon in 538 BC:

"If the greatest king of the age was to be an instrument in the hands of the Jewish God, it meant that this God was one who determined the date not only of one people but of all peoples; that he determined the fate of nations, the fate of the whole world".

Napoleon had tentatively offered to make himself "an instrument in the hands of the Jewish God" in the matter of Jerusalem, but had been foiled by the defender of Acre. Now he was Emperor and was not ready to be "an instrument", nor would he accept the proposition at all.

He set out to make the Jews stand up and declare their allegiance, and shrewdly devised questions which were equally impossible to answer without repudiating the central idea, or to evade without incurring the later reproach of falsehood. Dr. Kastein calls the questions "infamous", but that is only in the spirit earlier mentioned, that any question from a being outside the Law is infamous.

In another passage Dr. Kastein says, with involuntary admiration, that Napoleon in his questions "correctly grasped the principle of the problem", and this is higher praise than that accorded by Dr. Kastein to any other Gentile ruler.

Also, it is true; had mortal man been able to find an answer to "the Jewish question" Napoleon would have found it, for his enquiries went to the very heart of the matter and left truthful men only with the choice between a pledge of loyalty and an open admission of inveterate disloyalty.

The delegates, elected by the Jewish communities, came to Paris. They were in a quandary. On the one hand, they were all bred in the age-old faith that they must ever remain a "severed" people, chosen by God to "pull down and destroy" other nations and eventually to "return" to a promised land; on the other hand, they had just been foremost among those emancipated by the revolution, and the most famous general of that revolution, who interrogated them, once had undertaken to "re-establish ancient Jerusalem".

Now this man, Napoleon, asked them to say whether they were part of the nation he ruled, or not.

Napoleon's questions went, like arrows to a target, straight to the tenets of the Torah-Talmud on which the wall between the Jews and other men had been built. The chief ones were, did the Jewish Law permit mixed marriages; did the Jews regard Frenchmen as "strangers" (foreigners) or as brothers; did they regard France as their native country, the laws of which they were bound to obey; did the Judaic Law draw any distinction between Jewish and Christian debtors?

All these questions turned on the discriminatory racial and religious laws which the Levites (as earlier chapters showed) had heaped upon the moral commandments, thus cancelling them.

Napoleon with the utmost publicity and formality put questions before the Jewish representatives, which the world for centuries had been asking.

With this fierce light beating on them the Jewish notables had only two alternatives: to repudiate the racial Law in all sincerity, or to profess repudiation while secredy denying it (an expedient permitted by the Talmud).

As Dr. Kastein says, "The Jewish scholars who were called upon to refute the charges found themselves in an extremely difficult position, for to them everything in the Talmud was sacred, even its legends and anecdotes". This is Dr. Kastein's way of saying that they could only evade the questions by falsehood, for they were not "called upon to refute charges"; they were merely asked to answer truthfully.

The Jewish delegates ardently affirmed that there was no longer any such thing as a Jewish nation; that they did not desire to live in closed, self-governed communities; that they were in every respect Frenchmen and nothing more. They hedged only on the point of mixed marriages; these, they said, were permissible "under the civil hew".

Even Dr. Kastein is constrained to call Napoleon's next move "a stroke of genius".

It established historically that if forced publicly to answer these vital questions (vital to the peoples with whom they live) the representatives of Judaism will give answers which are either untrue or to which they cannot give effect.

The events of the decades that followed showed that the claim to separate nationhood-wifhin-nations was never renounced by those who truly wielded power in Jewry.

Thus Napoleon, in failure, achieved a historic victory for truth which retains its value in our day.

He sought to give the responses obtained by him the most binding public form, which would commit Jews everywhere and for all the future to the undertakings given by their elders, by desiring that the Great Sanhedrin be convened!

From all parts of Europe the traditional 71 members of the Sanhedrin, 46 rabbis and 25 laymen, hastened to Paris and met among scenes of great magnificence in February 1807. Though the Sanhedrin, as such, had not met for centuries, the Talmudic "centre" in Poland had but recendy ceased publicly to function, so that the idea of a directing body of Jewry was real and live.

The Sanhedrin went further than the Jewish notables in the completeness and ardour of its declarations; (incidentally, it began by recording thanks to the Christian churches for the protection enjoyed in the past, and this tribute is worth comparing with the usual Zionist version of history in the Christian era, which suggests that it was all a long ordeal of "Jewish persecution" at Christian hands).

The Sanhedrin acknowledged the extinction of the Jewish nation to be an accomplished fact. This solved the central dilemma thrown up by the fact that the Law, which theretofore had always been held to be exclusively binding for Jews, allowed no distinction between religious and civil law. As "the nation" had ceased to exist, the Talmudic laws of daily life were proclaimed to be no longer effective, but the Torah, as the law of faith, remained immutable; thus said the Sanhedrists. If any clash or dispute were to occur, the religious laws were to be held subordinate to those of the state in which individual Jews lived. Israel thenceforward would exist only as a religion, and no longer looked forward to any national rehabilitation.

It was a unique triumph for Napoleon (and who knows how much it may have contributed to his downfall?). The Jews were liberated from the Talmud; the way to their re-integration in their fellow men, their involvement in mankind, was reopened where the Levites had closed it over two thousand years before; the spirit of discrimination and hatred was renounced and exorcised.

These declarations formed the basis on which the claim for full civil liberties was made and realized throughout the West in the years that followed. All sections of Judaism, known to the West, supported them.

Thenceforth Orthodox Judaism, with the face it turned toward the West, denied any suggestion that the Jews would form a nation within nations. Reform Judaism in time "eliminated every prayer expressing so much as even the suspicion of a hope or a desire for any form of Jewish national resurrection" (Rabbi Moses P. Jacobson).

The ground was cut from beneath those opponents of Jewish emancipation in the British Parliament who contended that "the Jews look forward to the coming of a great deliverer, to their return to Palestine, to the rebuilding of their temple, to the revival of their ancient worship, and therefore, they will always consider England not as their country, but merely as their place of exile" (quoted by Mr. Bernard J. Brown).

Yet these warning voices spoke the truth. In less than ninety years the declarations of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin had in effect been cancelled, so that Mr. Brown was brought to write:

"Now, although civil equalities have been firmly established by law in nearly every land, Jewish nationalism has become the philosophy of Israel. Jews should not be surprised if people charge that we obtained equality before the law under false pretences; that we are still a nation within nations and that rights accorded us should be revoked'.

Napoleon unwittingly did posterity a service in revealing the important fact that the replies obtained by him were valueless. The one-and-only Law, of all thought and action, was in the remainder of the Nineteenth Century reinflicted on the Jews by their Talmudic rulers, and by Gentile politicians who gave them the same help as King Artaxerxes gave to Nehemiah.

Were the responses sincere or false when they were given? The answer probably may be divided, just as Judaism itself has always been divided.

No doubt the delegates had much in mind the accelerating effect which their responses, as they were framed, would have on the grant of full equality in other countries. On the other hand, many of them must earnestly have hoped that the Jews, at long last, might enter into mankind without secret denials, for in Jewry this impulse to break through the tribal ban has always existed, though it has always been beaten back by the ruling sect.

The probability is that some of the delegates sincerely intended what they said, and that others "secretly broke" (Dr. Kastein's phrase) with the loyalties thus publicly affirmed.

Napoleon's Sanhedrin had a basic flaw. It represented the Jews of Europe, and these (who were in the main the Sephardim) were losing authority in Jewry. The Talmudic centre, and the great mass of "Eastern Jews" (the Slavic Ashkenazi) were in Russia or Russian-Poland, and not even Napoleon gave much thought to that fact if he even knew of it. These Talmudists were not represented in the Sanhedrin and the responses given were by their Law heresy, for they were the guardians of the traditions of the Pharisees and Levites.

The Sanhedrin's avowals brought to an end the third Talmudic period in the story of Zion. It was that which began with the fall of Judea in AD 70, when the Pharisees bequeathed their traditions to the Talmudists, and at the end of these seventeen centuries the eternal question seemed, by the Sanhedrin's responses, to have been solved.

The Jews were ready to join with mankind and to follow the counsel of a French Jew, Isaac Berr, that they should rid themselves "of that narrow spirit, of corporation and congregation, in all civil and political matters not immediately connected with our spiritual law. In these things we must absolutely appear simply as individuals, as Frenchmen, guided only by a true patriotism and by the general good of the nations". That meant the end of the Talmud, "the hedge around the Law".

It was an illusion. In the eyes of today's Gentile student it seems to have been a great opportunity missed. In the eyes of the literal Jew it was an appalling danger narrowly averted: that of common involvement in mankind.

The fourth period in this narrative then began, the century of "emancipation", the 19th Century. During it the Talmudists in the East set out to cancel what the Sanhedrin had affirmed, and to use all the liberties gained through emancipation, not to put Jews and all other men on one footing, but to corral the Jews again, to reaffirm their "severance" from others and their claim to separate nationhood, which in fact was one to be a nation above all nations, not a nation-within-nations.

The Talmudists succeeded, with results which we are witnessing in our generation, which is the fifth period in the controversy of Zion. The story of their success cannot be separated from that of the Revolution, to which this narrative now returns.

Chapter 19. THE WORLD REVOLUTION

For the sake of orderly sequence this narrative has been carried through to Napoleon's Sanhedrin; the answers given by it closed the third, and opened the fourth period in the story of Zion, which began with the public renunciation of separate-nationhood and ended, ninety years later, with the public re-affirmation of separate-nationhood in its extremest form.

Before it continues into that fourth phase, the narrative now must move back twenty years to the start of the world-revolution, and consider what part, if any, was played by "the Jews" in that.

The 19th Century, in the West, differed from the preceding eighteen centuries of the Christian era there in the emergence of two movements with a converging aim, which by the century's end dominated all its affairs.

The one movement, Zionism, aimed at reassembling a dispersed nation in a territory promised to it by the Jewish god; the second movement, Communism, aimed at the destruction of separate nationhood as such.

Thus these two movements appeared at first sight to be fixedly opposed to each other, for the one made nationalism its religion, even its god, and the other declared war to the death on nationalism. This antagonism was only apparent, and in truth the two movements ran on parallel tracks, not head on towards a collision on the same line. For the god who promised land to the nation to be gathered-in also promised to set it "above all people that are upon the face of the earth" and to destroy all other nations "with a mighty destruction until they be destroyed". The world-revolution, which pursued the second of these aims, thus fulfilled the condition set for the first of them; either by accident or by design, it too was doing the will of Jehovah.

That being so, the historian's task is to find out, if he can, what relationship existed between the organizers of Zionism and those of the world-revolution. If there was none, and the parallelism of purpose was coincidental, then history was evidently having a little joke with the West. If relationship can be shown, the pattern of the last 170 years prefigures the shape of coming events; in that case the world-revolution has been the handmaiden of Zion.

These 170 years have probably been the most profligate and least creditable in the history of the West. At the start of the 19th Century it had behind it seventeen centuries of Christian achievement; the world had never before seen man so much improve his own state and his conduct to others; even warfare was becoming subject to a civilized code, and the future seemed certain to continue this upward process. By the middle of the 20th Century much of this achievement had been lost; a large area of the West had been surrendered to Asiatic barbarism; the question whether the remaining West and its faith could even survive clearly hung in the balance and probably would be answered during the closing decades of the century.

The period which saw this deterioration was that of the rise of the Judaist power to a peak of influence in the affairs of the West which hardly any European potentate or pontiff, doctrine or dogma had ever attained. The picture of this swelling might, spreading over Europe like an eastern thundercloud, is given in two quotations from the beginning and end of the 19th Century. In 1791 the great German historian Johann Gottfried von Herder, looking back on the hundred years behind him, wrote:

"The ruder nations of Europe are willing slaves of Jewish usury... The Jewish people is and remains in Europe an Asiatic people alien to our part of the world, bound to that old law which it received in a distant climate, and which according to its own confession it cannot do away with... It is indissolubly bound to an alien law that is hostile to all alien peoples".

The newspaper reader of 1807, when he learned of the Sanhedrin's ardent avowals of non-nationhood, would presumably have dismissed von Herder as a "bigot" (or even an "antisemite"), but the years and events have shown that he, like many before him, was but a scholar speaking truth. A hundred years later, in 1899, another, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, looked back on what Herder had written and recorded the further, continuing usurpation of power:

"A great change has taken place: the Jews play in Europe, and wherever European influence extends, a different part from that which they played a hundred years ago; as Viktor Hohn expresses it, we live today in a Jewish age'; we may think what we like about the past history of the Jews, their present history actually takes up so much room in our own history that we cannot possibly refuse to notice them: The 'alien' element emphasized by Herder has become more and more prominent... The direct influence of Judaism on the 19th Century appears for the first time as a new influence in the history of culture; it thus becomes one of the burning subjects of the day. This alien people has become precisely in the course of the 19th Century a disproportionately important and in many spheres actually dominant constituent of our life Herder said that 'the ruder nations of Europe were willing slaves of Jewish usury'. Today Herder could say the same of by far the greatest part of our civilised world our governments, our law, our science, our commerce, our literature, our art, practically all branches of our life, have become more or less willing slaves of the Jews and drag the feudal fetter, if not yet on two, at least on one leg The direct influence of Judaism on the 19 th century thus becomes one of the burning subjects of the day.

We have to deal here with a question affecting not only the present, but also the future of the world. If the Jewish influence were to gain the upper hand in Europe in the intellectual and cultural sphere, we would have one more example of negative, destructive power."

Such was the development in a hundred years from von Herder to Chamberlain. The last three sentences are a brilliant prognosis, for Chamberlain had not seen the. proofs, which our century has brought, of the truth of what he said; namely, that fantastic feat of international stage-management on the grand scale in October 1917

when Communism (the destroyer of nationhood) and Zionism (the creator of the dominant nation) triumphed at the same instant!

In the sixty years which have passed since Chamberlain wrote the process observed by him and Herder has gathered pace and power. The question no longer simply "affects the future of the world"; it is with us every day and we have no present that is not shaped by it; it has already altered the nature of the world and of man's lot in it. "Our governments", in the half-century that has elapsed, have become such "willing slaves" of the Judaic master-sect that they are in fact the bailiffs or agents of a new, international ruling-class, and not true governors at all.

The West has come to this dilemma through the pressure of two millstones, Communism and Zionism, the nation-destroying world-revolution and the new, nation-creating, ruling-class. The one has incited the mob; the other has gained mastery over rulers. Are the organizers of both the same? This book seeks to answer the question in its remaining chapters. What is clear is that each stage in the ruination of the West, during these 170 years, has been accompanied by successive stages of "the return" to the promised land. That is an indication of common managership too strong to be set aside unless it can be conclusively disproved. To the "heathen" masses of Christendom the process which began with the emergence of the world-revolution in 1789 has been merely one of sound and fury, signifying nothing; but the student perceives that in majestic rhythm it fulfils The Law and The Prophets of Judah.

The 19th Century was one of conspiracy, of which the things we witness in the 20th Century are the results. Conspiracy bred Communism and Zionism, and these took the future of the West in a pincer-like clutch. What were their origins? Why did they germinate in darkness until they broke ground together in the 19th Century? Had they a common root? The way to answer that question is to examine the roots of each separately and find out if they join; and the purpose of this chapter and the next is to trace the root-idea of world-revolution.

The French revolution was the world-revolution in action, not a revolution in France. From the moment of the event in France no doubt remains on that score. Before then people might indulge notions about suffering peasants, stung to sudden uprising by arrogant aristocrats and the like, but diligent study of the background of the French revolution dispels such illusions. It was the result of a plan and the work of a secret organization revealed before it occurred; it was not merely a French outburst produced by French causes. The plan behind it is the plan of Communism today; and Communism today, which is the world-revolution in permanence, has inherited the organization which evolved the plan.

The French revolution of 1789 is the one that provides the key to the mystery. It forms the link between the English one of 1640 and the Russian one of 1917 and reveals the whole process as a planned and continuing one which, having passed through these three stages, clearly will reach its final orgasm at some moment not far distant, probably during this century. That climax, foreseeably, will take the shape of an attempt to consummate and complete the worldrevolution by setting up a world-government under the control of the organization which has guided the revolutionary process from its start. This would establish the sway of a new ruling-class over the submerged nations. (As Dr. Kastein would say, it would "determine the fate of the whole world").

This picture, which only slowly emerged as the three centuries passed, is today clear in its historical perspective, where each of the three great revolutions is seen in the light thrown on it by the next:

(1) The English revolution appeared at the time to be a spontaneous English episode, directed only against the pretensions, at that moment, of a particular royal house, the Stuarts, and a particular form of religion, called "Popery". No contemporary dreamed of considering it as the start of a movement against all religion and all legitimate government. (The ruling sect of Jewry supplied the revolutionary dictator with funds and by means of this, traditional "abetting" part the Jewish leaders became chief beneficiaries of the revolution; if they had any part in the original instigation of it, this cannot be shown, nor has any evidence of a long-term, master-plan behind the revolution survived).

(2) The nature and course of the French revolution, however, puts the English one in a different light. It was not, and even at the time did not seem to be, a native French episode caused merely by French conditions. On the contrary, it followed a plan for universal revolution discovered and made public some years before; and the secret organization then exposed had members in many countries and all classes. Therefore its most characteristic acts (regicide and sacrilege), though they repeated those of the revolution in England, were seen not to be spontaneously vengeful deeds committed in the heat of a moment, but actions deliberately symbolic of a continuing plan and purpose: the destruction of all religion and all legitimate government, everywhere. Inevitably, this revelation leads to the surmise that the English revolution too may have been prepared by this secret organization with the aim of destroying all nationhood. (In the French revolution, as in the English one, the Judaist sect emerged as a chief beneficiary; the general emancipation of Jews, which came of it, was used by it as a cover for its conspiratorial work during the ensuing decades. Original Judaist instigation is not shown by any evidence now available.)

Thus the French revolution, unlike the English one, demonstrably was the product of a major conspiracy, with worldwide aims and deep roots. From this instant, the nature of the plan was plain, but the conspirators, wherever they were unmasked, seemed to be a horde of individuals with no bond of union between them save that of the arsonist's lust for destruction. The purpose was beyond doubt, but the identity of the organizers was still mysterious. This half-clarified scene was depicted in famous words by a classic authority on the subject, Lord Acton:

"The appalling thing in the revolution is not the tumult but the design. Through all the fire and smoke we perceive the evidence of calculating organisation. The Managers remain studiously concealed and masked but there is no doubt about their presence from the first.

The French revolution, then, revealed a design behind revolution, and it was the design of a set purpose in a worldwide field. What had seemed planless at the time of the English revolution now was seen to be, or had become the result of a plan and a pattern, and the conspiracy clearly was of such strength and age that its complicity in the earlier revolution had to be allowed for. However, this second revolution still left "the managers" masked, so that only half of the mystery had been solved (Lord Acton died in 1902 and thus did not see the third revolution).

(3) The revolution in Russia, again, opened room for new theories about the French and English revolutions. Its acts of regicide and sacrilege were as unmistakable an identity-card as the Muslim's greeting is a token of his faith; by them it informed all who wished to hear that it was still working to "the design" of worldwide destruction first revealed by the French revolution. Moreover, the secret, for a hundred years called "a lie", was no longer even denied; from 1917 on the world-revolution was avowedly permanent, avowedly worldwide in purpose, and the erstwhile secret conspiracy became a political party, operating in all countries under orders from a central headquarters in Moscow.

Thus the Russian revolution threw a brighter light on the French one, clarifying its outlines and origins. However, in the matter of the "studiously concealed" and "masked" managers, the Russian revolution threw an entirely different light on the two earlier ones, or at the least it opened up conjectures about their possible origins which none had previously spent much thought upon. The "managers" of the revolution in Russia were nearly all Eastern Jews. On this occasion the significant, symbolic acts of regicide and sacrilege were committed by Jews and a law was enacted which in effect forbade all discussion of the part played by Jews, or by "the Jewish question", in these events or in public affairs at all.

Thus vital questions were answered and what was a great mystery in 1789 became plain in 1917. The great benefit which today's student derives from the French revolution is the proof, supplied by it, of the existence of a design for world-revolution, and of an organisation which pursued that destructive ambition. Its existence and activity made the 19th Century the century of the grand conspiracy. A sense of evil things stirring in dark places, like the sounds which a prisoner in a dungeon awaits at night, disquietened men and nations. This was the feeling imparted by conspiracy to the enpested air around. From the moment of the French revolution men intuitively knew that they lived with conspiracy in their midst; in our day, which has suffered its effects, we can at least see with what we have to deal, if we look, and may say that it is the devil that we know.

Perhaps the greatest disservice that Napoleon did was, by his campaigns and glittering exploits to distract men's thoughts from the much greater danger that menaced them: the world-revolution and its secret "managers". But for him they might have paid more attention to the conspiracy, for they had the proof of its existence.

Chapter 20. THE DESIGN

This proof was given when the papers of Adam Weishaupt's secret society of "Illuminati" were seized by the Bavarian Government in 1786 and published in 1787. The original blueprint of world-revolution, and the existence of a powerful organization with members in the highest places, were then revealed. From that moment on no doubt remained that all countries and classes of society contained men who were leagued together to destroy all legitimate government and all religion. The conspiratorial organization burrowed underground again after its exposure, but survived and pursued its plan, bursting into full public view in 1917. Since then, as Communism, it has openly pursued the aims disclosed by the Bavarian Government's coup of 1786, by the methods then also revealed.

The publication of the Weishaupt documents came about by a chance as curious as that of the preservation of Mr. Whittaker Chambers's documents in 1948.* They were only a residue, remaining after the bulk had been destroyed, for something of the Illuminati's doings and designs had become known before 1786, partly through the boastings of its members, partly through the disclosures of some who (like Mr. Chambers 160 years later) revolted against the company in which they found themselves when they comprehended its true nature. Thus the Dowager Duchess Maria Anna of Bavaria in 1783 received information from former Illuminates that the order was teaching that religion should be regarded as nonsense (Lenin's "opiate for the people") and patriotism as puerility, that suicide was justifiable, that life should be ruled by passion rather than reason, that one might poison one's enemies, and the like. As a result of this and other information the Duke of Bavaria in 1785 issued an edict against the Illuminati; the order was indicted as a branch of Freemasonry, and government officials, members of the armed services, professors, teachers and students were forbidden to join it. A general ban was laid on the formation of secret societies (that is, bodies which banded together without making registration, as the law required).

* Mr. Whittaker Chambers, an impressionable, rather morbid young American, was "captured" by the Communists at Columbia University, New York, in 1925 and became an agent and courier who, working under an alias, conveyed stolen official documents to his Communist superiors. In 1938 he sickened of his bondage and fled the party. In 1939, appalled by the alliance between Communism and Hitlerism, he tried to inform President Roosevelt of the infestation of government departments by Communist agents, and of the espionage that went on, but was rudely rebuffed, being told by a presidential emissary to "go jump in the lake". As a precaution, he had secreted his proofs (photographs of hundreds of secret official documents) in a disused lift-shaft and in the course of years forgot them, for he heard nothing more until 1948! Then his name was mentioned in the course of an enquiry arising out of disclosures made by another former Communist agent, and he was sub-poenaed to give evidence. He did this and was at once sued for libel by a high government official, Mr. Alger Hiss, whom he incriminated of stealing highly secret papers and conveying them, through Mr. Chambers, to the Communists. For his own protection he then sought out his relative in New York and asked if the package, secreted in the disused service-lift shaft ten years before, was still there. Covered with dust, it was, and the enormity of its contents, examined again after ten years, startled even Mr. Chambers. He hid the packet in a pumpkin on his farm, where at last it came to light of day when his defence against the libel charge had to be produced. This led to the conviction of his accuser, Mr. Hiss, and to the partial exposure of a condition of Communist infestation in the American Government so deep and widespread, that American state policy obviously must, during the entire period of the Second World War, have been to a great extent under the direct influence of the world-revolutionary leaders in Moscow.

This interdict (which obviously could not be made effective; secret organizations cannot be suppressed by decree) put the conspirators on guard, so that (as the two historians of the Illuminati relate, Messrs. C.F. Forestier and Leopold Engel) "a considerable amount of the most valuable papers of the order where either carefully concealed or burned" and "few documents survive, for most of them were destroyed and external relationships were broken off, in order to avert suspicion"; in other words, the order went deep underground. Thus the documents which were found, in 1786, represent only a minimum. M.Forestier says that in 1784 (the last year in which it tended rather to vaunt its power than to conceal it) the order stretched from its Bavarian base "over all Central Europe, from the Rhine to the Vistula and from the Alps to the Baltic; its members included young people who were later to apply the principles instilled into them, officials of all kinds who put their influence at its service, members of the clergy whom it inspired to be 'tolerant' and princes whose protection it was able to claim and whom it hoped to control". The reader will see that this is a picture of Communism today, save for the allusion to "princes"; the number of these has diminished almost to nothing since 1784.

However, the papers which were found and published, if they did not show the full range of the Illuminati's membership and connections, especially in France, Britain and America, nevertheless exposed the nature of the secret society and its all-destructive ambition. An Illuminist emissary was struck by lightning on a journey to Silesia in 1785. Papers found on him caused the houses of two Illuminist leaders to be searched. Correspondence between "Spartacus" (Adam Weishaupt) and the "Areopagites" (his closest associates in the order), and other papers then found revealed the full plan for world-revolution with which we of the 20th Century have become familiar through its results and under the name of "Communism".

None can believe today that this grandiose plan of destruction originated in the brain of one Bavarian professor, or resist the conclusion that (as Mrs. Nesta Webster suggests) Weishaupt and his allies did not create, but only loosed upon the world a live and terrible force that had lain dormant for many centuries.

When he founded his Illuminati, on May 1, 1776, Weishaupt was dean of the faculty of law at Ingolstadt University (in our day university professors who are secret Communists are often to be found in the faculties of law). He had been brought up by the Jesuits, whom he came to hate, and he borrowed from them, and perverted to the opposite purpose, their secret of organization: the method which (as his associate Mirabeau said) "under one head, made men dispersed over the universe tend towards the same goal". This idea, of leagueing men together in secret conspiracy and using them to achieve an aim which they do not comprehend, pervades the entire mass of letters and other Illuminist documents seized by the Bavarian Government.

The idea is presented with ardent fondness and the many ways of realizing it are of high ingenuity. The accumulated experience of ages, in conspiracy, must have been drawn on and Mrs. Nesta Webster, in her search for the source of this morbid and perverse doctrine, found herself led back to the start of the Christian era and further. For instance, M. Silvestre de Sacy says that the method used by the Ismailis (a subversive sect within Islam in the 8th Century) was to enlist "partisans in all places and in all classes of society" in the attempt to destroy their professed faith and government; the Ismaili leader, Abdullah ibn Maymun, set out "to unite in the form of a vast secret society with many degrees of initiation freethinkers, who regarded religion only as a curb for the people, and bigots of all sects". The achievement of Abdulla ibn Maymun, according to another authority, M. Reinhart Dozy, was that "by means such as these the extraordinary result was brought about that a multitude of men of divers beliefs were all working together for an object known only to a few of them". These quotations exactly describe both the aims, methods and achievement of Adam Weishaupt and of Communism and they could be multiplied by extracts from the literature of the Cabalists, the Gnostics and the Manicheans.

The Weishaupt documents are incontestably authentic; the Bavarian Government unwittingly forestalled any attempt to cry "Forgery" (in the manner made familiar in our century) by inviting any who were interested to inspect the original documents in the Archives at Munich.

They revealed three main things: first, the aims of the society; second, the method of organization; and third, the membership, at least in a relatively restricted area (chiefly, the South German States). These three matters will be separately discussed here.

The basic idea, made abundantly clear in the correspondence between "Spartacus" and his pseudonymous fellow-conspirators, was to destroy all established authority, nationhood and religion, and thus to clear the way for the rise of a new ruling class, that of the Illuminates. The society's aims, as summed up by Henri Martin, were "the abolition of property, social authority and nationality, and the return of the human race to the happy state in which it formed only a single family without artificial needs, without useless sciences, every father being priest and magistrate; priest of we know not what religion, for in spite of their frequent invocations of the God of Nature, many indications lead us to conclude that Weishaupt had no other God than Nature herself.

This is confirmed by Weishaupt; "Princes and nations will disappear... Reason will be the only code of man". In all his writings he completely eliminated any idea of divine power outside Man.

The attack on "kings and princes" was merely "cover" for the true attack, on all nationhood (as time has shown; now that the supply of kings and princes has given out Communism impartially destroys proletarian prime ministers and politicians); and that on "priests" was a disguise for the real attack, on all religion. The true aim, in both cases, is revealed in Weishaupt's own correspondence with his intimates; the false one was professed to inferior agents of the society, or to the public if it ever got wind of Illuminist doings. Weishaupt's great skill in enlisting important people, who joined him in the belief that they were thus proving themselves "progressive" or "liberal", is shown by the number of princes and priests who were found in his secret membership-lists.

The best example of his success, and of his quick adaptability of method, is given by the case of religion. His attack on religion was a much more daring and startling thing in his day than in ours, when we have lived long enough with open Communism to become familiar with a proposition which in Weishaupt's day must have seemed scarcely credible: that man, having once found his way to the idea of God, should of his own will retrace his footsteps!

Weishaupt's original idea was to make Fire Worship the religion of Illuminism. This was unlikely ever to bring recruits from the rank s of the clergy, and he hit on a better idea, which brought them in numbers. He averred that Jesus had had "a secret doctrine", never openly revealed, which could be found by the diligent between the lines of the Gospels. This secret doctrine was to abolish religion and establish reason in its place: "when at last Reason becomes the religion of man so will the problem be solved". The idea of joining a secret society of which Jesus had been the true founder, and of following an example set by Jesus in using words to disguise meaning, proved irresistible to the many clerics who then passed through the door thus opened to them. They were figures of a new kind in their day; in ours the Communist cleric has become familiar.

The Illuminist leaders privately mocked them. "Spartacus's" chief collaborator "Philo" (the Hanoverian Baron von Knigge) wrote, "We say then, Jesus wished to introduce no new religion, but only to restore natural religion and reason to their old rights... There are many passages in the Bible which can be made use of and explained, and so all quarrelling between the sects ceases if one can find a reasonable meaning in the teaching of Jesus, be it true or not... Now therefore that people see that we are the only real and true Christians, we can say a word more against priests and princes, but I have so managed that after previous tests I can receive pontiffs and kings in this degree. In the higher Mysteries we must then (a) disclose the pious fraud and (b) reveal from all writings the origin of all religious lies and their connexion..."

"Spartacus" happily commented, "You cannot imagine what sensation our Priest's degree is arousing. The most wonderful thing is that great Protestant and reformed theologians who belong to Illuminism still believe that the religious teaching imparted in it contains the true and genuine spirit of the Christian religion. Oh, man, of what cannot you be persuaded! I never thought that I should become the founder of a new religion".

Through this success in persuading clerics that irreligion was the true faith and antichrist the true Christianity Weishaupt made great strides in Bavaria. He recorded that all non-Illuminist professors had been driven from Ingolstadt University, that the society had provided its clerical members with "good benefices, parishes, posts at court", that the schools were Illuminist-controlled, and that the seminary for young priests would soon be captured, whereon "we shall be able to provide the whole of Bavaria with proper priests".

Weishaupt's attack on religion was the most distinctive feature of his doctrine. His ideas about "the god of Reason" and "the god of Nature" bring his thought very close to Judaic thought, in its relation to the Gentiles, and as Illuminism became Communism, and Communism came under Jewish leadership, this might be significant. The Judaic Law also lays down that the Gentiles (who as such are excluded from the world to come) are entitled only to the religion of nature and of reason which Weishaupt taught. Moses Mendelssohn,* as quoted in his Memoirs, says:

"Our rabbis unanimously teach that the written and oral laws which form conjointly our revealed religion are obligatory on our nation only: 'Moses commanded us a law, even the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob'. We believe that all other nations of the earth have been directed by God to adhere to the laws oj nature... Those who regulate their lives according to the precepts of this religion oj nature and oj reason are called virtuous men of other nations..."

* Moses Mendelssohn wrote this nearly two hundred years ago and it correctly defines the Judaist attitude toward Kipling's "lesser breeds without the Law". In our day (1955) a proposal was being bruited in Jewry to bring the lesser breeds nominally within the Judaist fold while perpetuating their inferiority and exclusion. As the reader of this book will recall, in the pre-Christian era proselytes were sought, but from the start of the Christian period Judaist hostility to conversion has been firm and even fierce (with the one exception of the mass-conversion of the Mongolian Khazars, from whom today's Ashkenazi sprang) and the Talmud says that "proselytes are annoying to Israel like a scab".

In this authoritative view, then, God himself excluded the Gentiles from his congregation and commanded them to live merely according to the laws of nature and of reason. Thus Weishaupt was directing them to do just what the Jewish god directed them to do. If the Talmudic rabbis had no part in inspiring Illuminism (and research cannot discover any) the reason why they later took a directing part in Communism seems here to become plain.

In 1955 a young Reform rabbi, born in Germany but living in America, suggested that the time had come for Judaism to undertake missionary work among the Gentiles. The basis he laid down was identical with Moses Mendelssohn's dictum; this rabbi, Mr. Jakob Petuchowski, merely succeeded in finding a solution to what had seemed to Mendelssohn an insoluble difficulty ("Pursuant to the principles of my religion, I am not to seek to convert anyone who is not born according to our laws... the Jewish religion is diametrically opposed to it" i.e., conversion).

Mr. Petuchowski proposed, in fact, that conversions made by his proposed mission should be on a basis which would give the convert a status, in relation to the original Jews, rather comparable with that of the American Negro, during the slavery era, to the white folk in the big plantation house. The converts would be required (in other words, permitted) only to obey the "Seven Laws of Noah ", (the allusion is presumably to the ninth chapter of Genesis), and not the hundreds of commands and vetoes attributed to God by the "Mosaic Law". In this way the "lesser breeds" would apparently receive, at the hands of Judaism, the "religion of nature and of reason" recommended for them by Adam Weishaupt and Moses Mendelssohn alike. If they then called themselves "Jews", this would be rather as the plantation Negro took his owner's family-name.

This ingenious proposal may have been prompted by the reflection that Jewish power in the world is now so great that a solution to the problem of the status of the "lesser breeds" will have to be found, if "The Law" is to be literally "observed". Mr. Petuchowski's own words were, "Religious Jews do believe that the plans for God's kingdom on earth have been delivered into their keeping... Those Gentiles, therefore, who have this larger salvation at heart, should be made acquainted with what Judaism has to offer, and should be invited to cast in their lot with the household of Israel".

What was here "offered" was in fact "the religion of nature and reason".

So much for the aims of the Illuminati. They are those of Communism today, unchanged. As for the method, every baseness of which human beings are capable was listed for exploitation in the cause of recruitment. Among the papers were found two packets which particularly horrified public opinion at the time. They contained documents laying down the order's right to exercise the law of life and death over its members, a eulogy of atheism, the description of a machine for the automatic destruction of secret papers, and prescriptions for procuring abortion, counterfeiting seals, making poisonous perfumes and secret ink, and the like. Today, again, the contents of a Communist laboratory are familiar to any who follow such matters, but in 1787 the effect of this disclosure, in Catholic Bavaria, was like a glimpse of the antechamber of Hades.

Weishaupt' s papers included a diagram illustrating the way in which he exercised control over his organization. It shows what might be a section of chain-mail, or of honeycomb, and is identical with the celebrated "cell" system on which Communism is built today. It is the product of an intelligence of the highest kind (and, obviously, of centuries of experience; methods of this sort cannot be devised without a long process of trial and error). The secret is that damage to such a structure cannot be more than local, the main fabric remaining always unimpaired and capable of repair. If a few links, or cells, are destroyed these can be made good in due time, and meanwhile the organization continues, substantially unharmed.

At the centre of this web sat Weishaupt, and held all threads in his hands. "One must show how easy it would be for one clever head to direct hundreds and thousands of men", he wrote above the diagram, and below it he added, "I have two immediately below me into whom I breathe my whole spirit, and each of these two has again two others, and so on. In this way I can set a thousand men in motion and on fire in the simplest manner, and in this way one must impart orders and operate on politics".

When the Illuminist papers were published most of its members first learned that Weishaupt was its head, for he was known only to his close associates. The mass knew only that, somewhere above them, was a "beloved leader" or "big brother", a Being all-wise, kindly but stern, who through them would reshape the world. Weishaupt had in fact achieved the "extraordinary result" ascribed to Abdulla ibn Maymun in Islam: under him "a multitude of men of divers beliefs were all working together for an object known only to a few of them".

The fact that each dupe only knew his two neighbour dupes would not alone have been enough to bring about that result. How were the Illuminates kept together? The answer is that Weishaupt discovered, or received from some higher intelligence the secret on which the cohesive strength of the world-revolution rests today, under Communism: terror!

All Illuminates took "illuminated" names, which they used in their dealings with each other, and in all correspondence. This practice of the alias, or "cover name", has been continued to the present-day. The members of the Communist governments which usurped power in Russia in 1917 were known to the world, for the first time in history, by aliases (and are so known to posterity also). The exposures of 1945-1955 in America, England, Canada and Australia showed that the men who worked as Communist agents in the governments of these countries used "cover-names", in the way begun by Weishaupt.

Weishaupt organized his society in grades, or circles, the outer rings of which contained the new recruits and lesser dupes. Advancement through the grades was supposed to bring initiation into further chapters of the central mystery. Weishaupt preferred the enrolment of young men at their most impressionable ages, between 15 and 30. (This practice also was continued into our day; Messrs. Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Whittaker Chambers, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and others were all "netted" at their American or English universities). Other grades or degrees were added as the circle of recruitment widened, or especial obstacles to it were discovered; the example of religion has already been given, and in this case also Communism, by making use of the suggestion that Jesus was the first Communist, has followed Weishaupt's precedent, merely changing "Illuminist" to "Communist". In this approach to prospective members the manner of the invitation, "Will you walk into my parlour?", was varied to meet individual cases.

The young men who were recruited for the conspiracy were sworn in with much intimidating ceremonial, including a significant mockery of the Christian sacrament. They were required to supply a dossier about their parents, listing their "dominant passions", and to spy on each other. Both these ideas are basic in Communism and one possibly original source of them is the "Mosaic Law", where the obligation to denounce kinsfolk who incur suspicion of heresy, and to place "a guard upon my guard", is included in the "statutes and judgments".

The young Illuminate was made to feel that he would never know how many eyes of unknown superiors might be on him (he only knew his immediate superiors); he was taught to inform on those around him and inferred that they informed on him. This is the basic principle of terror, which can never be completely established merely by killing, torture or imprisonment; only the knowledge that he can trust no man, not his own son or father or friend, reduces the human victim to utter submission. Since Weishaupt's day this secret terror has been resident in the West. Those who have no personal experience of it may gain understanding of the power it wields in our day, even many thousands of miles from its central headquarters, by reading Mr. Whittaker Chambers's description of his flight into concealment after he resolved to break with his Communist masters.

As to the membership of the Illuminati, the papers discovered showed that, after ten years of existence, it had several thousand members, many of them in important civil positions where they could exert influence on the acts of rulers and governments. They even included rulers: the contemporary Marquis de Luchet relates that some thirty reigning and non-reigning princes had gutlessly joined an order, the masters of which were sworn to destroy them! It included the Dukes of Brunswick, Gotha and Saxe- Weimar, princes of Hesse and Saxe-Gotha, and the Elector of Mainz; Metternich, Pestalozzi the educationist, ambassadors and politicians and professors.

Above all others, it included the man who, twenty years later, was to write the world's most famous masterpiece on the theme of the youth who sold his soul to the devil. The inference that Faust was in truth the story of Goethe and Illuminism is hard to resist; its theme is essentially the same as that of Witness and other works which, in our day, have been written by men who escaped from Communism.

These lists were obviously not even complete, for the reason previously given, that precautions had already been taken before the Bavarian authorities raided the dwellings of Weishaupt's chief associates in 1786. For the same reason, the documents discovered only show a part of the area over which the Illuminati had spread; Weishaupt's own diagram showed that the secret order was constructed in such a way that detection should never uncover or damage more than a segment. It is possible, for the same reason again, that Weishaupt was but a group or area leader, and that the high directorate of what demonstrably was a world-revolutionary organization was never unmasked.

What is certain is that, although the Illuminist documents contained no names or other indications to show its power in France, the French revolution, when it began three years later, developed into an attack on all civil authority and all religion, exactly of the kind planned by Weishaupt and his associates. From that day to this writers in the service of the world-revolution (their name is legion, in all countries) have never ceased to deny all connexion whatsoever between Illuminism and the French Revolution; they artlessly argue that, as the secret society was forbidden in 1786, it cannot have had anything to do with an event in 1789.

The truth is that Illuminism, though forbidden, was no more extirpated than Communism would be by a legal ban today, and that its agents gave the French revolution those brandmarks which identify it as the work of the world revolutionaries, not of discontented French people. The acts of the Reign of Terror were of a nature unimaginable before they were committed, but they had long been familiar, in imagination, to the Illuminati. In what other minds could the idea have taken shape that the vessels of the sacramental supper should be borne by an ass in public procession through the streets of Paris? They were nurtured in the ancient tradition of such mockery, and their own initiates were admitted in a ceremony mocking the sacrament. In what brain but Weishaupt's could the notion of enthroning an actress as Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame have found birth?

"For the purpose of infernal evocation... it is requisite... to profane the ceremonies of the religion to which one belongs and to trample its holiest symbols underfoot"; this is Mr. A.E. Wake's description of the formula of black magic, and black magic and satanism were two of the ingredients in the Illuminist brew.

Weishaupt and his intimates, or perhaps his masters, proposed to enter into France through their agents, secret Illuminates, in high places. In this century we have seen what great results can be achieved by this method, the aborted result of the Second World War, and the condition of armed truce in which it has left the world, was brought about by such men as Hiss and White and the higher men who protected them. Weishaupt selected the perfect way of gaining such power over French affairs and events: through another, very powerful secret society, which he permeated and captured by the methods laid down in his papers. This was Grand Orient Freemasonry.

The plan to acquire control of Freemasonry through Illuminist agents, and the success achieved, is plainly stated in Weishaupt's papers. First he records that, "I have succeeded in obtaining a profound glimpse into the secrets of the Freemasons; I know their whole aim and shall impart it all at the right time in one of the higher degrees". At a later stage he gave a general order for his "Areopagites" to enter Freemasonry: "Then we shall have a masonic lodge of our own... we shall regard this as our nursery garden... at every opportunity we shall cover ourselves with this..." (i.e., Freemasonry).

This device of advancing "under cover" (which is still basic in Communism today) was the guiding principle: "If only the aim is achieved, it does not matter under what cover it takes place; and a cover is always necessary. For in concealment lies a great part of our strength. For this reason we must always cover ourselves with the name of another society. The lodges that are under Freemasonry are in the meantime the most suitable cloak for our high purpose... a society concealed in this manner cannot be worked against... In case of a prosecution or of treason the superiors cannot be discovered... We shall be shrouded in impenetrable darkness from spies and emissaries of other societies".

Today's Communist method, once again, may be clearly recognized in these words; they could be applied to the "capture" of parties, associations and societies in our day without change of a syllable. The extent of Weishaupt's success is best shown by quotation from the lament uttered, five years after the outbreak of the French revolution, by the Duke of Brunswick, Grand Master of German Freemasonry, who had also been an Illuminate. In 1794 he dissolved the order with words of pained surprise:

"... We see our edifice" (i.e., Freemasonry) "crumbling and covering the ground with ruins; we see destruction that our hands no longer arrest... A great sect arose, which taking for its motto the good and the happiness of man, worked in the darkness of the conspiracy to make the happiness of humanity a prey for itself. This sect is known to everyone; its brothers are known no less than its name. It is they who have undermined the foundations of the Order to the point of complete overthrow; it is by them that all humanity has been poisoned and led astray for several generations... They began by casting odium on religion... the plan they had formed for breaking all social ties and destroying all order was revealed in all their speeches and acts... they recruited apprentices of every rank and in every position; they deluded the most perspicacious men by falsely alleging different intentions... Their masters had nothing less in view than the thrones of the earth, and the government of the nations was to be directed by their nocturnal clubs. This is what has been done and is still being done. But we notice that princes and people are unaware how and by what means this is being accomplished. That is why we say to them in all frankness: the misuse of our Order... has produced all the political and moral troubles with which the world is filled today. You who have been initiated, you must join yourselves with us in raising your voices, so as to teach peoples and princes that the sectarians, the apostates of our Order, have alone been and will be the authors of present and future revolutions... So as to cut out to the roots the abuse and error, we must from this moment dissolve the whole Order..."

In this quotation the present narrative has jumped five years ahead of events, in order to show that one of the leading Freemasons of that generation, himself a penitent, identified the Illuminati as the authors of the French revolution and of future revolutions. Weishaupt's success in his declared intention of capturing Freemasonry from within, and the part then played by Illuminist agents inside Freemasonry in directing the revolution, could not be attested by a better authority than the Grand Master of German Freemasonry himself.

Under this injected influence Freemasonry, which was very strong in France, took an extreme course and produced the Jacobin clubs; these, again under Illuminst influence, presided over the Reign of Terror, when the masked authors of the revolution revealed its true nature by their deeds. Like the Russian revolution 130 years later, the one in France then displayed its hatred of the poor and defenceless more than of the rich, of the peasants of the Vendee more than their supposed oppressors, of all beauty as such, of churches and religion, of everything that might uplift the human soul above the level of animal needs and desires.

Adam Weishaupt himself became a Freemason in 1777, the year after he founded the Illuminati, being received into a Munich lodge. Count Mirabeau, the later revolutionary leader in France, was privy both to Weishaupt's intention to join and to the secret reason for it, for his Memoirs included a paper, dated 1776, which set out a programme identical with that of the Illuminati, and in his History of the Prussian Monarchy he refers to Weishaupt and to the Illuminati by name and says:

"The Lodge Theodore de Bon Conseil at Munich, where there were a few men with brains and hearts, was tired of being tossed about by the vain promises and quarrels of Masonry. The heads resolved to graft on to their branch another secret association to which they gave the name of the Order of the Illumines. They modelled it on the Society of Jesus, whilst proposing to themselves views diametrically opposed".

This is the exact intention and method described by Weishaupt in his own correspondence, and this is the proof that Mrabeau, the later revolutionary leader, knew of it at the time, that is in 1776. Moreover, his words suggest that the secret society of the Illuminati was founded with the express intention of gaining control of Freemasonry and of instigating and directing revolution through it. That Mirabeau was party to the whole undertaking from the start is suggested by the fact that the memoir of 1776 (the year in which the Illuminati were founded) ascribes to him the Illuminist "cover-name" of Arcesilas, so that he must have been a founder member, with Adam Weishaupt, and a leading Illuminate thereafter. Mirabeau, as the link between Weishaupt and the French Revolution, cannot be ignored. The editor of his Memoirs, M. Barthou, remarks that the "plan of reform" of 1776, found among Mirabeau's papers, "resembles very much in certain parts the work accomplished later by the Constituent Assembly" (the revolutionary parliament of 1789). That is another way of saying that the work of the Constituent Assembly very much resembled Adam Weishaupt's plan of 1776, when he and Mirabeau together were founding the Illuminati and planning together to gain control of Freemasonry.

The other stages in Weishaupt's underground capture of Freemasonry are also clear in the record. At the general congress of 1782 (seven years before the revolution) at Wilhelmsbad the Illuminati gained so many recruits that the Order of the Strict Observance, previously the most powerful body in Freemasonry, ceased to exist. The way to complete victory in the Masonic world was opened when the Illuminati enlisted the two most important personages in German Freemasonry, Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick (the later penitent) and Prince Carl of Hesse.

In 1785 Illuminst emissaries attended another general congress, in Paris, and from that moment the detailed planning of the revolution seems to have become the task of the Lodge of the Amis Reunis, which was a "cover" for the Illuminati. The blurring of traces at this point is the result of the notoriety which the order gained in Bavaria, its proscription in the following year, 1786, and the destruction of evidence. Nevertheless, in 1787, the same emissaries visited Paris at the invitation of the secret committee of the Lodge.

Even before the revolution had really developed, the fact that it was instigated and directed by Illuminism was known and published. The indictment and the warning uttered by the Marquis de Luchet stands out today as an astonishingly accurate prediction, not only of the course which the revolution would take in France, but of the continuing course of the world revolution down to our day. As early as 1789 he wrote:

"Learn that there exists a conspiracy in favour of despotism against liberty, of in capacity against talent; of vice against virtue, of ignorance against enlightenment... This society aims at governing the world... Its object is universal domination... No such calamity has ever yet afflicted the world..."

De Luchet precisely depicted the role which the monarch was to be forced to play during the Girondist phase ("see him condemned to serve the passions of all that surround him... to raise degraded men to power, to prostitute his judgment by choices that dishonour his prudence"), and the plight in which the revolution would leave France ("We do not mean to say that the country where the Illumines reign will cease to exist, but it will fall into such a degree of humiliation that it will no longer count in politics, that the population will diminish..."). If his warning went unheeded, cried de Luchet, there would be "a series of calamities of which the end is lost in the darkness of time... a subterranean fire smouldering eternally and breaking forth periodically in violent and devastating explosions".

The events of the last 1 65 years have not been better described than in these words of de Luchet, which foretold them. He also foresaw the "liberal and progressive" patron of the revolution who was to help greatly in bringing about the "violent and devastating explosions" of these 165 years: "there are too many passion s interested in supporting the system of the Illumines, too many deluded rulers, imagining themselves enlightened, ready to precipitate their people into the abyss". He foresaw the continuing strength and clutch of the conspiracy: "the heads of the Order will never relinquish the authority they have acquired nor the treasure at their disposal". De Luchet called on Freemasonry to cleanse its stable while time remained: "would it not be possible to direct the Freemasons themselves against the Illumines by showing them that, whilst they are working to maintain harmony in society, those others are everywhere sowing seeds of discord and preparing the ultimate destruction of their order?" 165 years later, in Britain and America, men were calling on their governments in just such words, and just as vainly, to cleanse the public offices and services of the Illumines, by then called Communists.

The measure of de Luchet's foresight is given by the fact that he wrote in 1789, when the French revolution was hardly a revolution; it was universally held to be merely a mild, health-giving reform which would leave the monarch a wise meed of power, amend obvious evils, and establish justice and freedom for ever in a happy, regenerated France! That was still the general belief in 1790, when across the Channel another man saw the true nature of the revolution and "predicted with uncanny accuracy the course of events", to quote his biographer of more than a century later, Mr. John Morley.

Edmund Burke, an Irishman, was one of the greatest orators the British House of Commons ever saw. Time is the test of such a man's quality, and as the years pass the phrases of his attack on the French revolution ring ever more nobly; as in de Luchet's case, the remarkable thing is that it was published in 1790, when the names of Robespierre and Danton were hardly known, before the word "republic" had been heard, when the king looked forward to long years of constitutional reign, when all France was joyfully celebrating the peaceful improvement that had been effected. Across this happy scene fell suddenly the shadow of Burke's outstretched arm, pointing "like an inspired prophet" to the doom to come. His biographer says, "It is no wonder that when the cloud burst and the doom was fulfilled men turned to Burke as they turned of old to Ahitopheth, whose counsel was as if men enquired of the oracle of God".

Unhappily that is not a true picture of what occurred when Burke's warning was fulfilled. Very many men turned against Burke, not to him, precisely because he had spoken the truth; indeed, the power which the conspiracy even at that time wielded over the press and public debate is most clearly shown by the way flattery of him was suddenly turned into attack and defamation after he published his Reflections on the revolution. The Illumines, and the "liberal and progressive" organs and speakers controlled by them, had greatly counted on Edmund Burke, because he had upheld the cause of the American colonists a decade earlier. How could he support one revolution and attack another, they asked angrily, and Burke came under the kind of general attack which the united press, in our generation, keeps in its locker for any man who publicly demands the investigation of Communism-in-government.

Had Burke followed the "progressive" line, and pretended that the French revolution would help "the common man", the flattery of him would have continued, but in that case nothing he said would have been of enduring value, or have been remembered today. As it is, the inspired words of his attack on the revolution have the imperishable gleam of gold: "It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound... The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever".

If these words, too, were inspired prophecy (and in 1955 they look truer than they were even in 1790) Christendom and the West at least found an eloquent and noble mourner in Edmund Burke. For he knew the difference between "revolutions" as clearly as he saw the true shape of the event in France. He was not to be bamboozled by the fact that somebody had miscalled a colonial war of independence, led by country squires, a "revolution". As a genuine friend of liberty, he had supported the colonists' bid to govern themselves and be masters in their own household. There was no resemblance whatever between their motives and those of the secret men who, as Burke saw, were behind the revolution in France. Therefore he stretched out his accusing hand and was as heedless of the reproaches of "liberal" and "progressive" as he had been of their flattery on the earlier occasion (assuredly Edmund Burke knew that their praise then had not been prompted by any sympathy with New England merchants or Southern plantation-owners).

In America, at that moment, the general feeling about the event in France was a deluded one, produced by the confusion of ideas which Burke rejected. There was, for the time being, a popular notion that another benign "revolution" had occurred, somewhat similar to the "American revolution". There was a transient "French Frenzy", when Americans wore cockades and liberty-caps, danced, feasted and paraded beneath intertwined French and American flags, and shouted "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". With the Reign of Terror, this phase of illusion was followed by one of revulsion and horror.

The Jacobin leaders directed the Reign of Terror and, as good Illuminates, used classic pseudonyms in the manner initiated by "Spartacus" Weishaupt himself: Chaumette was Anaxagoras, Clootz (described as a Prussian baron) was Anarcharsis, Danton Horace, Lacroix Publicola and Ronsin Scaevola. These terrorists, when they succeeded the Kerensky-phase, faithfully carried out the plan of the Illuminati, and by the killing of a king and the desecration of churches gave expression to its two chief ideas: the destruction of all legitimate government and of all religion. Yet even they were apparently only tools, for a contemporary, Lombard de Langres, wrote of that "most secret convention which directed everything after May 31, an occult and terrible power of which the other Convention became the slave and which was composed of the prime initiates of llluminism. This power was above Robespierre and the committees of the government... it was this occult power which appropriated to itself the treasures of the nation and distributed them to the brothers and friends who had helped on the great work".

It is this picture of men in high places doing the will of some hidden, but palpably directing, supreme sect that gives the revolution the aspect of a demoniac puppet-show, played against flickering red flames amid the odour of brimstone. The revolution, not the Trench revolution; whatever the true nature of the English one, since 1 789 there has only been one, continuous revolution. There have not been episodic, disconnected outbreaks, in 1848 and 1905 and so on, but those recurrent eruptions of "a subterranean fire smouldering eternally" which de Luchet and Burke foresaw before the event. What is historically of great value in the annals of the French revolution, however, is the proof, which they afford, of the use of men for a purpose uncomprehended by them. This gives the revolution, then and now, its peculiar and satanic imprint; it is, as Lombard de Langres wrote, "the code of hell".

When the revolution was ebbing, three men arose, in France, England and America, who saw three things plainly: that its course had followed the chart revealed by the Illuminati papers in 1787; that this secret society had been able, through Freemasonry, to instigate and direct it; and that the secret league of conspirators, with its continuing plan for world revolution, had survived and was preparing the further "violent and devastating explosions" foretold by de Luchet. These three men were the Abbe Baruel, a Jesuit and eyewitness of the revolution; Professor John Robison a Scottish scientist who for over twenty years was general secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; and the Rev. Jedediah Morse, a New England clergyman and geographer. They were all distinguished men. The Abbe Baruel's and Professor Robison's books and Mr. Morse's published sermons (all 1797-8) went into many editions and are still indispensable to students of the time. Their works and words gained much public attention and they were supported from Philadelphia, in his Porcupine 's Gazette, by William Cobbett, who seems to have been driven into exile by the same occult power which set out to destroy Messrs. Baruel, Robison and Morse.

The Abbe Baruel's' verdict on what had occurred was identical with de Luchet's earlier prophecy and Lord Acton's much later analysis:

"... We shall demonstrate that, even to the most horrid deeds perpetrated during the French revolution, everything was foreseen and resolved on, combined and premeditated; that they were the offspring of deep thought villainy, since they had been prepared and were produced by men, who alone held the clue of these plots and conspiracies, lurking in the secret meetings where they had been conceived... Though the events of each day may not appear to have been combined, there nevertheless existed a secret agent and a secret cause, giving rise to each event and turning each circumstance to the long-sought-for end... The grand cause of the revolution, its leading features, its atrocious crimes, will still remain one continued chain of deeplaid and premeditated villainy...

The three men came to the same conclusion: "An anti-Christian conspiracy... not only against kings, but against every government, against all civil society, even against all property whatsoever" (the Abbe Baruel); "An association has been formed for the express purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe" (Prof. Robison); "The express aim is 'to root out and abolish Christianity and overthrow all civil governments'." (Mr. Morse). They agreed that what had happened was, not merely an episode in France, born of French circumstances, but the work of an organization with a continuing plan in all countries: a universal plan. They agreed that this organization was the secret society of the Illuminati, that it had inspired and controlled the terrorist phase of the revolution, that it had survived, and that it was established and strong in England and the United States. The Abbe Baruel in particular gave warning in this last respect.

The words and writings of these three men were supported by the leading public men of their day, and have been so fully borne out by events, particularly in our century, that historically they simply serve to show that the world-revolution was recognized by some, and its future course foretold, at the moment of its second appearance in the West. The efforts of these three men were as vain in averting the havoc which the conspiracy later wreaked, and for that reason the case of Messrs. Barruel, Robison and Morse is of especial interest.

What befell them proves more conclusively than any of their own words the very thing they strove to establish: the continued existence and strength of a secret society working, in all countries, for the destructive purpose which they described. Messrs. Barruel, Robison and Morse were smothered with vituperation. In their day newspapers were in their infancy, and were usually owned by one man, who also edited them. It must therefore have been much more difficult than it is today to gain control of a large proportion of them. The concentrated attack which was delivered against the three men from the moment when they said that Illuminism had brought about the French revolution and still existed shows that even in 1797 the Illumines were in effective control of the press in America and England.

This was one of the most surprising discoveries yielded by the research which produced this book. In my own day I have been forced to realize that this control exists, and that a writer who writes about the world revolution in the vein of Edmund Burke will find all avenues of publication closing against him. Mrs. Nesta Webster relates the same experience. When she first began to write on revolution, in the early 1920's, a well-known London publisher said to her, "Remember that if you take an anti-revolutionary line you will have the whole literary world against you". She says she thought this extraordinary but then found through experience that the publisher was right and that has been my observation too. However, I thought it was a condition that had arisen during the last thirty years until I studied the story of Messrs. Barruel, Robison and Morse; then I saw that "the whole literary world" fell as one man on them in 1798, when the Reign of Terror was recent. Nothing else so clearly showed, to me, that the line from Illuminism in 1789 to Communism today is but a line of inheritance; the same organization pursues the same aim with the same methods and even with the same words.

That was another curious thing about the attack on those three writers who took "an anti-revolutionary line". Soon after they gained the public eye the attacks in the newspapers began; nearly always anonymous. They made use of exactly the same language (Doublespeak) as that which is employed in similar assaults today. The three men were accused of starting a "witch-hunt", of being bigots and alarmists, of persecuting "freedom of opinion" and "academic freedom", of misrepresenting "liberal" and "progressive" thought, and the like. From that, the attack continued to slander and scurrilous innuendo, and I often found phrases which recurred in the campaign waged against an American Cabinet member, Mr. James Forrestal, in 1947-9; their private lives were said to be immoral and their financial habits shady; and at the last came the familiar suggestion that they were "mad". This suggestion is often made today, in the culminant stages of a campaign against any anti-revolutionary figure; it is evidently held to be especially strong medicine in defamation. This particular form of attack might have its original source in the Talmud, which uses it against Jesus (the Jewish Encyclopaedia, in its article on Jesus, refers its readers to the work of a Jewish writer who "agrees that there must have been abnormal mental processes involved in the utterances and behaviour of Jesus").

In short, these attacks on Messrs. Barruel, Robison and Morse made use of a limited political vocabulary which today is plainly recognizable as that of the revolution and its agents, and is now so hackneyed that it must be imparted to all initiates from some central place in the organization. The campaign against them was effective, so that their warnings, like those of Burke, were forgotten by the masses. However, the secret band (which must have the same horror of truth as the devil might have of the cross) continued to fear them, so that the defamation continued long after all three were dead! As recently as 1918 the Columbia University of New York allotted funds for a costly piece of research designed to show that the Illuminati truly died when they were proscribed in 1786 and thus could not have caused or survived the French revolution, and in this publication all the stock-in-trade epithets were brought out and used again, as if the three dead men were live "witch-hunters"!

In 1918 the Russian revolution was but a year old and the moment was evidently held apt for another attempt to show that the French revolution had been a self-contained affair, leaving no roots which might have erupted in Russia in 1917. Messrs. Barruel, Robison and Morse, if from some bourne they were able to watch these proceedings, no doubt observed that in 1918 and the following years Communism found the Columbia University of New York to be a very good hunting-ground. (Among the unlucky young men who were there entrapped for the cause was the Mr. Whittaker Chambers whose repentance and warning in 1939, had it been heeded by President Franklin Roosevelt, might have changed the whole course of the Second World War and of this century for the better).

The first two presidents of the American Republic, though they did not effectively act against the secret society, were deeply alarmed about it and well knew that what Barruel, Robison and Morse said was true. One of George Washington's last acts was, in a letter to Mr. Morse, to express the hope that his work would have "a more general circulation... for it contains important information, as little known, out of a small circle, as the dissemination of it would be useful, if spread through the community". (Presumably General Washington would not have told a Whittaker Chambers to "go jump in the lake"). A little earlier Washington had informed another correspondent that he was fully satisfied that "the doctrines of the Illuminati and the principles of Jacobinism" had "spread in the United States".

Indeed, this was beyond doubt, for secret societies had appeared in the United States in 1793, that is, within ten years of the Republic's birth, under the guise of "Democratic Clubs". Their true nature was made plain by the attitude of the French Minister, Genet, towards them; he showed the open sympathy which Soviet Ambassadors, in our generation, display for Communist organizations, or perhaps more accurately, for those which serve as "cover" for Communism (the relationship between the Soviet embassies and the revolutionary party in the country of accreditation was established by massive documentary proof in the Canadian and Australian investigations of 1945-46 and 1954-55 respectively). George Washington, as president in 1794, charged these "self-created societies" with instigating the insurrectionary outbreak in Pennsylvania known as the Whiskey Rebellion. Washington's authority was too great for him to be attacked as a witch-hunter and the clubs burrowed quickly underground, but from that moment the presence on American soil of an organization for world-revolution was known to all who cared to know and were able to withstand the "brainwashing" of the press.

The part admittedly played by Grand Orient Freemasonry, under Illuminist permeation, in the French Revolution caused American Freemasonry also to fall under suspicion, but frank discussion of this question was hindered by the fact that the great Washington was head of the Masonic fraternity. The defenders of Freemasonry laid much emphasis on this (evidently on the principle of "innocence by association"), and on the occasion of Washington's funeral in 1799 made a great parade of fellowship with the dead hero. Out of respect for him, rather than from satisfied curiosity, the public debate then waned, but at least two prominent Masons, Amos Stoddard and the Rev. Seth Payson, like the Duke of Brunswick in Europe publicly stated that the Illuminati had permeated Freemasonry and were working under its name. Washington's successor, President John Adams, in 1798 addressed a stern warning to Freemasonry:

"... the society of Masons have discovered a science of government, or art of ruling society, peculiar to themselves, and unknown to all the other legislators and philosophers of the wodd; I mean not only the skill to know each other by marks or signs that no other persons can divine but the wonderful power of enabling and compelling all men, and I suppose all women, at all hours, to keep a secret. If this art can be applied, to set aside the ordinary maxims of society, and introduce politics and disobedience to government, and still keep the secret, it must be obvious that such science and such societies may be perverted to all the ill purposes which have been suspected..."

After this public rebuke nothing but the death of Washington in the next year, probably, could have appeased the public desire for a thorough investigation; as so often in these affairs, the opponents of investigation profited from an irrelevant event which distracted or disarmed public attention. Nevertheless, public suspicion continued through three decades and led to the formation of an Anti-masonic Party in 1 827, which at its State convention in Massachusetts in 1829 declared "there is evidence of an intimate connexion between the higher orders of Freemasonry and French Illuminism". That was almost the last kick of the party of investigation, for the next State convention, in Vermont in 1830, recorded the sequel with which our century has been made familiar: "... the spirit of enquiry... was soon and unaccountably quelled; the press was mute as if the voice of the strangled sentinel and the mass of the people kept in ignorance that an alarm on the subject of Masonry had ever been sounded".

In other words, the cry for investigation had been drowned, as in our generation, by the counter-cry of "witch-hunt" and the like. From that moment until today the American people have never succeeded in moving any government to a full investigation and the secret infestation of government and the public departments continued, with results only partially revealed by the exposures of 1948 and after. The situation in England has been very similar.

In the last few paragraphs this narrative has jumped a few years to follow the course of American public uneasiness about Freemasonry to its end in 1830 (the Anti-masonic Party actually died in 1840). Now it returns to the immediate aftermath of the French revolution, and its effect on the world.

President Adams, as his Works show, was fully informed and persuaded about the existence of a universal and continuing conspiracy against all legitimate government and religion. He made the mistake, natural in his day, of thinking the plan a French one, just as people today, with no excuse, speak and think of Russian Communism, although the international nature of the revolution has long been made plain, beyond all doubt.

By his Sedition Act of 1798 President Adams tried to safeguard the future of the Republic, but time has since shown that laws against secret societies and conspiracies (although they should be enacted, to establish the illegality of the undertaking) are ineffective in checking them, especially as the secret organization has centuries of experience in eluding such laws. The one effective measure against secret conspiracy is investigation, public exposure and remedy, and this has never been fully used.

The American public man who most plainly perceived the entire shape of the future was Washington's confidant, Alexander Hamilton. He left among his papers an undated memoir (probably 1797-1800) which said:

"... the present era is among the most extraordinary which have occurred in the history of human affairs. Opinions, for a long time, have been gradually gaining ground, which threaten the foundations of religion, morality and society. An attack was first made upon the Christian revelation, for which natural religion was offered as a substitute... The very existence of a Deity has been questioned and in some instances denied. The duty of piety has been ridiculed, the perishable nature of man asserted, and his hopes bounded to the short span of his earthly state. Death has been proclaimed an eternal sleep, the dogma of the immortality of the soul a cheat, invented to torment the living for the benefit of the dead... A league has at length been cemented between the apostles and disciples of irreligion and anarchy. Religion and government have both been "stigmatized as abuses... The practical development of this pernicious system has been seen in France. It has served as an engine to subvert all her ancient institutions, civil and religious, with all the checks that served to mitigate the rigour of authority; it has hurried her headlong through a series of dreadful revolutions, which have laid waste property, made havoc among the arts, overthrown cities, desolated provinces, unpeopled regions, crimsoned her soil with blood, and deluged it in crime, poverty, and wretchedness;... This horrid system seemed awhile to threaten the subversion of civilised society and the introduction of general disorder among mankind. And though the frightful evils which have been its first and only fruits have given a check to its progress, it is to be feared that the poison has spread too widely and penetrated too deeply to be as yet eradicated. Its activity has been suspended, but the elements remain, concoctingfor new eruptions as occasion shall permit. It is greatly to be apprehended that mankind is not near the end of the misfortunes which it is calculated to produce, and that it still portends a long train of convulsion, revolution, carnage, devastation and misery. Symptoms of the too great prevalence of this system in the United States are alarmingly visible. It was by its influence that efforts were made to embark this country in a common cause with France in the early period of the present war; to induce our government to sanction and promote her odious principles and views with the blood and treasure of our citizens. It is by its influence that every succeeding revolution has been approved or excused; all the horrors that have been committed justified or extenuated; that even the last usurpation, which contradicts all the ostensible principles of the Revolution, has been regarded with complacency, and the despotic constitution engendered by it slyly held up as a model not unworthy of our imitation. In the progress of this system, impiety and infidelity have advanced with gigantic strides. Prodigious crimes heretofore unknown among us are seen..."

We of the 1950's are so familiar with the results here foreseen that we can scarcely realize what skill was needed, in the 1790's, so clearly to foresee them! From de Luchet before the Reign of Terror ("a series of calamities of which the end is lost in the darkness of time... a subterranean fire smouldering eternally and breaking forth periodically in violent and devastating explosions") to Alexander Hamilton after it ("the elements remain, concocting for new eruptions as occasion shall permit... mankind is not near the end of the misfortunes which it is calculated to produce... a long train of convulsion, revolution, carnage, devastation and misery") the shape of our century was most plainly and accurately foretold.

The net result of all this prescience, in terms of precaution, was nothing.

Needlessly but massively, all came about as these men, and the Burkes and Barruels, Robisons and Morses foresaw; like a man sleepwalking, the West trod on all the charted landmines. The anti-revolutionary prophets were cried down; the revolutionary orators and writers took over the debate and were applauded.

Napoleon's wars helped to divert public attention from the plot and the organization that had been discovered. Ten years after the French revolution the documents of the Illuminati and the French revolution were being forgotten; the public masses either began to believe that the secret society truly was dead, or had never had part in the revolution, or did not care. Twenty years after the French revolution the Illuminati were as busy as ever. Nothing had changed, save that the sect's followers in England and America had succeeded, through their power over published information, in beguiling the public mind and in defaming all who gave warning.

This later knowledge about the Illuminati is recent; Mrs. Nesta Webster's research discovered it. It comes from the boxes of Napoleon's police, which have now yielded their contents to the student and historian. These show that, two decades after the revolution and on the eve of Napoleon's own downfall, the Illuminati were very much alive, and pursued their undeviating aim.

Francois Charles de Berckheim was a special commissioner of police at Mayence under the Empire, and a Freemason. He reported in 1810 that the Illuminati had initiates all over Europe and were working hard to introduce their principles into the lodges of Freemasonry: "Illuminism is becoming a great and formidable power... kings and peoples will have much to suffer from it unless foresight and prudence break its frightful mechanism". A later report, of 1814, fully bears out the main contention of Messrs. Barruel, Robison and Morse in 1797-9 about the continuance of the secret society:

"The oldest and most dangerous association that which is generally known under the denomination of the Illumines and of which the foundation goes back towards the middle of the last century... the doctrine of Illuminism is subversive of every kind of monarchy; unlimited liberty, absolute levelling down, such is the fundamental dogma of the sect; to break the ties that bind the sovereign to the citizen of a state, that is the object of all its efforts".

Twenty years after the act of penance publicly performed by the Duke of Brunswick, Berckheim recorded that "among the principal chiefs... are numbered men distinguished for their fortune, their birth, and the dignities with which they are invested". He believed that some of these were "not the dupes of these demagogic dreams" but "hope to find in the popular emotions they stir up the means of seizing the reins of power, or at any rate of increasing their wealth and credit; but the crowd of adepts believe in it religiously..."

The picture given in these words (which recall de Luchet's, of twenty-five years before) is, or should be, familiar today, for our generation has shown again that avarice for power still leads wealthy or well-known people to associate themselves with movements, apparently hostile to their wealth or renown, in the belief that through them they may become even richer or more notorious.

Berckheim then gives a description of the organization and methods of the Illuminati which reproduces the picture given by Weishaupt's correspondence of 1786, and could equally be a photograph of Communism at work in our century. The following extract shows a group of recognizable 20th Century characters, to which any attentive student of our times could fit names, yet it was written in 1813:

"As the principal force of the Illumines lies in the power of opinions, they have set themselves out from the beginning to make proselytes amongst the men who through their profession exercise a direct influence on minds, such as literateurs, savants and above all professors. The latter in their chairs, the former in their writings, propagate the principles of the sect by disguising the poison that they circulate under a thousand different forms. These germs, often imperceptible to the eyes of the vulgar, are afterwards developed by the adepts of the Societies they frequent, and the most obscure wording is thus brought to the understanding of the least discerning, is above all in the universities that llluminism has always found and always will find numerous recruits; Those professors who belong to the Association set out from the first to study the character of their pupils. If a student gives evidence of a vigorous mind, an ardent imagination, the sectaries at once get hold of him; they sound in his ears the words Despotism, Tyranny, Rights of the People, etc., etc. Before he can even attach any meaning to these words, as he advances in age, reading works chosen for him, conversations skilfully arranged, develop the germ deposited in his youthful brain. Soon, his imagination ferments... At last, when he has been completely captivated, when several years of testing guarantee to the society inviolable secrecy and absolute devotion, it is made known to him that millions of individuals distributed in all the States of Europe share his sentiments and his hopes, that a secret link binds firmly all the scattered members of this immense family, and that the reforms he desires so ardently must sooner or later come about. This propaganda is rendered the easier by the existing associations of students, who meet together for the study of literature, for fencing, gaming or even mere debauchery. The Illumines insinuate themselves into all these circles and turn them into hotbeds for the propagation of their principles. Such then is the Association's continual mode of progression from its origins until the present moment; it is by convening from childhood the germ of poison into the highest classes of society, in feeding the minds of students on ideas diametrically opposed to that order of things under which they have to live, in breaking the ties that bind them to sovereigns, that llluminism has recruited the largest number of adepts..."

Thus llluminism survived and flourished in darkness after its "adepts" in the editorial offices, university chairs and pulpits had beaten down the public clamour for its extirpation. For some five generations since then the thing has continued: a proportion of notable men and a proportion of young men at the universities have in each succeeding generation been enticed into this net. The only counter-measure which would give the seniors pause and open the eyes of the unwary younger ones would be full public information about the world revolution and its methods, and that has been denied from generation to generation, so that the secret sect has maintained its power and hold. There can be only one explanation for this refusal of governments, from generation to generation, to investigate and expose: namely, that in this day as in Weishaupt's the sect has its "adepts" in the governments themselves; of that our century has given sufficient evidence.

What of Weishaupt himself, twenty years and more after his exposure and the proscription of his order? In 1808 he was enquiring about a point of masonic ritual and his enquiry reached the notice of an eminent member of the Grand Orient, the Marquis de Chefdebien, who then wrote in a letter to a friend that llluminism had supplied the men who "stirred up revolt, devastation, assassination": When Weishaupt died, in 1 830, his order was probably stronger than it had ever been, but was about to change its name; the same organization, with the same aims, was in the 1840's to emerge as Communism. That further story belongs to later chapters, and at this point the present narrative takes leave of Adam Weishaupt, the man whose name is forever identified with the emergence of world-revolution as a permanent idea and ambition, propagated by a permanent organization of secret conspirators in all lands, and having nothing whatever to do with remedying oppression or injustice; these evils it desired to aggravate and perpetuate.

Whoever his prompters, whatever the original source of his great knowledge of human weakness, Weishaupt, as Mrs. Nesta Webster says, "gathered into his hands the threads of all the conspiracies, was able to weave them together into a gigantic scheme for the destruction of France and the world". In his army men of all classes and of the most diverse views were welded together by bonds of infamy which seemed as strong as those of faith and honour: "Weishaupt's admirable system of watertight compartments precluded them from a knowledge of these differences and they all marched, unconsciously or not, towards the same goal".

If there were manifold currents of discontent before, Weishaupt fused them into one. With him and Illuminism, "vague subversive theory became active revolution"; the general staff was formed, the battle-operation laid down, the objective clarified. Today, nearly two hundred years later, the consequence of that is also clear: the all-destructive world-revolution must either prevail over Christendom and the West, reducing them both to ruins, or itself be crushed and broken up. There is now no third solution or middle course or different end to the conflict which was revealed in 1786. Leading public men and the sect's devotees both saw that from the start. By 1875 Mgr. Dillon tersely stated the unalterable fact:

"Had Weishaupt not lived, Masonry might have ceased to be a power after the reaction consequent on the French revolution. He gave it a form and character which caused it to outlive that reaction, to energise it to the present day, and which will cause it to advance until its final conflict with Christianity must determine whether Christ or Satan shall reign on this earth in the end".

This book is a study of "the Jewish question" as the most important question in world affairs at the present time; yet the present chapter (the longest yet) on the world-revolution has made no mention of the Jewish question or of Jews. There is a reason for this. Fifty years after the French revolution the world-revolution was under Judaist direction, but original Judaist instigation of the world-revolution in its French phase cannot be shown. Therefore the possibility is open that the world-revolution was not at the start a Judaist undertaking, but one in which the ruling sect of Judaism later became the majority stockholder. Nothing definite can be established either way; the covering-up of tracks is the first principle of revolutionary tactics.

Apparently Jews played little or no part in the master-conspiracy (that of Weishaupt and his Illuminati) and simply a proportionate part, with all others, in the French revolution. As to the first, the leading authority on this subject, Mrs. Nesta Webster, says "Jews appear to have been only in rare cases admitted to the Order". Leopold Engel, a mysterious character who reorganized the order in 1880, goes further, stating that the recruitment of the Jews was forbidden. On the other hand, Mrabeau, a leading Illuminate and revolutionary, identified himself with Judaist demands and pretensions, so that any restriction on the actual appearance of Jews in the Order may have been a "cover" device of the kind which Weishaupt held to be supremely important.

The best authorities at the time agreed that the Illuminati were the instigators of the revolution and that they were men of all countries. The Chevalier de Malet says, "The authors of the revolution are not more French than German, Italian, English, etc. They form a particular nation which took birth and has grown in darkness, in the midst of all civilized nations, with the object of subjecting them to its domination". This is the picture which today's student also gains from study of the literature of the French revolution; it is entirely different from the picture of the Russian revolution of 1917, to which the words could not be applied.

In the French revolution itself (as distinct from the foregoing conspiracy) the part played by Jews is fairly clear, but seems to have been that of "abetting disorder" ascribed to them by the Koran, rather than that of control or direction. Indeed, it is often difficult to distinguish Jews, as such, in the records of the time, because writers of the day did not so separate them. Moreover, the revolution in its French phase appeared to be against religion and all nationhood (in the Russian phase, again, this was no longer the case). Thus, the mob which brought crosses and chalices to the revolutionary assembly, while the churches of Paris were being given over to "Feasts of Reason", also included Jews who contributed ornaments from the synagogue to the display of profanation. Again, at "the Temple of Liberty", a citizen "brought up in the prejudices of the Jewish religion" undertook to prove "that all forms of worship are impostures equally degrading to man". Alexandre Lambert fils then gave voice to this protest against the bondage of the Talmud:

"The bad faith, citizens, of which the Jewish nation is accused does not come from themselves but from their priests. Their religion, which would allow them only to lend to those of their nation at 5 percent, tells them to take all they can from Catholics; it is even hallowed as a custom in our morning prayers to solicit God's help in catching out a Christian. There is more, citizens, and it is the climax of abomination; if any mistake is made in commerce between Jews, they are ordered to make reparation: but if on 100 louis a Christian should have paid 25 too much, one is not bound to return them to him. What an abomination! What a horror! And where does that all come from but from the Rabbis? Who have excited proscriptions against us? Our priests! Ah, citizens, more than anything in the world we must abjure a religion which... by subjecting us to irksome and servile practices, makes it impossible for us to be good citizens".*

* The italicized line in this quotation gives a timely opportunity to remark that when Alexandre Lambert fils so spoke the rabbinical period in Judaist history had just begun. Before 1772, when Poland was partitioned, there had always been a visible, central, governing or directing authority for all of Jewry. At the start this was the Levitical priesthood, in Jerusalem and Babylon. Under Rome it was the dominant political party, the Pharisees, who were in effect the government. After the fall of Jerusalem and the dispersion it was the Talmudic "movable government" in Palestine, Babylonia, Spain and Poland. After this sank from sight in 1772 the "rabbinical" period began, where authority over the entire congregation of Jewry, as far as it was wielded, was exercised through the rabbis everywhere. Among these, naturally, were men of every degree of belief and temperament, from the most extreme to the most temperate; but the present century has shown that the majority of them, as at all earlier periods in Jewish history, followed the literal "Law" of Judaism, which from the Gentile point of view, of course, is extremism at its most extreme.

If the Jews are anywhere identified as Jews (not simply as participants) in the worst deeds of the revolution, this is in Jewish vaunt, not Gentile accusation. For instance, such a writer as M. Leon Kahn goes far out of his way to associate Jews, by name, with the attack on the king and on religion, and that a hundred years after the events. This is an example of the laboured effort, which may be traced in much Judaist literature, to show that nothing of this kind can happen in the world save by the hand of Jehovah, that is to say, of Jews. M. Leon Kahn apparently could not picture the French revolution in any other terms than those of Daniel and Belshazzar. But for the Russian revolution, M. Leon Kahn might be forgotten; once again, it is our present-day that gives these depictments of old events their look of truth.

In the aftermath of the French revolution, the Jews, through their leaders, seem simply to have turned a situation to good account, as they were entitled to do. However, in the light of what followed later it is significant that the Jews who profited were the "Eastern Jews", and that these non-Semitic converts to Judaism at that point in time made their first breach in the walls of the West.

Most of the Jews in France were Sephardim, descended from those Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had some tenuous tradition, at least, linking them with Palestine. Any disabilities still suffered by these long-settled Jews were ended by the decree of 1790, which gave them all the rights of French citizens. In Alsace a community of Ashkenazim, the Slavic Jews, had appeared and these visitors from Russia were greatly disliked, so that the proposal to bestow citizenship on them provoked stormy debates, in the revolutionary Assembly and an insurrection among the Alsatian peasants. On this occasion the warnings with which earlier centuries had made the West familiar again were heard. The Abbe Maury told the citizen deputies, "The Jews have traversed seventeen centuries without mingling with other nations... They must not be persecuted, they must be protected as individuals and not as Frenchmen, since they cannot be citizens... Whatever you do, they will always remain foreigners in our midst". The Bishop of Nancy concurred; "They must be accorded protection, safety, liberty; but should we admit into the family a tribe that is foreign to it, that turns its eyes unceasingly towards a common country, that aspires to abandon the land that bears it? The interest of the Jews themselves necessitates this protest".

The Sephardic Jews also protested: "We dare to believe that our condition in France would not today be open to discussion if certain demands of the Jews of Alsace, Lorraine and the Three Bishoprics had not caused a confusion of ideas which appears to reflect on us... To judge by the public papers they appear to be rather extraordinary, since these Jews aspire to live in France under a special regime, to have laws peculiar to themselves, and to constitute a class of citizens separated from all the others".

This Jewish protest (a recurrent one through the ages down to our present day, and one always ignored by Gentile rulers) was as vain as that of the merchants of Paris thirty years before against the opening of their corporations to Jews:

"The French merchant carries on his commerce alone; each commercial house is in a way isolated; whilst the Jews ate particles of quicksilver, which at the least slant run together into a block".

Despite all opposition the decree emancipating the Jews of Alsace was passed in 1791. By the time Napoleon succeeded to power a Jewish problem of the first order had thus been created for him and (after his failure to solve it) for the world.

From this time on the ruling sect of Jewry bent all its efforts on reducing the authority of the original, Sephardic Jews and increasing that of their compact Ashkenazi in the East; from this moment on the Ashkenazi began to move into Europe (and later into America), to assume the leadership of the world-revolution and to carry with them everywhere the assault on all legitimate government, religion and nationhood.

That development followed the French revolution, or first phase of the world-revolution, which was like the opening of a door or the breaking of a dyke. At the time all that could fairly be said of the Jews in relation to the revolution was that they had been involved in it like other men, and had benefited from it rather more than other men. The sequel turned a different light on all this, and began to show Judaist direction, not mere involvement.

For in the half-century following the revelation of the blueprint for world-revolution and the outbreak in France, the historical processes of Jewry and of the world-revolution no longer remained separate or distinct; they converged. The continuing conspiracy and "the Jews" (in the sense of the dominant sect) then became identical and could no longer be considered apart. From the middle of the 19th Century the world-revolution was under Jewish leadership; whatever the fact had been before, it then passed into these hands.

The authoritative witness, whose words (like the earlier ones of de Luchet, Alexander Hamilton and Edmund Burke) were fully borne out by events, was one Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of England.

Chapter 21. THE WARNINGS OF DISRAELI

Benjamin Disraeli, later Lord Beacons field, repeatedly warned Christendom against the world-revolution. Like de Luchet, Alexander Hamilton and Edmund Burke fifty years before, he saw "the design" behind it; unlike Lord Acton, who fifty years later spoke only of anonymous "managers", Disraeli identified these organizers as Jews. The century that has passed since he uttered the plainest of these warnings has justified him; whatever its origins, the organized world-revolution was under Judaist leadership by the middle of the 19th Century and continued under Judaist leadership at least until the 1920's (in the present writer's opinion the condition continued after that and prevails today).

Why the Talmudic sect took over the leadership of the revolutionary organization established by Weishaupt, or whether it instigated the original revolutionary undertaking, are two questions which cannot be answered today.

If the ambition of Judaic world domination, instilled through the centuries by the Talmud and even more by the Cabala*, is ever to be realized the enslavement of "the heathen" to the Holy Nation will have to be accomplished through some destructive organization like that set up by Weishaupt; the fact that Weishaupt founded his Illuminati at the very moment when the Jewish "centre" in Poland sank from sight, after an unbroken life of more than two thousand years, might be more than a coincidence. On the other hand, it is equally possible that the dominant sect for the purpose of Talmudic fulfilment, took over control of a destructive organization already set up by non-Jews for a different end.

* The Jewish Encyclopaedia says that the Cabala (the oral, traditional lore, in contradistinction to the written law, or Torah) from the 13th century on branched out into an extensive literature alongside of and in opposition to the Talmud, being entrusted only to the few elect ones. Mrs. Nesta Webster, however, quotes another passage from the Jewish Encyclopaedia as saying that "the Cabala is not really in opposition to the Talmud".

Disraeli's two most significant warnings preceded and followed the revolutionary outbreaks which occurred in many parts of Europe in 1848. Based on the experience gained in France a half-century before, these represented the second of the "eruptions, concocted as occasion shall permit", and "the periodical explosions" which (as de Luchet and Alexander Hamilton had foretold) the world-revolutionary organization was to bring about. They failed everywhere, possibly because the memory of the French revolution was recent enough for governments and peoples to deal resolutely with them. Their suppression left Disraeli in no illusion about the future. He had described what would happen before it occurred; after it, he foretold the continuance of the conspiracy and the recurrence of the violent outbreaks.

Disraeli wrote novels (with greater success than two later imitators, Colonel House of Texas and Mr. Winston Churchill when young), and depicted himself in them as the aloof, urbane, omniscient, slightly mocking impresario of human affairs. In Coningsby he is the chief character, Sidonia, a Spanish-Moslem Jew, the master financier, power behind all powers and passionless manipulator of affairs, one who is "assisted by that absolute freedom from prejudice which is the compensatory possession of a man without a country".

Sidonia remarked in 1846 (the year when Coningsby was published): "That mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing in Germany and... of which so little is as yet known in England, is developing entirely under the auspices of the Jews".

Then, after the outbreaks of 1 848, Disraeli returned to the subject, telling the House of Commons in 1852: "The influence of the Jews may be traced in the last outbreak of the destructive principle in Europe. An insurrection takes place against tradition and aristocracy, against religion and property. .. The natural equality of men and the abrogation of property are proclaimed by the secret societies who form provisional governments and men of Jewish race are found at the head of every one of them" (exacdy the same thing recurred in Russia, in 1917, that is, seventy years after the 1848 outbreaks).

Disraeli added, "The most skilful manipulators of property ally them selves with Communists; the peculiar and chosen people touch the hands of all the scum and low castes of Europe". This, he said, was because they wished to destroy Christianity.

The task of research, in such a work as this, is arduous and has few compensations, but acquaintanceship with Disraeli was a solace. The reader has already met some true prophets among the many false ones, during this journey through the centuries, but he will not meet another quite like Benjamin Disraeli, whose liberation from Talmudic bonds gave him this "absolute freedom from prejudice". His name was significant, for he was of the breed of the Israelite prophets who denounced Judah. He was proud of his descent, and yet was enabled by his detachment to feel a love of England which those of native ancestry often cannot emulate. His ironical comments on public affairs and human events are refreshing to read today, when politicians shun the truth as the devil might shun holy water.

He candidly stated that "the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes", and in these words he publicly affirmed that real government is by the Hidden Hand. All informed observers know that this is the truth of affairs, but any presentday American president or British prime minister would denounce the statement as "witch-hunting". "I think", said Sidonia, "that there is no error so vulgar as to believe that revolutions are occasioned by economical causes". Thus spoke Disraeli; in our day the Lloyd Georges and Woodrow Wilsons, Roosevelts and Trumans have pretended that the revolutions in France and Russia and elsewhere were spontaneous mass-eruptions by "the people", infuriate, against "tyranny".

Disraeli practised the teaching of Christianity; he was not merely "a baptised Jew".

He would not have associated himself, or his country's name, with the Old Testamentary vengeance of Nuremberg, for this is what he said after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, when the spirit of revenge was ravening in the land: "I do without the slightest hesitation declare my humble disapprobation of persons in high authority announcing that upon the high standard of England 'vengeance' and not 'justice' should be inscribed... I protest against meeting atrocities by atrocities. I have heard things said and seen things written of late which would make me almost suppose that the religious opinions of the people of England had undergone some sudden change, and that, instead of bowing before the name of Jesus, we were preparing to revive the worship of Moloch. I cannot believe that it is our duty to indulge in such a spirit".

These words contain an allusion which reaches every Jew and Gentile. Talmudic Judaism is "the worship of Moloch" and Disraeli knew this when he chose the words. The whole dispute between ancient Israel and Judah of the Levites raged round this false deity and his demands, and Israel turned its back on Judah on this very account; this is the root of the controversy of Zion, three thousand years ago and now.

It is reflected in the two most significant passages in the Old Testament: Jeremiah's charge that God had never commanded the children of Israel "to cause their sons and daughters to pass through the fire unto Moloch... neither came it into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin"; and Ezekiel's answer that God had given Israel these "statutes that are not good" and the sacrifice of the firstborn. The god of love and mercy, the god of hatred, vengeance and human sacrifice: that was from the start the issue, and is today, and if Disraeli had lived a hundred years later Christendom might by this scion of Jewry have been spared the stigma of the Talmudic vengeance at Nuremberg.

Similarly, Disraeli cannot be imagined lending himself, his office and his country's strength to the support and spread of the world-revolution, as the leaders of Britain and America lent themselves in the first and second world wars; his whole public life was spent in forewarning his country against the destructive conspiracy which their acts promoted.

In 1955 a Lord Samuel (who in the heyday of Liberalism rose from plain Mr. Herbert Samuel, through various political offices, to ennoblement) proudly stated that he was the first Jew ever to have held Cabinet rank in England. This was presumably a jibe at Disraeli's conversion; nevertheless, the world in the 20th Century might have been the better for more Disraelis. The striking things about Disraeli, studied at the distance of a century, are his habit of speaking absolute truth, his accuracy of prediction, his vast instinctive and acquired knowledge, his deep though unimpassioned love for England, and his Christian charity. In matters of fact he was always right; in those of opinion, he was ever on the side of the angels. His contempt for "Liberals" was great, though delicately phrased ("infanticide is practised as extensively and as legally in England as it is on the banks of the Ganges, a circumstance which apparently has not yet engaged the attention of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel"). The present writer thinks he erred in one matter, namely, in his opinion that the doctrines of Jesus were the completion, not the repudiation, of Judaism. The contrary seems to me to be true, namely, that Judaism was that very heresy ("the worship of Moloch") which Disraeli spurned, and which Jesus came to change.

Disraeli was the product both of Sephardic Jewry and of England at that period; he could not, without both of these influences, have achieved that "absolute freedom from prejudice". His father, Isaac D'Israeli, wrote, "A religion which admits not toleration cannot be safely tolerated, if there is any chance of its obtaining a political ascendancy", and the Encyclopaedia Britannica says Isaac's reason for withdrawing from the synagogue was that Talmudic Judaism with its rigid laws "cuts off the Jews from the great family of mankind". His son's biographer, Mr. Hesketh Pearson, says the elders fined Isaac D'Israeli forty pounds when he declined election as Warden of the Congregation stating that he could never take part in their public worship "because, as now conducted, it disturbs, instead of exciting religious emotions". Isaac would not have been able so to challenge the elders, had he lived in a Talmudic community in Russia or Poland; he would have been outlawed, possibly killed.

Thus the father and the son (who became a member of the Church of England at the age of twelve) were formed by the free air of England at that time. Benjamin Disraeli, was to achieve the removal of the last disabilities put on Jews in England, and then publicly to proclaim that (in the immediate sequence to this emancipation) Jews were taking over control of the world-revolution everywhere. To a man of "absolute freedom from prejudice" the campaign against Jewish disabilities and the candid statement of this result were duties equally inescapable, even though the second development bore out the warnings of the enemies of that Jewish emancipation, which Disraeli had fought to complete.

Before concluding the tale of Disraeli's own warnings, the course of the world-revolution during his time needs to be traced, that is to say, during the century succeeding the outbreak in France. When Weishaupt died in 1 830, leaving behind him the plan and the organization first revealed by the discovery of the Illuminati's documents in 1786, Disraeli was 26. The next fifty years were filled with the contest for Weishaupts succession; during this period Disraeli uttered his many warnings. When it ended Jewish control of the world-revolution had nevertheless been firmly established and it had been given the imprint of the Eastern Jews, the Mongoloid Khazars, under their Talmudic rabbis.

The result might have been different, for men of various kinds struggled to succeed Weishaupt, and many of them were Gentiles. At the start there was no single, united revolutionary organization; there were revolutionary secret societies, not yet coalesced, in various countries. The chief of them, and the one in clearest line of descent from Weishaupt's llluminati, was the Alta Vendita in Italy, some of the papers of which, seized and published by the Pontifical Government, revealed an identity of aim and method with the llluminati documents of a half-century earlier (as Mrs. Nesta Webster has established from the work of Cretineaujoly.)

In France Freemasonry continued to serve as the cloak used by the revolution, and in Germany the "League of Virtue" (Tugendbund) was directed by lieutenants of Weishaupt.

Various men worked to fuse these, apparently distinct national movements into one, and to assume the leadership, in succession to Adam Weishaupt. Among them were a Frenchman, Louis Blanc (whose name the reader is asked to bear in mind, for a reason which will appear later; at one moment he seemed likely to play the part of Lenin, even before Lenin was born), a Russian, Mchel Bakunin, and a Jew, born in Germany, Karl Marx.

The struggle was fought between the last two, for Louis Blanc soon faded from the scene. Mchel Bakunin and Karl Marx were as poles apart. Bakunin, "the father of Anarchy", was "a disciple of Weishaupt", according to the French revolutionary socialist, Benoit Malon. He represented that early breed of idealist revolutionaries who thought that they had found in revolution an instrument to destroy tyranny. He saw the danger that the confiscatory State, set up on the ruins of private property, would merely reproduce the tyrannical propensities of the private capitalist in gargantuan shape; therefore he looked for ways to reconcile the communal ownership of land and capital with the utmost possible diminution in the powers of the State and ultimately even with the complete abolition of the State. Thus he was the very opposite of Karl Marx, whose similar proposal, for the communal ownership of land and capital, was aimed simply at setting up a super-tyranny in place of petty tyrants.

The ruling passion (and original motive) of all Bakunin's work was a horror of despotism; Marx planned to destroy a ruling class in order to establish such a despotism as the world had never known. This was the profound difference between the two men, and it throws up a question never to be answered: what would the effect on the world have been if Bakunin's Anarchism, instead of Marx's Communism, had assumed leadership of the world-revolution? For Anarchism was opposed to every kind of forcible government, and to the State as the embodiment of the force employed in the government of the community; Communism was the deification of force wielded by the State.

Everything about Bakunin is genuine: his struggle, sufferings and death. Everything about Marx is bogus: his thirty years of incitement from the British Museum reading-room, his comfortable life on Friedrich Engels's bounty, his obviously calculated marriage to a "von", his genteel funeral with graveside orations; all are typical of the petty bourgeois who so loudly declaimed against the bourgeoisie. The most bogus thing of all was his Communist Manifesto, which diagnosed an ailment ("The proletarian is without property") and prescribed suicide as the remedy ("The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property").

This was a plain intimation to the proletariat that it had nothing to gain but chains from Communism, and if revolutionary outbreaks all over Europe followed the publication of the Manifesto in January 1848, the oppressed masses cannot have roused to them by its logic. Within a few weeks of publication, revolts occurred all over Germany, in Austria, Hungary, Italy, France and Denmark. This was proof that the individual "secret societies" in the various countries were fusing together, that some means had been found to co-ordinate and synchronise their outbreaks, and thus, for the first time, to demonstrate world-revolution in action, through simultaneous eruptions in numerous countries.

Probably only one organization, already existing at that time, had at its disposal the international network which could make this synchronization and co-ordination possible, and that was the Talmudic rabbinate in Eastern Europe. Theoretically, the vast organization of the Catholic Church could have been put to the same purpose, but the Church saw its deadliest enemy in the revolution and was not so used; on that point history is clear. What Disraeli had known and stated two years before became historical fact: "that mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing in Germany... is developing entirely under the auspices of the Jews". Karl Marx and his Communist Manifesto were the outward and visible signs of a significant historic event: Talmudic Judaism had taken over the world-revolution.

Of the three men who at that time appeared to contend for the generalship of the revolution, Louis Blanc quickly fell out of the running. He was a member of the provisional government set up in Paris after the 1848 revolt, and in the capacity of minister seemed to have the opportunity to put his theories into practice. He held that individualism and competition were cancers in the body social and, like Marx, wished to set up the all-despotic State (albeit of the "welfare" kind favoured by the British Socialists a century later). He was the herald of the "right to work" which, in Russia in the present century, proved to be the State's right to inflict forced labour. In his shortlived office he undertook "to guarantee the livelihood of the workers by work" and was authorized to call together an assembly of workers' delegates to prepare a plan for "full employment". This body was in form an anticipation of the Soviets, and it represents Louis Blanc's chief claim to be remembered. After the suppression of the revolt he fled to England and only returned twenty-three years later, bereft of importance.

That left Marx and Bakunin. Typically, Karl Marx, expelled from Prussia and France after 1 848, settled comfortably in London until he died, thirty-four years later. Only Bakunin ran to man the "barricades". Bakunin was by birth a Russian aristocrat and had thrown up his ensignship in a Czarist regiment in 1832 after the suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1830; the spectacle of terrorized Poland inspired in the heart of this young Russian officer the horror of despotism which thenceforth dominated his life. He met Marx before 1848 and left a description of the difference between them: "Marx called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right; I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty, and I also was right".

Bakunin was in Paris for the fighting of 1848, and in May 1849 was a member of the provisional government set up by the revolutionaries in Saxony, leading the defence of Dresden until the Prussian troops prevailed, when he was captured while trying to escape (with Richard Wagner). He was sentenced to death, and reprieved, successively by the Saxon and Austrian governments. "He was kept in fetters and chained to a wall for a year and then surrendered to the Russian government. After six years imprisonment he was sent, toothless, scorbutic and prematurely aged, to "the comparative freedom of Siberia", whence, in 1861, after twelve years of captivity, he escaped to Japan, America and eventually England. Unbroken by his experiences, he at once resumed preaching the spirit of anarchist revolt and in 1864, in Switzerland, founded his International (the Alliance Internationale Sociale Democratique).

About the same time, Karl Marx founded his International (the International Working Men's Association) in London, and the next few years were filled with the decisive struggle between Bakunin and Marx for the soul of the revolution. During Bakunin's long absence in Saxon, Austrian and Russian jails and in Siberia, Marx in London had established his hold on the international revolutionary organization (in several countries he had sons-in-law as lieutenants, on the Napoleonic model), but Bakunin's renown was great and he was deprived of the leadership only by a series of tricks which Marx, through his control of the General Council, was able to use against his rival. In 1872 the General Council called a congress of the International at The Hague, where Bakunin and his friends could not go on account of governmental hostility. At this congress charges were made against Bakunin (reminiscent of those which sixty years later were to be raised against any Communist leaders of whom Stalin wished to rid himself and he was expelled from the International by vote of the Council, packed by Marx's handpicked men.

Broken in health Bakunin died a few years later, and apparently brought on his end by refusing to take food. With him died any hope (if such hope ever existed) that the organized world-revolution might be used to overthrow tyranny and liberate men; from the moment that it came "entirely under the auspices of Jews" (Disraeli) its purpose was to enslave men and to establish an indestructible tyranny. Bakunin's idea was to organize force against oppression, and the worst oppressor of all, in his eyes, was The State. These are his words: "The State is not society, it is only an historical form of it, as brutal as it is abstract. It was born historically, in all countries, of the marriage of violence, rapine, pillage, in a word, war and conquest... It has been from its origin, and it remains still at present, the divine sanction of brutal force and triumphant inequality. The State is authority; it is force; it is the ostentation and infatuation of force..."

Precisely such a State as that, Karl Marx designed to set up through his international revolutionary movement, and it was to be a world State. Bakunin in 1869, when his contest with Karl Marx was reaching its climax, like Disraeli in 1 846 and 1 852 identified the leadership of the world-revolution as Jewish and in this he saw the cause of the perversion, as he considered it, of the revolutionary idea. His Polemique contre les Juifs, written in 1 869, was mainly directed against the Jews of the International, and from what we have since seen of these affairs we may assume that his expulsion by the Marxist General Council in 1872 became certain at the moment of that publication in 1869.

When Disraeli died in 1881 he had spent between thirty and forty years warning his countrymen and the world against "the secret societies":

"It was neither parliaments, nor populations, nor the course of nature, nor the course of events, that overthrew the throne of Louis Philippe... The throne was surprised by the secret societies, ever prepared to ravage Europe... Acting in unison with a great popular movement they may destroy society..." (1852). "There is in Italy a power which we seldom mention in this House... I mean the secret societies. It is useless to deny, because it is impossible to conceal, that a great part of Europe is covered with a network of these secret societies, just as the superficies of the earth is now being covered with railroads... They do not want constitutional government; they do not want ameliorated institutions... they want to change the tenure of land, to drive out the present owners of the soil, and to put an end to ecclesiastical establishments..." (1856).

Disraeli plainly saw, and perhaps was the first to recognize the name, the fraudulent nature of Liberalism: "it is the manoeuvres of these men who are striking at property and Christ, which the good people of this country, who are so accumulative and so religious, recognize and applaud as the progress of the Liberal cause".

If it were in the power of man, by informed warnings to avert disastrous events, the repeated warnings of this unique authority would have averted the tribulation which the revolution brought on the millions of mankind in the next century. But, "by a divine instinct, men's minds mistrust ensuing danger"; the neglect of Disraeli's warnings proved what all preceding centuries had shown: that human beings will not be deterred from a dangerous undertaking, or aroused from a perilous inertia, by any spoken counsel. Experience alone can in time move them to act, and in that the 20th Century has made them rich.

In the middle decades of the last century Disraeli spoke in vain. He could not be merely defamed as a "witch-hunter", and therefore was derided with the mien of affectionate disdain: "it was generally thought" (says Mr. Hesketh Pearson) "that he had a bee in his bonnet on the subject of the secret societies, the existence of which was denied; but we can now see them as the seeds of a movement which, having found a formula, fused and festered into Communism". That verdict of 1951 is obviously true and agrees with the contemporary one of the revolutionary eye-witness Benoit Malon: "Communism was handed down in the dark through the secret societies of the 19th Century".

Thus, when Disraeli died the thing he had striven to avoid had come about: the "secret societies" had been welded into one world-revolutionary movement under Jewish control, and this was preparing to blow up the foundations of the 20th Century. He had found the perfect description for this organization: "a network" which covered Europe "just as the superficies of the earth is now being covered with railroads". Informed men began more and more frequently to use this expression, "the network", and to speak of "the hidden hand" which ruled governments. In the years before the revolutions of 1848 the former Rabbi Drach, who like Disraeli foresaw what was coming, published his indictment of the Talmud as the source of this disruptive process; his ensuing persecution was described by a Jewish writer named Morel, who among other things said, "what can the wisest measures of the authorities of all countries do against the vast and permanent conspiracy of a people which, like a network as vast as it is strong stretched over the whole globe, brings its force to bear wherever an event occurs that interests the name of Israelite".

The sequence of events is significant. In 1772 Poland was partitioned and, after more than 2,500 years, the "centre" of Jewish Government "ceased to exist" (according to Dr. Kastein) or became a secret Jewish government (as the Russian authorities believed). In 1776 Adam Weishaupt founded his Illuminati. By 1846 Disraeli was writing that "the revolution is developing entirely under Jewish auspices". In 1869 Michel Bakunin, the disciple of Weishaupt, attacked the Jews in the revolutionary movement. In 1872 Bakunin was expelled and the united Communist movement plainly emerged, under Karl Marx (in 1917 it produced an almost exclusively Jewish Bolshevist government).

Such was the result, foretold by Disraeli, of the removal of Jewish disabilities and of a few decades of Jewish emancipation. The lowering of the barriers had not had the effect of amalgamating the Jews in the comity of peoples; its consequences had been to give "the most formidable sect" (Bakunin's words) freedom to work for the ruination of these peoples by revolution. The responses given by the Sanhedrin to Napoleon's questions at the century's start, by its middle-age had been shown to be void of force. Jews would not thenceforward be allowed to involve themselves with other men, in the nationhoods and laws of the lands where they dwelt; on the contrary, identification with the worldrevolution set them more apart from others than even they had ever been before. The century of emancipation had been turned into a fraud even before it ended.

During the 19th Century (as Dr. Kastein, again, records) the term "antisemitism" was born. As "persecution" could no longer be said to exist, some new word had to be found, capable of intimidating Gentiles and terrifying Jews, the second purpose being more important than the first, and "antisemitism" was invented. "Abracadabra" might have served as well, for the term "antisemitism" is patently absurd in relation to people who are demonstrably not Semites and whose Law commands the extirpation of Semites (the Arab peoples of Palestine; any expression of sympathy with the Semitic Arabs, expelled from their native land by the Zionist intruders in 1948, in time came to be attacked as "antisemitism").

Presumably the authors of this term desired to keep such words as Jew, Jewish and anti-Jewish out of the public controversy and counted on intimidating the mass-mind by the introduction of an obscurantist word. What the dominant sect meant by "antisemitism" was in fact a combination of lese majesty (offences against the dignity of the sovereign power) and heresy (opposition to the paramount religious doctrine); and by the middle of the present century the mass-mind had to a great extent submitted to this idea; that numerous breed which in earlier times would have doffed its cap at the approach of the squire's bailiff or have crossed itself when the priestly eye turned its way held its tongue and looked respectful when any Jewish affair was mentioned.

The word "antisemitism" was coined at the time when "men of Jewish race", as Disraeli and Bakunin pointed out, took over the direction of the world-revolution, and the main object of its invention was by intimidation to deter public discussion of that remarkable development; the events of the present century have abundantly proved that, as this book will show. In the recent time, a Jewish authority, Mr. Bernard Lazare, offered a definition of "antisemitism" in a book which bore the word as its title. This definition had nothing whatever to do with the prophet Shem and his tribe, with Semitic blood or speech or stock, or with anything Semitic whatsoever; Mr. Lazare related "antisemitism" entirely to an adverse opinion of the Jewish role in revolution. He wrote:

"This is what must separate the impartial historian from antisemitism. The antisemite says: 'The Jew is the preparer, the machinator, the chief engineer of revolutions'; the impartial historian confines himself to studying the part which the Jew, considering his spirit his character, the nature of his philosophy, and his religion, may have taken in revolutionary processes and movements".

What Mr. Lazare clearly meant was that nothing more than "a part" in revolutionary processes might be attributed to Jews, and that a man who said that The Jew is the preparer, the machinator, the chief engineer of revolutions" committed lese majesty and heresy.

However, it is substantially what Disraeli said (who may even have had a drop or two of Semitic blood, and in that differed from the Eastern Jews to whom he alluded): "that mighty revolution... is developing entirely under the auspices of the Jews", "the influence of the Jews may be traced in the last outbreak of the destructive principle", "men of Jewish race are found 'at the head of every one of them" (i.e., the secret societies).

As he was himself racially Jewish, Disraeli presumably felt no need to labour the fact that many Jews were as stoutly opposed as he to the "mighty revolution" and to "the destructive principle". In his day this would have been apparent, and he would not have had to armourplate his words against the propagandist who, today, would accuse him of incriminating all Jews by his allusions to "the auspices of the Jews" and "the influence of the Jews" (which by Mr. Lazare's definition would make him "antisemitic"!).

From the French revolutionary period onward (when the long resident Jews of France gave warning against the newcomers from the East who were making trouble in Alsace) the Sephardic Jews of the West strongly resisted the ill wind that was blowing towards them from the East. Emancipation had loosened their bonds; they stood to lose all they had gained if "the destructive principle", "engineered" by the Talmudic sect and the Ashkenazim in the East, were to prevail over the West.

The warnings of Disraeli were addressed to this, then the dominant section of Jewry as much as to the Gentiles; perhaps more. The Sephardic Jews may also be said to have paid more heed to them than the Gentile masses around them. Their punishment was to be excommunicated; by one of the most remarkable operations ever performed by statisticians on a body of people, the Sephardim were within a hundred years to be pronounced virtually extinct (like the "ten lost tribes" long before).

Chapter 22. THE MANAGERS

When Jewish direction of the world-revolution became discernible by the middle of the last century it was direction by the Ashkenazic (Eastern, or Slavic) Jews. The Sephardic (Western, or Iberian) Jews were in the mass strongly opposed to it. It was directed against them as much as against Christendom, for emancipation in Europe had led to a substantial measure of assimilation in their case; they were slipping from the grasp of the ruling elders of Judaism, who were faced with the loss of their power through Jewish integration in mankind. Segregation was vital to Talmudic Judaism, and integration was lethal.

At that point they threw the "Eastern Jews" into the contest, whose emergence as a separate body of Jews coincided with the start of the world-revolution. Before then the West knew only "Jews", and these were the Sephardic Jews. Alluding to the period when Disraeli began to speak of Jewish leadership of the revolution, Dr. Kastein says, "From this time onwards it is possible to speak of Western and Eastern Jews". In fact the separate breeds had existed for about a thousand years; what Dr. Kastein means is that the Eastern Jews at that moment emerged as a distinct body, mobilized by the rabbinical government for action against the emancipated Sephardic Jews of the West and against the West itself.

Up to that time the Western Jews had only been dimly aware of these Eastern Jews, and to the Christian West they were unknown. Their cohesion as a mass, and the energy which had been stored up in them by many centuries of rabbinical absolutism in the ghettoes, was to make of them, when they entered the West, the most powerful of all the forces which shaped the events of the 20th Century. They were good material for the purpose to which they were put. Racially of barbaric Asiatic origins, for centuries they had received a Talmudic training in a regimentation as strict as that of any ancient Oriental despotism.

In the grand strategy which unfolded during the 19th Century they were employed for a double purpose, and with skill were used to achieve ends, so contradictory, that their simultaneous accomplishment must have been held impossible, before it came about, by any rational observer. In Russia itself they were used, as a mass, to wreck emancipation (for there would have been no hope of reclaiming the emancipated Jews of Western Europe if these had seen that the Eastern Jews, too, were becoming emancipated). To the outer world they were simultaneously depicted, even while they blocked the process of emancipation in Russia, as being the victims of a cruel, "antisemitic" persecution which wantonly denied them emancipation!

Given the control of modern media of mass-propaganda and mass-suggestion it is possible to impress on the mind of the multitude these false images of what is happening elsewhere, and under the spell of such false notions to incite them into war itself. During the last century the politicians of the West began habitually to declaim against the persecution of the Jews in Russia, while those Jews, under a rigorous leadership, were being prompted to destroy emancipation by every conceivable means.

Lest the reader doubt, I must add that the picture here given is historically authentic, and is confirmed by the Judaist authorities. Among others Dr. Kastein says, "The great majority of Jews offered bitter passive resistance to all 'attempts at amelioration'". However, this resistance was not simply "passive" but also took lethal forms. Dr. Chaim Weizmann is probably the best authority on this period, and his work will be extensively cited in what follows. The ghettoized Ashkenazim (both in their Communist and their Zionist organizations) were inspired to obstruct emancipation by every possible device (including assassination in the last resort) while the story of their persecution was hammered, as an intimidatory warning, into the consciousness of the Western Jews and, as a rightful claim for succour, into that of the Christian West.

The Gentile politicians of the West presented these fictions to their peoples as truth, for they had found that powerful Jews, in all countries, were able to assist parties favoured by them with money, press support and votes; the return they required was support for the cause of the "persecuted" Jews in Russia and for the "return" to Palestine. In effect this meant that politicians who sought these favours had to subordinate national interest to two causes ultimately destructive of all nation-states: the revolution and the ambition to acquire territory for the dominant race. This was the process by means of which, as Disraeli said in Lothair (1870) "democracy has degraded statesmen into politicians". In this way also that state of the mass-mind began to take shape which would not brook any confutation, no matter how fully proven, of the legend of a permanent Jewish persecution and of a disease endemic in Gentile man (an epidemic at that time in Russia called "antisemitism"). When it was dangerous to believe that the world was round, the multitude vocally agreed that it was flat; this condition was reproduced, in respect of Talmudic Judaism's propaganda, in the 19th century, with the results which have been seen in this one.

The Western Jews were much less responsive than the Western politicians to these two currents from the East. These original Jews, in whom the Sephardic tradition and strain continued, were moving towards integration, or at least towards an involvement, with diminishing frictions, in mankind. They intuitively feared the growing pressure from Russia and, recalling the unhappy end of the long, prosperous centuries in Spain, were filled with foreboding by the thought of its possible consequences. I recall, from my own time in Europe, how the Western Jews distrusted and feared these Eastern Jews, in whom they saw the spectral threat of an enforced return to the ghettoes and to rabbinical absolutism. The German Jew then was wont to refer to "diese Ostjuden" (these Eastern Jews!) with aversion; the Eastern Jew for his part, when after the first world war he made his way from Russia and Poland into Germany, spoke with contempt of the settled Jews there as "diese Berliner" (these Berliners!).

The rabbinical directorate of Jewry, in its Eastern fastnesses, set out to use these Judaized Tartars from Russia against the emancipated Jews of the West and against the West itself. The secretive life of Jewry has made the counting of Jewish heads impossible at all periods. This lack of any trustworthy figures of Jewish populations enabled the ruling sect a century ago to begin, and in our day almost to complete, an astonishing biological operation: they have transformed nearly all Jews into Ashkenazim!

At the end of the 1 8th century the Jews known to the West were the Sephardim, who inherited at least a tenuous tradition, a frail thread leading back through Spain to Africa, and fading then into a legend of Canaanitish origins. By the middle of the present century these Jews were declared by the elders of Jewry to have become almost extinct! A report presented to the Second World Sephardic Conference held in New York in 1954 stated that the Jewish world population was 11,763,491; that only 1,744,883 (or 15 percent) of these Jews were Sephardim; and that merely 52,000 of these Sephardim lived in Europe (which formerly knew only Sephardic Jews) and the entire Western Hemisphere.

Normal processes of birth and death could not have worked this magic. Evidently the Sephardim, like the ten tribes of Israel nearly three thousand years ago, have been declared to have "vanished" because they "ceased to believe that they had a destiny apart from their neighbours". The Ashkenazim have been awarded the inheritance of Judah, "an order of existence fundamentally different from that of the people about... no process of assimilation to others... absolute differentiation"; and nearly all Jews have now been declared to be Ashkenazim! Thus the elders of Judaism twice have expunged masses by strokes of the pen. The Sephardim have been excommunicated for the same reason as the Israelites, but obviously they live on in truth, some integrated in mankind, some segregated in original Judaism.

The identification of the Eastern Jews with the world-revolution, a century ago, cannot have come about by chance or by individual leanings, for they were despotically ruled. The regime of the rabbis in the East was nearly absolute and the ghettoized communities obeyed their commands, as God-empowered lawgivers and magistrates, in every act of daily life. During the 1930's, when I saw a good deal of such Eastern Jewish communities, in Poland and Ruthenia, they still lived a life of seclusion, unimaginable to the Western mind until it was beheld. A mass move of these Eastern Jews into the revolutionary camp (or any other camp) could not have occurred without rabbinical guidance, for the penalties of disobedience, in those Talmudic confines, were dire (I have quoted the Jewish authority who testifies that the rabbis sometimes encouraged lynching if local circumstances disabled them from openly pronouncing the death penalty prescribed by the Law.)*

* This rabbinical administration of the Judaic Law within Jewish communities continues today in America, England and other Western countries. In 1955 a Jewish merchant of Leeds, in England, came under Jewish suspicion of having allowed some of 223 old British tanks, disposed of by him, to reach Egypt, a neighbour of the Zionist state. No complaint was raised in respect of their sale to other countries, and the transaction, whatever their destination, was legal under British law. The alleged Egyptian sale, alone, was brought before a Jewish court, the president of which stated in the British Press that if the man were cleared the court's findings "will be accepted without question by the Jewish community", but if he were not "we have our ways as a community of dealing with a transgressor".

The word "transgressor" relates to the Judaic rabbinical law, so that this was a public intimation that a man found to have "transgressed" that law would be punished, without regard to his innocence or guilt under the law of the country of which he was a citizen.

In this case the action taken cuts across State policy at its highest levels, those of foreign policy and national defence: for foreign policy and national defence cannot be conducted in the national interest if sections of the community are able to nullify governmental policy by dictating the choice of foreign countries to which arms may be sold, and punishing "transgressors", This case, however, was exceptional only in the publicity it received. As to that, as far as I was able to judge it aroused no great public interest or feeling, or if it did, this was not allowed to find expression in the newspapers. This was an example of the extent to which public discussion or criticism of any action taken by the ruling powers of Jewry had been silenced in the West by 1955.

Therefore the mass move into the revolutionary camp must be regarded as one of high policy, directed after full consideration by that Jewish government which was transferred to Poland after the expulsion from Spain and sank from the sight of men at the dissection of Poland in 1772. Contemplated in that historical perspective, the threefold purposes of the grand design become clear, and events have demonstrated them. First, through revolution the process of emancipation (and therewith of Jewish assimilation in the West) might be reversed and the supremacy of the ruling sect in Jewry maintained. Second, through revolution vengeance might be taken on Christendom for the expulsion from Spain, or perhaps for the existence of Christendom (for that is the affront to which the Talmud is in effect the answer). Third, revolution would promote the fulfilment of The Law, which ordained the ruination of the heathen and the triumph of the Chosen People, or at any rate of the sect which used that beguiling term.

An ambition which perhaps was not hugely foolish among Near Eastern tribes and in the small space of the known world in 500 BC, thus became the megalomaniac one of our global era, which is witnessing an attempt to impose an ancient tribal law, born in the petty feuds of little ancient lands, upon the world. The Gentile is apt to imagine that The Law which governs this undertaking is that which he can find in the Torah, or Old Testament, which he shares with the Jew, but this is not true. The Old Testament contains a lofty law of righteousness and neighbourly behaviour and inspired glimpses of the universal "house of prayer of all peoples". This Law was rejected by Judah, and the Torah includes the interpolations and cancellations which nullify it; but at any rate it contains both; it is two books, and any man may choose the one that seems to him to be the word of God. In fact that is what Christianity did; it took from the Old Testament, and applied to itself, those parts of the Torah which have a universal application, and it ignored the Levitical insertions which voided the moral commandments.

But the Judaic Law under which the Eastern rabbinate directed Eastern Jews into the revolutionary camp is that of the Talmud, of which "the modern Jew is the product" (Mr. Rodkinson, previously cited). The Talmud contains no lofty law of righteousness applicable to all men, but sets up the creed of Moloch, shorn of the universal applications; it is one book, not two. It is the uncompromising response to Christianity: "the precepts of justice, of equity, or charity towards one's neighbour, are not only not applicable with regard to the Christian, but constitute a crime in anyone who would act differently. The Talmud expressly forbids one to save a non-Jew from death... to restore lost goods, etc. to him, to have pity on him" (the former Rabbi Drach, already quoted). This was The Law of the Slavic Ashkenazim in their ghettoes; the Ashkenazim, under stern direction, became the engineers of the world-revolution; and according to the Judaic authorities the Ashkenazim are now "the Jews", or 85 percent of them.

Thus a formidable, secret sect, in parts of Russia little known to the outer world trained a compact mass of human beings for an onslaught on the nation-states of Christendom and the West, and in the 19th century began to unleash the force which it had generated. For the next hundred and fifty years (until the present day) the revolutionary force worked with spreading effect to disrupt the West, always following the plan originally disclosed in Weishaupt's papers, and "men of Jewish race" were constantly found at the head of it. The results have shown: Europe, once a land-mass of prosperous and virile nation-states, is now a place of bewildered peoples who struggle to make their way out of the new Dark Age and into the light again. The effects have spread far beyond Europe; Disraeli's "destructive principle" today beats on the doors of all the world. Possibly another hundred years must pass before the force let loose expends itself and the Ashkenazim (like the Sephardim before them) find the pull of mankind too strong for them, so that the Cabalist's dream of world dominion fades.

Under The Law this destruction was not an end in itself; it was a means to the end laid down in The Law. The extirpation of nation-states was to be the essential prelude to the establishment of the triumphant nation-State, that of the chosen people in their promised land. Thus, in the middle of the last century, a second force also was brought into being in those same Eastern, Talmudic-ruled areas where the world-revolution received its shape and impetus.

This was Zionism, the force that was set in movement to achieve "the return" and lay the foundations of the supreme Nation-State in Palestine. This, the force of domination, at every stage in the process of the last hundred years kept step with the force of revolution, and neither could have achieved what it did achieve without the other. The achievement is clear: the "return" has been accomplished and the nation-state of the chosen people has been founded; simultaneously the nation-states of other peoples, those breeds outside The Law, have been reduced or extinguished. The dominant-force corrupted the governments of these states at the top level; the revolutionary-force eroded their foundations at the bottom level.

Dr. Kastein, having affirmed that the Jewish government (the "centre", with its unbroken history of more than two thousand years) "ceased to exist" after the dissection of Poland in 1772, records that a hundred years later "a Jewish international" was in being. He evidently meant that the Jewish government of jews had given way to a Jewish government of governments, and this is evidently the truth of our time.

Disraeli spoke of "a network" of revolutionary organizations which covered the earth like a system of railroads; it is the perfect description of the destructive mechanism which was constructed. To achieve the greater purpose there had to be another network at the top, and although Disraeli did not use the word in that case, he alluded to it when he said, "The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes". This is presumably "the Jewish international" of which Dr. Kastein speaks, a league of powerful and wealthy men at the top, under whose authority kings and princes, first, and republican presidents and politicians, next, equally found themselves.

These two machines worked in synchronization, each promoting the aim of the other. In their dealings with the masses, the Gentile rulers were forced by the threat of revolution from below to yield ever more authority, until they fell; in their dealings with foreign countries, and in the wars to which these led, they were constrained by the power of the purse to support the plan of the symbolic "return" to Palestine. The Gentile often asks why men of wealth should promote revolution. Disraeli put the same question, in order to give the answer: they wish to destroy Christianity. He knew precisely what he meant; to the Gentile the answer may be made more comprehensible by saying that they obey the Talmudic Law, which requires the destruction of heathen nation-states as the prelude to the triumphant "return".

Thus the story of the emergence of Zionism from the ghettoes of Russia and of the delicate interplay between the two forces, the one coiling itself round the rulers of the West and the other undermining the structure of the nation-states, forms the next chapter of the controversy of Zion.

Chapter 23. THE "PROPHET"

The 19th Century moved inexorably towards the repudiation of the Sanhedrin's avowals to Napoleon, towards the re-segregation of the Jews, towards the re-establishment of that theocratic state in the midst of states, the danger of which Tiberius had depicted before the Christian era began. The struggle was not between "the Jews" and "the Gentiles"; as on the ancient day when the Persian king's soldiers enabled Ezra and Nehemiah to enforce "the new Law" on the Judahites, it was once more between some Jews and some Gentiles and the other Jews and the other Gentiles. The mystery always was that at such junctures the Gentile rulers allied themselves with the ruling sect of Judaism against the Jewish masses and thus against their own peoples, among whom they fostered a disruptive force. This paradox repeated itself in the 19th century and produced the climacteric of our present day, in which all nations are heavily involved.

The emancipated Jews of the West were undone on this occasion, with the mass of Gentile mankind, by the Western politicians, who enlisted, like a Swiss Guard, in the service of Zionism. Therefore this narrative must pause to look "at the Liberals" of the 19th Century, who by espousing Zionism enabled it to disrupt the affairs and deflect the national policies of peoples.

They may best be studied through the founder of their line. "The Prophet" (he claimed the title which Amos angrily repudiated) was Henry Wentworth Monk, by few remembered today. He was the prototype of the 20th Century American president or British prime minister, the very model of a modern Western politician.

To account for this man one would have to revivify all the thoughts and impulses of the last century. It is recent enough for a plausible attempt. One effect of emancipation was to make every undisciplined thinker believe himself a leader of causes. The spread of the printed word enabled demagogues to distribute ill considered thoughts: The increasing speed and range of transport led them to look for causes far outside their native ken. Irresponsibility might pose as Christian charity when it denounced its neighbours for indifference to the plight of Ethiopian orphans, and who could check the facts? Dickens depicted the type in Stiggins, with his society for providing infant negroes with moral pocket handkerchiefs; Disraeli remarked that the hideous lives of coalminers in the North of England had "escaped the notice of the Society for the Abolition of Negro Slavery".

The new way of acquiring a public reputation was too easy for such rebukes to deter those who were tempted by the beguiling term "liberal", and soon the passion for reform filled the liberal air, which would not brook a vacuum. The "rights of man" had to be asserted; and the surviving wrongs were most easily discovered among peoples faraway (and, for fervour, the further the better). It was the heyday of the self-righteous, of those who only wanted the good of others, and cared not how much bad they did under that banner. The do-gooders founded a generation, and also an industry (for this vocation was not devoid of material reward, as well as plaudits). In the name of freedom, these folk were in our day to applaud, and help bring about, the re-enslavement of half Europe.

Into such a time Henry Wentworth Monk was born (1827) in a farm settlement on the then remote Ottawa River in Canada. At seven he was wrenched from kith and kip and transported to the Bluecoat School in London, at that time a rigorous place for a lonely child. The boys wore the dress of their founder's day (Edward VI), long blue coat, priestly cravat, yellow stockings and buckled shoon. They lived as a sect apart, ate monastic fare and little of it, the rod was not spared, and they were sternly drilled in the Scriptures.

Thus young Monk had many emotional needs, crying to be appeased, and his child's mind began to find modern applications in the Old Testament, to which his infant mind was so diligently directed. By "swift beasts", he deduced, Isaiah meant railways, and by "swift messengers", steamships. He next decided, at this early age, that he had found the keys to "prophecy" and could interpret the mind of God in terms of his day. He ignored the warnings of the Israelite prophets and of the New Testament against this very temptation; what he found was merely the teaching of the Levitical priesthood, that one day the heathen would be destroyed and the chosen people re-gathered in their supreme kingdom in the promised land.

Men of rank and influence also were toying with this idea that the time had come for them to make up God's mind. When Monk was eleven a Lord Shaftesbury proposed that the great powers should buy Palestine from the Sultan of Turkey and "restore it to the Jews". England then had a statesman, Lord Palmerston, who did not let such notions disturb his duty, and nothing was done. But in young Monk an idea was ignited, and The Prophet was born; his life thenceforth held no other interest until it ended sixty years later!

At fourteen he obtained special leave to attend a sermon preached by "the first English Bishop in Jerusalem" (whose name, history records, was Solomon Alexander). The little boy returned to school with shining eyes, dedicated to his life's work of procuring Palestine, without regard to the people already in it, for some body of other people utterly unknown to him. The idea would not let him settle down on his father's Canadian farm when he returned to it; it stood between him and the Christian ministry, when he was made a candidate for this. He pored over the Old Testament and found it was but a code, that cleared before his eyes.

Thus he fell into the irreverence which the study of the Levitical scriptures sometimes produces in men who describe them selves as Christians and yet ignore the New Testament. Once they accept the concept of foretellings to be literally fulfilled, they yield, in fact, to the Judaic Law of a political contract which leaves no latitude whatever to God, save in the one point of the time of completion. From that they proceed, in one bound, to the conclusion that they know the time (which God, presumably, has forgotten). At that stage such men believe that they are God. This is the end to which the process must lead them: the denial of Christianity, and of all divinity. This is the profanity to which all leading politicians of the West, in our century, lent themselves; Monk was the original of a multitude.

Even in his remote Canadian habitat he found other prophets. An American Jew, a Major Mordecai Noah, was trying to build a Jewish "city of refuge" on an island in the Niagara River, preparatory to "the return"; from what the Jews of North America needed refuge, until they "returned", he alone knew. Also, a Mr. Warder Cresson. the first United States Consul in Jerusalem, became so ardent for "restoration" that he embraced Judaism and published a book, Jerusalem The Centre And Joy Of The Whole World. Returning to America, he cast off his Gentile wife, renamed himself Michael Boas Israel, went to Palestine and there contrived to marry a Jewish girl with whom he could communicate only by signs.

All this fired Monk's ardour the more. He decided, in the Old Testamentary tradition, no more to cut his hair or adorn his body until "Zion is restored". As his hair grew abundantly, he became most hirsute; as he sold his small property and thereafter never laboured, he was for the rest of his days dependent on others. At twenty-six he set out for Jerusalem and reached it after much hardship. Having nothing but shagginess and shabbiness to testify to the truth of his message, he found few hearers.

Monk might have disappeared from the annals at that point but for a chance encounter which made him publicly known. In this century of world wars, trans-continental and trans-oceanic projectiles, and mass-destroying explosives, the 19th Century counts as a stable, peaceful period of time, unshadowed by fear for the morrow. The student, particularly of this controversy of Zion, is astonished to find how many educated men apparently lived in fright of annihilation and decided that they could only be saved if a body of the planet's inhabitants were transported to Arabia. The Prophet's path crossed that of another of these tremulous beings.

A young English painter, Holman Hunt, appeared in Jerusalem. He also was ready for "a cause", for he was waging the characteristic feud of the young artist against the Academicians, and that produces an inflammable state of mind. He enjoyed ill health and often thought his end near (he lived to be eighty-three). He had just painted The Tight of the World, which depicted Jesus, lantern in hand, at the sinner's door, and the sudden apparition of the bearded Monk caught his imagination. He grasped eagerly at the Prophet's idea of threatening mankind (including the Academicians) with extermination if it did not do what Prophecy ordained.

So these two, Prophet, and pre-Raphaelite, concerted a plan to starde the indifferent world. Monk depicted "the scapegoat" to Holman Hunt as the symbol of Jewish persecution by mankind. They agreed that Holman Hunt should paint a picture of "the scapegoat" and that Monk should simultaneously write a book explaining that the time had come for the persecuted to be restored, in fulfilment of prophecy.

(In fact the scapegoat was an ingenious Levitical device, whereby the priest was empowered to absolve the congregation of its sins by taking two kids of the goat, killing one for a sin-offering, and driving the other into the wilderness to expiate by its suffering "all their transgressions and all their sins... putting them upon the head of the goat". The Prophet and Holman Hunt transformed the meaning into its opposite. The scapegoat for the sins of the Jews was to become the symbol of the Jews themselves; its tormentors, the Levitical priests, were by implication to be changed into Gentile oppressors!)

Holman Hunt went to work; this was a delightful way, both to take a swing at the Royal Academy ("problem pictures") and to identify himself with a cause. His picture would say more than any spoken word, and it would be followed by Monk's written word. The Picture and The Book, The Symbol and The Interpretation, The Herald and The Prophet: once the world beheld "The Scapegoat" Monk's work of revelation would find an audience, awakened to its transgressions and eager to make amends.

Hunt, wearing Arab robes and carrying easel and rifle, was then seen by the Bedouin driving a white goat to the Dead Sea. He painted an excellent picture of a goat (indeed, of two goats, as the first goat, with excessive zeal, died, and a substitute had to be found). For greater effect, a camel's skeleton was brought from Sodom and a goat's skull borrowed, and these were arranged in the background. The painting certainly produces the impression that the Levites must have been cruel (the animal's agony was graphically represented) and wicked, to pretend that by its suffering they could wash out all the iniquities of their people: Holman Hunt took it to England, first pledging himself, with Monk, "to the restoration of the Temple, the abolition of warfare among men, and the coming of the Kingdom of God upon the earth"; probably no painter ever had such large purposes in mind when he conceived a picture.

Monk then produced his Simple Interpretation of the 'Revelation and the joint undertaking was complete; the world had but to respond. In this first book Monk still tried to wed Levitical politics with Christian doctrine. Historically he stayed on safe ground; he pointed out, correctly, that "the ten tribes" could not have become extinct, but lived on in the mass of mankind: This led him to his "interpretation", which was to the effect that "the true Israelites", Jewish and Christian, should migrate to Palestine and establish a model state there (at that point he was far from literal Zionism, and ran risk of being accounted an "antisemite"). His portrayal of the consequences was plain demagogy; if this were done, he said, war would come to an end. But then came the paramount idea (and who knows whence Monk got it?): an International Government must be set up in Jerusalem. Here Monk hit on the true intention of Zionism. Monk was only enabled to have his work published through an acquaintanceship which he owed to Holman Hunt: John Ruskin, the famous art critic, prevailed on the publisher Constable to print it. The Book (like The Picture) failed of effect, but Ruskin helped The Prophet with money and in other ways, and thus saved him from oblivion.

Ruskin, too, was the product of early pressures and inner disappointments. Like Wilkie Collins (an excellent craftsman who could not rest content with writing good novels and vainly tried to emulate Dickens's gift for arousing moral indignation), he was not happy to remain in the field where he was eminent but was ever ready to champion (and less ready to examine) anything that looked like a moral cause. Like Monk, he had been drilled in the Old Testament as a child (though by a possessive Puritan mother), and he was recurrently unlucky in love, sometimes humiliatingly so. He was therefore at all times in search of an outlet for unspent emotional impulses. He feared life and the future, so that The Prophet's incessant warnings of wrath to come unnerved him and made him put his hand in his pocket. He had a large audience and yielded to the same impiety as Monk and Holman; as his biographer says (Mr. Besketh Pearson), "he succumbed to the delusion, common to all messiahs, that his word was God's", and in the end his reason waned, but by then he had enabled The Prophet to preach and wander on.

After the failure of Monk's book Holman Hunt tried again. He began a painting of Jesus, in the synagogue, reading the messianic prophecies and announcing their fulfilment in himself. To make his meaning clear, he used Monk as the model for the figure of Jesus, and the indignation of the elders was to symbolize the world's rejection of The Prophet. Holman Hunt's preliminary study for this picture is in the National Gallery at Ottawa and shows Monk holding in one hand the Bible (open at the Book of the Revelation) and in the other: a copy of the London Times. (I was working in monastic seclusion in Montreal, somewhat bowed down by the nature and weight of the task, when I discovered the picture, and my neighbours were then surprised by the loud noise of mirth which burst from the usually silent room where a former correspondent of The Times bent over his labours).

Thereafter human nature slowly had its way. Holman Hunt sold a picture of the Finding of Christ in the Temple for 5,500 (pounds) and his resentment against life (and the Academicians) mellowed. He found himself unable to ask the tattered Prophet to accompany him to fine houses like those of Val Prinsep and Tennyson. Ruskin was busy with ill-starred loves, and was becoming sceptical as well. Nevertheless, these two sedentary men could not quite forget The Prophet's warnings that they would be destroyed unless they soon effected the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. He was always telling them that "the day" was at hand and pointing to some warlike episode, in Africa or Asia Minor or the Balkans or Europe, as the foretold beginning of the end; skirmishes and minor campaigns never lacked. At last Holman Hunt and Ruskin hit on a plan which seemed likely to allay their fears, appease their consciences and rid them of The Prophet; they urged him to go to Jerusalem and (like Sabbatai Zevi) proclaim the approach of The Millennium!

He was about to go when another war broke out, completely confounding him because it was not in any of the places where, interpreting prophecy, he had foretold the beginning of the end of days. It was in the very area from which, according to his published interpretation, salvation was to come: America.

After a glance at the authorities, The Prophet announced that he had located the error in his calculations: the Civil War was in fact the great, premonitory event. Now something must be done about Palestine without delay! John Ruskin put his foot down. If The Prophet were truly a prophet, he said, let him hasten to America before he went to Jerusalem, and call down some sign from heaven that would stop the Civil War. He, Ruskin, would finance the journey. And The Prophet went, to stop the Civil War.

The tradition then prevailed in America that a republican president must be accessible to all, and Mr. Abraham Lincoln was so beleaguered three days a week. One day, when the President's doors were open, The Prophet was swept in with a crowd of patronage- seekers, petitioners and sightseers.

His appearance gained him a few words of conversation with the President. Mr. Lincoln's harassed eye was arrested by the sight of something peering at him through the undergrowth. He asked who the visitor was, then learning that he was a Canadian come to end the war. Asked for his proposal, The Prophet urged that the South free its slaves against compensation and the North agree to Southern secession, a suggestion which (Monk recorded) "appeared to amuse the President. Mr. Lincoln asked, "Do not you Canadians consider my Emancipation Proclamation as a great step forward in the social and moral progress of the world?"

Monk said this was not enough: "Why not follow the emancipation of the Negro by a still more urgent step: the emancipation of the Jew?" Mr. Lincoln was baffled (the Jews had always been emancipated in America) and asked in astonishment, "The Jew, why the Jew? Are they not free already?"

Monk said, "Certainly, Mr. President, the American Jew is free, and so is the British Jew, but not the European. In America we live so far off that we are blind to what goes on in Russia and Prussia and Turkey. There can be no permanent peace in the world until the civilized nations, led, I hope, by Great Britain and the United States, atone for what they have done to the Jews, for their two thousand years of persecution, by restoring them to their national home in Palestine, and making Jerusalem the capital city of a reunited Christendom".

Characteristically, Monk had never been to "Russia, Prussia or Turkey"; he was that kind of "Liberal". In Russia the Talmudic rabbinate was opposing emancipation by every means, and two years before Monk saw Mr. Lincoln the Czar Alexander II had been assassinated when he announced a parliamentary constitution; in Prussia the Jews were emancipated and for this very reason were the objects of attack by the Jews in Russia; the Jews under Turkish rule (which oppressed all subject nationalities impartially) were already in Palestine and thus could not be restored thither.

In Mr. Lincoln's day the notion that all wars, wherever fought and for whatever reason, ought to be diverted to the aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was new (today it is generally accepted and put into practice, as the two world wars have shown), and the President was again amused.

He had on hand the cruellest war in Western history, up to that time. Being a man of resource, and versed in dealing with importuners, he rid himself of The Prophet with a good-humoured jest. "My chiropodist is a Jew", he said, "and he has so often put me on my feet that I would have no objection to giving his countrymen a leg up". Then, reminding Monk of the war in progress, he begged The Prophet to await its end: "then we may begin again to see visions and dream dreams". (Another topic for a debating society: was the use of this phrase chance or intention? Mr. Lincoln certainly knew what fate the Old Testament prescribes for "false prophets and dreamers of dreams".)

Monk returned to London and Ruskin paid his expenses to Palestine, whence, on arrival, he was deported as a nuisance in 1864. Destitute, he signed as seaman aboard a Boston-bound clipper and, being wrecked, swam the last part of the Atlantic. He was cast ashore bleeding and almost naked, so that, looking like a bear, he was shot as one, in semi-darkness, by a farmer. He lost his memory and mind, and in this condition at last came home. He recovered after some years and at once returned to his obsession. The "day of trouble", so long foretold, still had not come; the planet kept its accustomed place. He re-examined prophecy and decided that he had erred in recommending the union of Jews and Christians in the world-state to be set up in Jerusalem. Now he saw that what prophecy required God to do was first to put the Jews in possession of Palestine, and then to set up a worldwide organisation with power to enforce the submission of nations to its.

After a lifetime Monk thus stumbled on the fullness of the political plan of world dominion which is contained in the Old Testament, and still thought that he was interpreting divine prophecy. No evidence offers that he ever came in contact with the initiates and illuminates of the grand design. The only recorded Jewish money he was ever offered was a charitable gift of five pounds "if you are personally in want". He moved always in the company and at the cost of the bemused Gentile "Liberals".

He was forgotten in the Ottawa Valley when, in 1 870, his hope (one must use the word) that "the day of troubles" was at last at hand was revived by a huge forest fire, which he took as a sign from heaven that the time had come. Somehow he made his way to London (1872) and to Hunt and Ruskin, who had thought him dead. Ruskin was wooing Rose La Touche, so that for the time he was unresponsive to warnings of doom and wrote to The Prophet, "I acknowledge the wonderfulness of much that you tell me, but I simply do not believe that you can understand so much about God when you understand so little about man... you appear to me to be mad, but for aught I know I may be mad myself (these last words, unhappily, were prescient).

Such admonitions were not new to The Prophet. His relatives and friends had ever implored him, if he felt called to improve mankind, to look around him at home: the lot of the Canadian Indians, or even of the Canadians, might be bettered. To a man who held the key to divine revelation advice of this kind was sacrilegious, and Monk, by way of various pamphlets, came at length to the idea of a "Palestine Restoration Fund". For this he borrowed a notion of Ruskin's, originally devised to help Ruskin's own country; namely, that wealthy folk should forfeit a tithe of their incomes for the purpose of reclaiming English wastelands. Monk decided that the tithe should serve a better object: the "return"!

By this time (1875) Ruskin was once more unnerved, first by the death of Rose La Touche and next by the apparent imminence of one more distant war (this time a British-Russian one). Clearly The Prophet was right after all; the "day of troubles" was come. Ruskin signed Monk's manifesto and dedicated a tenth of his income to The Prophet's fund for the purchase of Palestine from the Sultan while the English wastelands stayed unreclaimed. When this was achieved, a congress of all nations was to set up a federation of the world in Jerusalem.

The Prophet, thus propped on his feet again, was further helped by Laurence Oliphant, a lion of the Victorian drawing rooms whom he had by chance met when he made his way about America, hobo-fashion. Oliphant was a man of different type, a bold, cynical venturer, or adventurer. The idea of buying Palestine appealed to him, but he had no illusions about it. He wrote to Monk, "Any amount of money can be raised upon it, owing to the belief which people have that they would be fulfilling prophecy and bringing on the end of the world. I don't know why they are so anxious for the latter event, but it makes the commercial speculation easy", Oliphant, as will be seen, did not trouble to hide his disdain for The Prophet's message.*

* Oliphant touched on an interesting point. One interpretation of the numerous prophecies is that the end of the world will follow the "return" of the Jews to Palestine, so that the folk who promote this migration presume even to determine the moment when Jehovah shall bring the planet to an end. The mystification expressed by Oliphant was felt by a perplexed French politician at the Peace Conference of 1919, who asked Mr. Balfour why he was so eager to bring about "the return" of the Jews to Palestine; if this truly was the fulfilment of prophecy, then prophecy also decreed that the end of the world would follow. Mr. Balfour replied languidly. "Precisely, that is what makes it all so very interesting".

In 1880 Holman Hunt, again enjoying deteriorated health, was so alarmed by small warlike episodes in Egypt an d South Africa that he thought extinction at hand and joined with Monk in issuing a manifesto which anticipated the Zionist-ruled world-government schemes of this century. It was headed "The abolition of national warfare", called on all men of goodwill to subscribe a tenth of their income to the realization of "the Kingdom of God" in the form of a world government to be set up in Palestine and to be called "the United Nations", and proposed that the money be given to Mr. Monk for the purpose of acquiring Palestine.

That was the finish. Ruskin, approaching his end, rudely refused all further part in the fantasy. Oliphant dropped out. The "Bank of Israel" came to nothing. Samuel Butler showed The Prophet the door. Even Holman Hunt at last appealed to him to preach "that there is a God in heaven, who will judge every man on earth" and to desist from pretending in effect that he, Monk, was God. The Jews spoke similarly: one told him, "The land of our forefathers is dead, and Palestine is its grave... to attempt to form a nation from the polyglot people of Judaism today would only end in utter failure".

Monk was beyond redemption. In 1884 the Bluecoat boy returned to Ottawa for the last time and spent his final years canvassing, pamphleteering, and haranguing members of the Canadian House of Commons as they sat, between sessions, in their garden by the Ottawa River. They listened to him with amused indulgence; sixty years later Canadian Ministers, at Ottawa and New York, were to repeat all the things Monk said as the unassailable principles of high policy, and no Member would demur.

Monk's life was wretched and was not redeemed by any true faith or genuine mission. This account of it is given to show how false and foolish the great project was seen to be, and how misguided the men who took it up, against the background of the last century. The fallacy of the whole notion, of Zionism leading to the despotic world-government, is instantly displayed when it is considered in that setting, with Monk and his friends declaiming from the stage. The whole thing then is seen as a picaresque comedy; a farce, not merely because it was unsuccessful, but because it was never serious. What was recommended could not be seriously entertained because its consequences obviously had not been considered and, if calculated, at once were foreseen to be disastrous. Against the background of a time when debate was free and opinion, being informed, might be brought to bear on the matter, these men strut foolishly, leaving only the faint echo of clownish noises in the corridors of time.

Nevertheless, in the present century the entire vainglorious scheme, unchanged, was imported into the life of peoples as a serious and urgent undertaking, transcending the needs of nations. Indeed, it was made a sacrosanct one, for an unwritten law of heresy was set around it which in effect checked the antiseptic force of public discussion, and within this palisade the politicians of the West made a morality play out of The Prophet's claptrap. John Ruskin and Holman Hunt, from whatever bourne the Victorian friends of the oppressed may now inhabit, may look down and see the graves of many dead, and the living graves of nearly a million fugitives, as the first results of their great plan, now in accomplishment.

Monk, had he lived in this century, would have been qualified for important political rank, for support of this cause has become the first condition for admission to the high temporal places. His life was spent in pursuing the lure of an excessive vanity and in the very year of his death, 1896, the fantasy which led him became a political and practical reality, dominating our time. While he went his vagrant way between Ottawa, Washington, London and Jerusalem very different men, in Russia, built up the real force of Zionism. In 1896 it was launched into the lives of the peoples, and its explosive detonations have grown louder and more destructive until today even the newspaper scribes commonly allude to it as the issue which may set the spark to the third world war.

Chapter 24. THE COMING OF ZIONISM

In the second half of the last century when Communism and Zionism began their simultaneous assault on the West, Europe was a place of strong and confident states well able to withstand the effects of inner troubles and foreign wars. The revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 had been overcome without great exertion. Austria-Hungary and France were not much weakened by their Prussian defeats in 1866 and 1871; they resumed their national existences, as defeated countries for centuries had done, side by side with yesterday's victor, and soon were tranquil again. The Balkan people, emerging from five centuries of Turkish rule also were moving towards prosperity, in the kindlier air of national freedom. On the eastern borders of Europe Russia, under the flag of Christendom, appeared to be joining in this process of national and individual improvement.

The appearance was deceptive, for the two maggots were in the apple, and today's scene shows the result. The eighteen Christian centuries which, despite ups and downs showed a total sum of human betterment greater than that of any earlier time known to man, were coming either to an end or an interregnum; which, we still do not know, though believers have no doubt about the good resumption, somewhen. However, one eminent man of that period, from whom confidence in the outcome might have been expected, foresaw what was to come in our century and thought it would be the end, not a transient Dark Age.

This was Henry Edward Manning, the English clergyman who was converted to Rome, became Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and, had he accepted nomination by his fellow cardinals, might have become Pope. Edmund Burke, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton had all perceived the worldwide aims of the revolution and foretold its spreading eruptions. Disraeli, Bakunin and others, a half-century later, had testified to, and warned against, the Jewish usurpation of the revolutionary leadership. Manning joined in these warnings but also foresaw the coming of Zionism and the part it would play in the dual process.

Of the revolution he said, "The secret societies of the world, the existence of which men laugh at and deny in the plenitude of their self-confidence; the secret societies are forcing their existence and their reality upon the consciousness of those who, until the other day, would not believe that they existed" (1861). He expected the full success of Weishaupt's original plan and thought the time in which he lived was "the prelude of the anti-Christian period of the final dethronement of Christendom, and of the restoration of society without God in the world". Today the anti-Christian revolution holds temporal power in half of Europe, the Christian cross has been expunged from the flags of all great European nations save the British and from those of many small ones, and a "society without God" has been set up as a potential world-government, so that these words of ninety years ago are seen as an impressive forecast part- fulfilled.

Then (and in this he rose above the other seers) he depicted the part which Zionism would play in this process: "Those who have lost faith in the Incarnation, such as humanitarians, rationalists and pantheists, may well be deceived by any person of great political power and success, who should restore the Jews to their own land... and there is nothing in the political aspect of the world which renders such a combination impbssible".

Finally, he said that he expected the personal coming of Antichrist in the form of a Jew. (In these words he moved from the ground of political calculation, where as events have shown he was expert, to that of interpreting prophecy; he related Saint Paul's message to the Thessalonians, 2.1.iii-xi, to the coming time, saying, "It is a law of Holy Scripture that when persons are prophesied of, persons appear".)

Thus, while Europe outwardly appeared to be slowly moving towards an improving future on the path which for eighteen centuries had served it well, in the Talmudic areas of Russia Zionism joined Communism as the second of the two forces which were to intercept that process. Communism was designed to subvert the masses; it was the "great popular movement" foreseen by Disraeli, by means of which "the secret societies" were to work in unison for the disruption of Europe. Zionism set out to subvert rulers at the top. Neither force could have moved forward without the other, for rulers of unimpaired authority would have checked the revolution as it had been checked in 1848.

Zionism was essentially the rejoinder of the Talmudic centre in Russia to the emancipation of Jews in the West. It was the intimation that they must not involve themselves in mankind but must remain apart.

Never since Babylon had the ruling sect ventured to play this card. It can never be played again, if the present attempt ultimately ends in fiasco. For that reason the Talmudists ever refrained from playing it, and only did this when emancipation confronted them with a vital emergency, the loss of their power over Jewry. Indeed, they had always denounced as "false Messiahs" those who clamoured that the day of fulfilment was come. 'Had Sabbatai Zevi, or for that matter Cromwell or Napoleon, been able to deliver Palestine to them, they might have proclaimed one of these to be the Messiah. On this occasion they proclaimed themselves to be the Messiah, and that bold enterprise can hardly be repeated. Historically therefore, we are probably moving towards the end of the destructive plan, because it obviously cannot be fulfilled, but the present generation, and possibly some generations to come, by all the signs have yet a heavy price to pay for having encouraged the attempt.

Dr. Chaim Weizmann's book is the best single fount of information about the twin roots of Communism and Zionism and their convergent purpose. He was present at the birth of Zionism, he became its roving plenipotentiary, he was for forty years the darling of Western courts, presidential offices and cabinet rooms, he became the first president of the Zionist state, and he told the entire tale with astonishing candour. He shows how, in those remote Talmudic communities nearly a hundred years ago, the strategy took shape which in its consequences was to catch up, as in a vortex, all peoples of the West. Americans and Britons, Germans and Frenchmen, Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Baits, the Balkanic peoples and all others were to be implicated. The lifeblood and treasure of the West were to be spent on the promotion of these two complementary purposes like water from a running tap.

Millions, living and dead, were during two wars involved in their furtherance. Men now being born inherit a share in the final upheavals to which they must inexorably lead. The Jews shared in all that tribulation, in their small proportion to the masses affected. Dr. Weizmann's account enables today's student to see the beginnings of all this; and now this narrative reaches our own time, which receives daily shape from what then occurred.

He explains that the Jews in Russia were divided into three groups. The first group was that of the Jews who, seeking "the peace of the city", simply wanted to become peaceable Russian citizens, as the Jews of the West, in the majority, at that time were loyal German, French or other citizens. Emancipation was for this group the final aim, and it chiefly contained those Jews who, by talent, diligence and fear of Talmudic rule, had escaped from the ghettoes.

Dr. Weizmann dismisses it as small, unrepresentative and "renegade", and as it was swept away it must also disappear from this narrative, which belongs to the two other groups. By the edict of the Talmudists it has "disappeared from the face of the earth", or been excommunicated.

The remaining mass of Jews in Russia, (that is, those that lived in the ghettoes under Talmudic rule) were divided into two groups by a vertical line which split households and families, including Dr. Weizmann's own house and family. Both groups were revolutionary; that is to say, they agreed in working for the destruction of Russia. The dissension was solely on the point of Zionism. The "Communist-revolutionary" group held that full "emancipation" would be achieved when the world-revolution supplanted the nation-states everywhere. The "Zionist-revolutionary" group, while agreeing that the world-revolution was indispensable to the process, held that full "emancipation" would only be achieved when a Jewish nation was established in a Jewish state.

Of these two groups, the Zionist one was clearly the superior in Talmudic orthodoxy, as destruction, under the Law is but a means to the end of domination, and the dominant nation is that ordained to be set up in Jerusalem. In the households, dispute was fierce. The Communists maintained that Zionism would weaken the revolution, which professed to deny "race and creed"; the Zionists contended that revolution must lead to the restoration of the chosen people, of whom race was the creed. Individual members of these households probably believed that the point in dispute was valid, but in fact it was not.

Neither of these groups could have taken shape, in those sternly ruled communities, against the will of the rabbinate. If the rabbis had given out the word that Communism was "transgression" and Zionism "observance" of "the statutes and judgments", there would have been no Communists in the ghettoes, only Zionists.

The ruling sect, looking into the future above the heads of the regimented mass, evidently saw that both groups were essential to the end in view; and Disraeli, in one of the passages earlier quoted, named the motive. From the middle of the last century the story of the revolution is that of Communism and Zionism, directed from one source and working to a convergent aim.

Dr. Weizmann gives an illuminating glimpse of this apparent dissension among the members of a conspiratorial, but divided, Jewish household where the ultimate shape of the high strategy was not seen and the issue between "revolutionary-Communism" and "revolutionary-Zionism" was fiercely argued. He quotes his mother, the Jewish matriarch, as saying contentedly that if the Communist-revolutionary son were proved right she would be happy in Russia, and if the Zionist-revolutionary one were correct, then she would be happy in Palestine. In the outcome both were by their lights proved right; after spending some years in Bolshevized Moscow she went to end her days in Zionized Palestine. That was after the two conspiracies, having grown in secrecy side by side, triumphed in the same week of 1917.

Communism was already an organized, though still a secret and conspiratorial party in the ghettoes when Zionism first took organized (though equally secret) form in the Chibath Zion (Love of Zion) movement. This was founded at Pinsk, where Dr. Weizmann went to school, so that as a boy his path led him into the Zionist-revolutionary wing of the anti-Russian conspiracy. In his childhood (1881) something happened which threatened to destroy the entire legend of "persecution in Russia" on which Talmudic propaganda in the outer world was based.

In 1861 Czar Alexander II, the famous Liberator, had liberated 23,000,000 Russian serfs. From that moment the prospect of liberty and improvement on the Western model opened out for Russian citizens of all nationalities (Russia contained about 160 nationalities and the Jews formed about 4 percent of the total population). Then, during the twenty years following the liberation of the serfs, the Jews began, under Talmudic direction, to offer "bitter passive resistance to all 'attempts at improvements' " (Dr. Kastein). In March 1881, Alexander II moved to complete his life's work by proclaiming a parliamentary constitution. Dr. Kastein's comment speaks for itself: "It is not surprising to find a Jewess taking part in the conspiracy which led to the assassination of Alexander II".

This event, the first of a similar series, was the first major success of the revolutionaries in preventing emancipation. It restored the ideal condition depicted by Moses Hess (one of the earliest Zionist propagandists) in the year following the liberation of the serfs: "We Jews shall always remain strangers among the nations; these, it is true, will grant us rights from feelings of humanity and justice, but they will never respect us so long as we place our great memories in the second rank and accept as our first principle, 'Where I flourish, there is my country'".

During this period Leon Pinsker, another herald of Zionism, published his book Auto-Emancipation. The title was a threat (to the initiated); it meant, "We will not accept any kind of emancipation bestowed on us by others; we will emancipate ourselves and will give 'emancipation' our own interpretation". He said, "There is an inexorable and inescapable conflict between humans known as Jews and other humans", and he described the master-method to be used to bring about this "self-emancipation" and to "restore the Jewish nation": the struggle to achieve "these ends, he said, "must be entered upon in such a spirit as to exert an irresistible pressure upon the international politics of the present".

These words of 1882 are some of the most significant in this entire story. They show foreknowledge of the highest order, as the reader may discern if he try to picture, say, some Polish or Ukrainian patriot-in-exile talking, then or now, of "exerting irresistible pressure upon international politics". The political emitter is a sad man of hope deferred, an habitue of the Cafe des Exiles who is usually thankful if the second secretary of an Under Secretary of State deigns to spare him half an hour. Pinsker was an obscure Jewish emigre in Berlin, little known outside revolutionary circles, when he wrote these words, which would seem to be of the most foolish pretension if the events of the next seventy years had not proved that he knew exactly what he meant. He knew how Zionism would prevail. Clearly the conspiracy, long before its nature was even suspected in the outer world, had powerful support far outside Russia and this unknown Pinsker was aware of the methods by which the affairs of the world were to be rearranged.

Such was the state of the two-headed conspiracy in Russia when Dr. Weizmann grew to manhood and began to play his part. The word "conspiracy", frequently used here, is not the author's; Dr. Weizmann candidly employs it. Loathing Russia, he went (without hindrance) to Germany. The sight of "emancipated" Jews there so repelled him that he longed for the ghettoes of Russia and returned to them during his holidays, then resuming his part in "the conspiracy", as he says. Then, at various universities in the emancipated West he continued his "open fight" to de-emancipate the Jews of Europe. They recognized the danger and turned faces of fear and enmity to these Ostjuden.

Thus in Germany Gabriel Rieser told the Zionist-revolutionaries from Russia "We did not immigrate here, we were born here, and because we were born here, we lay no claim to a home anywhere else; we are either Germans or else we are homeless". Similarly, the rabbis of Reform Judaism resolved that "the idea of the Messiah deserves every consideration in our prayers, but all requests that we may be led back to the land of our fathers and the Jewish State be restored must be dropped out of them".

These Jews struggled to keep faith with the Sanhedrin's pledges. They had made peace with mankind, and it appeared impossible that the Talmudists could ever lead them back into a new Nehemiahan captivity. Dr. Kastein records with horror that towards the end of the 19th century "one Jew in five married a Gentile" and, with greater horror, that in war "on all fronts Jew stood opposed to Jew; this was a tragedy... which will be repeated... as long as Jews are compelled 'to fulfil their duties as citizens of the lands of their adoption".

The shadow of the new Talmudic captivity was much nearer to the Jews of the West than even they could suspect. The elders in Russia had been organizing during all these decades and as the end of the century approached were ready to "exert irresistible pressure upon the international politics of the present". The most successful specialist in this exertion of pressure; a roving Zionist prime minister, was young Chaim Weizmann, who during the last years of Monk's life moved about the European cities and universities, from Darmstadt to Berlin, and later from Berlin to Geneva, planting therein the time-bombs of the future and preparing for his 20th Century task.

As the century closed came a sudden acceleration in this process, as if a machine long in construction were completed and began to run at high power, and its throbbing pulsations were at once felt throughout all Jewry, though the Gentile masses, less sensitive to such vibrations, remarked them not at all. In the succession to Moses Hess another Jew from Russia, Asher Ginsburg (Ahad Ha'am) proclaimed that the Jews not only formed a nation but must have a Jewish state in Palestine. However, this was but one more voice from remote Russia, and the weakness of the Jews in the West was that they did not realize the power and strength of the compact, organized mass in the Eastern ghettoes, or at any rate, they could not see how it could make itself felt in Europe.

The warning to them came in 1896, the year of Prophet Monk's death, when Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State, With that, the cat was in their dovecot, and not very long afterwards the doves were in the cat. Their ranks were split, for this Theodor Herzl was not one of the Eastern Jews, not a Jew from Russia. He was one of themselves, or at all events they held him to be one. He appeared to be the very model of an emancipated Western Jew, yet he was on the side of the Zionists. A premonitory tremor ran through Jewry. Christendom, which had as much cause to be perturbed, remained blissfully unaware for another sixty years.

Chapter 25. THE WORLD ZIONIST ORGANIZATION

If mere chance, ever and again, produces men like Karl Marx and Dr. Theodor Herzl at moments when their acts can lead to destructive consequences out of proportion to their own importance, then chance in the past century has been enlisted in the conspiracy against the West. The likelier explanation is that a higher command was already in charge of these events and that it chose, or at all events used Herzl for the part he played. The brevity of his course across the firmament (like that of a shooting star), the disdainful way in which when his task was done he was cast aside, and his unhappy end would all support that explanation.

Those who have known Vienna and its atmosphere in our century will understand Herzl and his effect. A declining monarchy and a tottering nobility: a class of Jews rising suddenly and swiftly to the highest places; these things made great impression among the Jewish masses. Dr. Herzl, rather than the Neue Freie Presse, now told them how went the world and instructed politicians what to do. Obsequious Obers in the chattering cafes hastened to serve "Herr Doktor!" It was all new, exciting. Self-importance filled the Herzl's and de Blowitz's of that time and when Dr. Herzl emerged as the self-proclaimed herald of Zion the Western Jews were left awed and uncertain. If Dr. Herzl could talk like this to the Great Powers, perhaps he was right and the Napoleonic Sanhedrin had been wrong!

Could it be true that policy was made in Dr. Herzl's office, not in the Ballhausplatz? Had a Jew from Russia written The Jewish State, or attempted to set up a World Zionist Organization, the Western Jews would have ignored him, for they feared the conspiracy from the East and at least suspected its implications. But if Dr. Herzl, a fully emancipated Western Jew, thought that Jews must re-segregate themselves, the matter was becoming serious.

Herzl asserted that the Dreyfus case had convinced him of the reality of "antisemitism". The term was then of fairly recent coinage, though Dr. Kastein seeks to show that the state of mind denoted by it is immemorial by saying "it has existed from the time that Judaism came into contact with other peoples in something more than neighbourly hostility". (By this definition resistance in war is "antisemitism", and the "neighbours" in the tribal warfare of antique times, to which he refers, were themselves Semites. However, the words "contact exceeding neighbourly hostility" offer a good example of Zionist pilpulism.)

Anyway, Dr. Herzl stated that "the Dreyfus process made me a Zionist", and the words are as empty as Mr. Lloyd George's later ones, "Acetone converted me to Zionism" (which were demonstrably untrue). The Dreyfus case gave the Jews complete proof of the validity of emancipation and of the impartiality of justice under it. Never was one man defended so publicly by so many or so fully vindicated. Today whole nations, east of Berlin, have no right to any process of law and the West, which signed the deed of their outlawry, is indifferent to their plight; they may be imprisoned or killed without charge or trial. Yet in the West today the Dreyfus case, the classic example of justice, continues to be cited by the propagandists as the horrid example of injustice. If the case for or against Zionism stood or fell by the Dreyfus case, the word should have disappeared from history at that point.

Nevertheless Dr. Herzl demanded that "the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the righful requirements of a nation" (he specified no particular territory and did not especially lean towards Palestine). For the first time the idea of resurrecting a Jewish state came under lively discussion among Western Jews.* The London Jewish Chronicle described the book as "one of the most astounding pronouncements which have ever been put forward". Herzl, thus encouraged, went to London, then the focus of power, to canvass his idea. After successful meetings in London's East End he decided to call a Congress of Jews in support of it.

* At that time it hardly reached the mind of the Gentile multitude. In 1841 a Colonel Churchill, English Consul at Smyrna, at the conference of Central European States called to determine the future of Syria had put forward a proposal to set up a Jewish state in Palestine, but apparently it was dismissed with little or no consideration.

Consequently, in March 1 897, Jews "all over the world" were invited to send delegates to a "Zionist congress", a counter-Sanhedrin, at Munich in August. The Western Jews were adamantly opposed. The rabbis of Germany, and then the Jews of Munich, protested, and the place of meeting was changed to Basel, in Switzerland. The Reform Jews of America two years earlier had announced that they expected "neither a return to Palestine... nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish State". (Most curious to relate today, when Rabbi Stephen Wise in 1899 suggested a book about Zionism to the Jewish Publication Society of America its secretary replied, "The Society cannot risk a book on Zionism").

When Herzl's congress met most of the 197 delegates came from Eastern Europe. This group of men then set up a "World Zionist Organization", which proclaimed Jewish nationhood and "a publicly secured, legally assured home" to be its aims, and Herzl declared "The Jewish State exists". In fact, a few Jews, claiming to speak for all Jews but vehemendy repudiated by many representative bodies of Western Jewry, had held a meeting in Basel, and that was all.

Nevertheless, the proposal, for what it was worth in those circumstances, was at last on the table of international affairs. The congress was in fact a Sanhedrin summoned to cancel the avowals made by the Napoleonic Sanhedrin eighty years before. That Sanhedrin repudiated separate nationhood and any ambition to form a Jewish state; this one proclaimed separate nationhood and the ambition of statehood. Looking back fifty years later, Rabbi Elmer Berger observed, "Here was the wedge of Jewish nationalism, to be driven between Jews and other human beings. Here was the permanent mould of ghettoism into which Jewish life in the unemancipated nations was to remain compressed so that the self-generating processes of emancipation and integration could not come into play".

The Napoleonic Sanhedrin had a basic flaw, now revealed, of which Napoleon may well have been unaware. It represented the Western Jews, and Napoleon cannot reasonably be expected to have known of the strength of the compact, Talmudic-ruled mass of Jews in Russia, for Dr. Herzl, who surely should have known of this, was ignorant of it! He made the discovery at that first World Zionist Congress, called by him in such confident expectation of mass-support: "and then... there rose before our eyes a Russian Jewry, the strength of which we had not even suspected. Seventy of our delegates came from Russia, and it was patent to all of us that they represented the views and sentiments of the five million Jews of that country. What a humiliation for us, who had taken our superiority for granted!"

Dr. Herzl found himself face to face with his masters and with the conspiracy, which through him was about to enter the West. He had declared war on emancipation and, like many successors, was unaware of the nature of the force he had released. He was soon left behind, a bugler whose task was done, while the real "managers" took over.

He had forged the instrument which they were to use in their onslaught on the West. Dr. Weizmann, who became the real leader, clearly sees that: "It was Dr. Herzl's enduring contribution to Zionism to have created one central parliamentary authority for Zionism... This was the first time in the exilic history of Jewry that a great government had officially negotiated with the elected representatives of the Jewish people. The identity, the legal personality of the Jewish people, had been re-established".

Dr. Weizmann presumably smiled to himself when he included the words "parliamentary" and "elected". The middle sentence contains the great fact. The Jews who met at Basel, shunned by the majority of Western Jews, and its declarations, could only be lent authority by one event, which at that time seemed unimaginable; namely, their recognition by a Great Power. This inconceivable thing happened a few years later when the British Government offered Dr. Herzl Uganda, and that is the event to which Dr. Weizmann refers. From that moment all the Great Powers of the West in effect accepted the Talmudists from Russia as representing all Jews, and from that moment the Zionist-revolution also entered the West.

Thus ended the century of emancipation, which began with such bright prospect of common involvement, and the prescient words of Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (written just before Dr. Herzl's congress met at Basel) at once became truth and living reality. Looking back on Gottfried von Herder's words of a hundred years before, "The ruder nations of Europe are willing slaves of Jewish usury", Chamberlain wrote that during the 19th Century "a great change has taken place... today Herder could say the same of by far the greatest part of our civilized world... The direct influence of Judaism on the 19th Century thus becomes one of the burning subjects of the day. We have to deal here with a question affecting not only the present, but also the future of the world".

With the formation of the World Zionist Organization, which the great governments of the West were to treat, in effect, as an authority superior to themselves, the burning subject began to mould the entire shape of events. That it affected "the future of the world" is plainly seen in 1956, when this book is concluded; from the start of that year the political leaders of the remaining great powers of the West, Britain and America, observed in tones of sad surprise that the next world war might at any time break out in the place where they had set up "the Jewish State", and they hastened to and fro across the ocean in the effort to concert some way of preventing that consummation.

Chapter 26. THE HERESY OF DR. HERZL

For the six years from 1897 to 1903 Dr. Theodor Herzl of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse was a world figure of an entirely new kind. He had created Zionism as an organized political force (and it was to be the death of him, as of some others who followed him on that path). He had launched it among the affairs of the West like a Chinese cracker. Yet he was an insubstantial shadow, the product of the cafes, of Sacher Torte and Kaffee mit Schlagsahne. He was like a man used for his "connections" by an astute company promoter and discarded when the flotation was well launched. He was never truly the leader and began to realize that, with a shock of alarm, at his first congress of 1897, when "there rose before our eyes a Russian Jewry, the strength of which we had not even suspected"; by 1904 the full realization of his captivity had killed him.

He once wrote that at Basel in 1897 "I founded the Jewish state... I hounded the people into the state sentiment and conveyed to them the emotion that they were the national assembly". The next six years showed, in actual events, what Leon Pinsker had meant in 1882 by "exerting irresistible pressure upon the international politics of the present".

Herzl, the Budapest-born Viennese journalist, began a triumphal tour of the great capitals; he was launched on a glittering flight, as from trapeze to trapeze, through the haut monde. Emperors, potentates and statesmen received him as the spokesman of all the Jews and the contrast between what they thought and what he must have known is impressive for, as his first lieutenant, Max Nordau, said after his death,: "Our people had a Herzl but Herzl never had a people"; the Talmudic rabbinate in the East, which scorned this false Messiah, stood between him and any mass following.

The world in which he moved seemed firm and well founded. The Widow at Windsor and the Old Gentleman at Schoenbrunn were beloved by their peoples; the Young Man in Berlin was growing older and mellowing; the Czar was still the father of his people; men's right to process of law was everywhere being asserted; gradually industrial serfdom was giving way to better conditions. But everywhere the rulers and politicians knew and feared the danger that this process, calculably good if given time, would be arrested and destroyed by the world-revolution, for by this time Weishaupt's secret society had grown, through Disraeli's "network of secret societies", into the Communist party organized in all countries.

Herzl's method was to exploit this general fear for his particular end, the Jewish State. He offered domestic peace if it were supported and revolution if it were not and he claimed to speak in the name of all the Jews. It is, of course, implicit in this that he knew the revolutionary leadership to be Jewish, and he thus confirmed, several decades later, what Disraeli and Bakunin had said. His belief in the method he used is expressed in his famous phrase, "When we sink we become a revolutionary proletariat; when we rise there rises the terrible power of our purse".

Thus he told a Grand Duke of Baden that he would diminish revolutionary propaganda in Europe in proportion to the support that his territorial ambition received from high authority. Then he was received by the behelmeted Kaiser, mounted on a charger, at the very gates of Jerusalem, and the emperor agreed to present to the Sultan Herzl's proposal for a Zionist chartered company in Palestine under German protection. When nothing came of this Herzl threatened the Kaiser, too, with revolution: "If our work miscarries, hundreds oj thousands of our supporters will at a single bound join the revolutionary parties".

Then in Russia he was received by the Czar himself, to whom he spoke in similar terms. About this time the third Word Zionist Congress was held and the decision was taken that every Jew who became a member acknowledged the sovereignty of the still mythical Jewish State. Rabbi Elmer Berger says despondendy that therewith "ghettoized, corporate Jewish existence became a reality again and now existed upon a greater scale that it had ever before achieved".

Next Herzl saw another potentate, the Sultan of Turkey. Nothing tangible came of all these journeys, but the great coup was at hand, for Herzl then transferred his activities to England. There, too, he evidently had access to the highest places, for one of the decisive actions of world history was prepared, British folk who were then in their cradles, and their children and grandchildren were to be caught up in the consequences of those unrecorded interviews.

Who enabled Dr. Herzl from Vienna to command reception by the great in all countries, and who ensured that they should listen to demands that were imperious, and intimidatory as well? Obviously "kingly portals" (his own phrase) would not have opened to him merely because he had called a meeting of 197 men at Basel and this had passed a resolution. Others, more powerful than he, must have interceded to set aside porters, doormen, footmen, secretaries, chamberlains and all those whose task it is to keep importuners from their masters.

At this point the present narrative enters the most secret and jealously guarded field of all. The origins of the world-revolution, its aims and the Jewish assumption of its leadership may now be shown from the mass of documentary evidence which has accumulated; the existence of Disraeli's "network", spreading over the superficies of the earth, is known to all; the nature of the "revolutionary proletarist" is clear. But there is also that second network, of influential men at the higher level where "the power of the purse" may be used to exert "irresistible pressure on the international politics of the present" through rulers and politicians. This network of men, working in all countries to a common end, is the one which must have enabled Herzl to penetrate, with his demands, to the highest places.

All experienced observers know of the existence of this force at the highest level of international affairs. The Zionist propagandists pretend that Jewish opposition to Zionism came only from "Jewish notables", "Jewish magnates" and "rich Jews" (these phrases repeatedly recur, for instance in Dr. Weizmann's book). In fact the division in Judaism was vertical, among rich and poor alike, and though the majority of Western Jews were at that time violently opposed to Zionism the minority contained rich and notable Jews. Only these can have enabled the spectre of Zionism, in the person of Dr. Herzl, to make its sudden, Nijinski-like leap into courts and cabinet-rooms, where he began to go in and out as if he were born to privilege. Those who helped him were plainly in alliance with the one compact, organized body of Zionists: the Talmudic communities in Russia.

Dr. Kastein says that the "executive" set up by the 197 men at Basel "was the first embodiment of a real Jewish international" , In other words, something that already existed received a visible expression. A "Jewish international" was already in being and this was powerful enough to command royal, princely and ministerial audiences for Dr. Herzl everywhere.

Of this international "network" of like-thinking men at the highest level, in Dr. Herzl's day, the student may only make a picture by carefully piecing together significant glimpses and fragments (its existence and concerted actions in our time are plainly demonstrable, as this book in its later chapters will show, from the growing mass of literature). For instance, Dr. Weizmann says he told Dr. Herzl that Sir Francis Montefiore (a leading Jew in England) was "a fool", whereon Herzl answered, "He opens kingly portals to me". Again, one Baron de Hirsch was Herzl's chief financial backer and supporter. Of this Baron de Hirsch Count Carl Lonyay (quoting from documents in the secret archives of the Imperial Court at Vienna) says that Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, wishing to make provision for a woman friend before his suicide at Mayerling, obtained 100,000 gulden "from the banker, Baron Hirsch, in return for an act of friendliness he had performed in December, when he invited the banker to meet the Prince of Wales" (the future Kind Edward VII).

Baron de Hirsch, in the sequence to this introduction, became an intimate of the Prince of Wales, and private banker and financial adviser to the future King of England. He was also brother-in-law of a Mr. Bischoffsheim of the Jewish financial house of Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt in London, of which a very rich German-born Jew, Sir Ernest Cassel, was a member. Sir Ernest, as Mr. Brian Connell says in a biographical study, fell heir to Baron de Hirsch's friendship with the future king: "where Hirsch had been an intimate, Cassel was to become Edward VII's closest personal friend". He was indeed the last of the king's intimates to see him alive, the king, on the day of his death, insisting on keeping an appointment with Sir Edward and rising to dress himself for the purpose.

In the sequence to this account Mr. Connell says: "The small international fraternity of which he" (Sir Ernest Cassel) "became perhaps the leading member were all men with backgrounds similar to his own, people whom he approached in the course of his extensive travels. There was Max Warburg, head of the great private banking house in Hamburg; Edouard Noetzlin, honorary president of the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, in Paris; Franz Philippson in Brussels; Wertheim and Gompertz in Amsterdam and, above all, Jacob Schiff of the firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company in New York. Ties of race and interest bound these men together. The web of their communications quivered at the slightest touch. They maintained between them an incredibly accurate network of economic, political and financial intelligence at the highest level. They could withdraw support here, provide additional funds there, move immense sums of money with lightning rapidity and secrecy from one comer to another of their financial empires, and influence the political decisions of a score of countries".

"Ties of race and interest... web... network... intelligence at the highest level... move immense sums of money... influence political decisions...": there can be no reasonable doubt that this was the "Jewish international" of which Dr. Kastein wrote and the mechanism which operated, across all national boundaries, to support Dr. Herzl. Nothing less could explain the action which the British Government took and if there was doubt earlier, about the concerted action of this force, above and distinct from nations, the events of our mid-century have removed it. With such a power behind him Dr. Herzl was in a position to make demands and utter menaces. The powerful men who formed this international directorate (the term is not too large) at that time may not, as individuals, have believed in Zionism, and may even have been privately opposed to it. In the present writer's belief even they were not powerful enough to oppose, or to deny support to, a policy laid down by the elders of Jewry.

While the consequences of Dr. Herzl's journeys were secretly taking shape, he continued his travels. He took an innocent pride in his sudden elevation and liked the elegance of society, the tailcoats and white gloves, the chandeliers and receptions. The Talmudic elders in Russia, who had grown up to the kaftan and earlocks and were preparing to overthrow him, disdained but made use of this typical figure of "Western emancipation".

In 1903 he had astonishing experiences, resembling those of Sabbatai Zevi in 1666. He went to Russia and on his progress through Jewish cities was the object of Messianic ovations from the unenlightened masses. On this occasion he sought to persuade de Russia to bring pressure on the Sultan, in the matter of his proposal for a chartered company in Palestine. He made some impression on the Russian Minister of the Interior, von Plehve, to whom he said that he spoke for "all the Jews of Russia".

If he believed that he was soon undeceived. He did something that shows him either to have been recklessly brave or else quite unaware of what truly went on around him (this happens sometimes with such men). Presumably in order to strengthen his case with von Plehve, with whom he must have used the "Zionism or revolution" argument, he urged the Jews in Russia to abstain from revolutionary activities and discussed their "emancipation" with the Russian authorities!

Thus he wrote his own political death warrant, and indeed he soon died. To the Talmudic elders this was heresy; he had entered the forbidden room. They had been working to prevent Jewish emancipation in Russia, because they saw in it the loss of their power over Jewry. If his negotiations with the Russian Government succeeded, pacification in Russia would follow, and that would mean the end of the propagandist legend of "Jewish persecution" in Russia.

When he returned to address the Sixth Congress of his World Zionist Organization his fate rose to meet him in the form of a compact mass of Russian Jews no longer merely "humiliating" to him, but menacing. At this moment of his fiasco he thought he had the ace of trumps in his pocket and he produced it. As a result of those interviews in London and of the "irresistible pressure" which supported him, the British Government had offered Dr. Herzl of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse a territory in Africa, Uganda!

If history records a stranger thing, I have not discovered it. Yet the trump card proved to be a deuce. 295 delegates voted to accept the offer, but 175 rejected it; clearly Dr. Herzl did not speak for "all Jews". The great majority of the 175 Noes came from the Jews of Russia. The huddled Jewish throngs there had hailed Herzl as the Messiah; these 175 emissaries of the Eastern rabbinate imprecated him, for Uganda meant the ruin of their plan. They cast themselves on the floor in the traditional attitude of mourning for the dead or for the destruction of the temple. One of them, a woman, called the world-famous Dr. Herzl "a traitor" and when he was gone tore down the map of Uganda from behind the speakers' dais.

If what he said and wrote was fully candid, Dr. Herzl never understood why the Jewish emissaries from Russia refused to consider any other place than Palestine, and if that is so he must have been most guileless. He had built up his entire movement on the claim that "a place of refuge" was directly needed for "persecuted Jews", and these were the Jews of Russia; Jews were fully emancipated elsewhere. If that was true, then any good place would do, and he had now procured one for them; moreover, if any of them preferred to stay in Russia, and his negotiations with the Russian Government succeeded, they could have all they wanted in Russia too!

From the point of view of the Talmudic rabbinate in Russia the matter was entirely different. They, too, had built up the legend of "persecution in Russia", while they worked against emancipation there, but this was for the purpose of fulfilling the ancient Law, which meant possession of Palestine and all subsequent things that the Law ordained. Acceptance of Uganda would have meant Doomsday for Talmudic Judaism.

Dr. Weizmann describes Dr. Herzl's final humiliation. After the vote Herzl went to see the Jews from Russia, who had turned their backs on him and walked out, in their committee room. "He came in, looking haggard and exhausted. He was received in dead silence. Nobody rose from his seat to greet him, nobody applauded him when he ended... It was probably the first time that Herzl was thus received at any Zionist gathering: he, the idol of all Zionists".

It was also the last time. Within the year Dr. Herzl was dead, at the age of forty-four. No conclusion can be offered about his death. Judaist writers refer to it in cryptic terms. The Jewish Encyclopaedia says it was the result of what he endured and other authorities make similarly obscure, though significant, allusions. Those who during the centuries have been the object of anathema or excommunication by the ruling sect often have died soon and wretchedly. The student comes to feel that in this matter he approaches mysterious things, closed to all ordinary research.

The curious thing is that Herzl's intimate, right-hand man and leading orator saw the shape of things, at that time and to come, with complete clarity. He displayed a foreknowledge as great as that of Leon Pinsker when he depicted the series of events to which Pinsker's "irresistible pressure on international politics" would lead. At the very congress where Herzl suffered his humiliation Max Nordau (an alias or pseudonym; his name was Suedfeld) gave this exact prognosis:

"Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl, the Zionist congress, the English Uganda proposition, the future world war, the peace conference where, with the help of England, a free and Jewish Palestine will be created" (1903). Here spoke the initiate, the illuminate, the man who knew the strength and purpose of "the international". (Max Nordau helped the process, the course of which he foretold, by writing such best-sellers of the 1890's as Degeneration, in which he told the West that it was irredeemably corrupt). Even Max Nordau did not spell out his conclusion to its logical end. Another delegate did that, Dr. Nahum Sokoloff, who said: 'Jerusalem will one day become the capital of world peace". That the ambition is to make it the capital of the world is clear in 1956, when the Western governments stand in daily fear of its annexation to the Zionist state; whether mankind would find it to be the capital oi peace remains to be seen.

After Dr. Herzl died Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the later Zionist leader, led the attack on the Uganda offer and at the Seventh Congress, of 1905, the acceptance, at his instigation, was revoked. From that moment Zionism was the instrument of the Talmudic rabbinate in the East.

The story of the Uganda offer and its scornful rejection shows the indifference of the ruling sect to the welfare and the wishes of the Jewish masses, for whom they pretended to speak; indeed, when the matter is carefully considered "hostility" suggests itself as a truer word than "indifference". This is seen by examining, in turn, the feeling expressed towards the offer by the three main groups of Jews: those of the West, those of Russia, and (a section of Jewry never even mentioned in all these loud exchanges) the Jews already in Palestine.

The Jews of the West at that time were strongly opposed to Zionism as such, whether it led to Uganda, Palestine or anywhere else; they just wanted to stay where they were. The Jews of Russia were depicted as needing simply "a place of refuge" from "persecution", and if that was true, Uganda might have appealed to them; anyway, the frenzied ovations with which they received Dr. Herzl suggest that they would have followed any lead he gave, had the rabbinate allowed them. That leaves the Jews who were already in Palestine.

This one community of original Jews was ardently in favour of removal to Uganda, as research discovers, and for this reason they were denounced as "traitors" by the Judaized Chazars from Russia who had taken over Zionism! This is what the Zionist Organization at Tel Aviv still was saying about them in 1945:

"It was a degrading and distressing sight to see all these people who... had been the first to build up the Jewish Palestine of that day, publicly denying and repudiating their own past... The passion for Uganda became associated with a deadly hatred for Palestine... In the community centres of the first Jewish colonies young men educated in the Alliance Israelite schools denounced Palestine as 'a land of corpses and graves', a land of malaria and eye-diseases, a land which destroys its inhabitants. Nor was this the expression of a few individuals. Indeed, it was only a few individuals here and there... who remained loyal... The whole of Palestine was in a state of ferment... All opposition to Uganda came from outside of Palestine. In Zion itself all were against Zion".

What the masses of people wanted, Jewish or Gentile, was from 1903 of no account. Acceptance or refusal made no difference; the offer had been made, and by it the West and its future were involved in an enterprise foreseeably disastrous. As Dr. Weizmann says, a British government by this act committed itself to recognize the Talmudists from Russia as the government of all Jews; thereby it also committed future generations of its people, and the similar commitment of the American people was to follow a decade later, when the path had been prepared.

Out of that act of 1903 came the beginning of this century's tribulations. The story of Zion thereafter became that of Western politicians who, under "irresistible pressure", did the bidding of a powerful sect. 1903 was the conspiracy's triumphant year, and for the West it was to prove as ominous as 1914 and 1939, which years both took their shape under its shadow.

Chapter 27. THE "PROTOCOLS"

While Zionism thus took shape in the Eastern ghettoes during the last century and at the start of this one emerged as a new force in international affairs (when the British Government offered it Uganda), the world-revolution, in those same Talmudic areas, prepared its third "eruption". The two forces moved forward together in synchronization (for Zionism, as has been shown, used the threat of Communism in Europe to gain the ear of European rulers for its territorial demand outside Europe). It was as if twin turbines began to revolve, generating what was in effect one force, from which the new century was to receive galvanic shocks.

According to Disraeli and Bakunin the world-revolution had come under Jewish leadership around the middle of the century, and its aims then changed. Bakunin's followers, who sought to abolish the State as such because they foresaw that the revolutionary State might become more despotic than any earlier despotism, were ousted and forgotten. The world-revolution therewith took the shape of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, which aimed at the super-State founded in slave-labour and in "the confiscation of human liberty" (as de Tocqueville wrote in IE)

This change in leadership and aims determined the course of the 20th Century. However, the methods by which the existing order was to be destroyed did not change; they continued to be those revealed by Weishaupt's papers published in 1787. Many publications of the 19th Century showed that the original Illuminist plan continued through the generations to be the textbook of the revolutionaries of all camps, as to method.

These works propagated or exposed the destructive plan in various ways, sometimes allegorical, but always recognizable if compared with the original, Weishaupt's documents. In 1859 Cretineau Joly assailed Jewish Leadership of "the secret societies". His book reproduced documents (communicated to him by Pope Gregory XVI) of the Italian secret society, the Haute Vente Romaine; their authenticity is beyond question. The Haute Vente Romaine was headed by an Italian prince who had been initiated by one of Weishaupt's own intimates (Knigge) and was a reincarnation of the Illuminati. The outer circle of initiates, the dupes, were persuaded that "the object of the association is something high and noble, that it is the Order of those who desire a purer morality and a stronger piety, the independence and unity of their country". Those who graduated into the inner degrees progressively learned the real aims and swore to destroy all religion and legitimate government; then they received the secrets of assassination, poison and perjury first disclosed by Weishaupt's documents.

In 1862 Karl Marx (whose Communist Manifesto is recognizably Illuminist) founded his First International, and Bakunin formed his Alliance Sociale Democratique (the programme of which, as Mrs. Nesta Webster has shown by quoting correlative passages, was Illuminism undiluted). In the same year Maurice Joly published an attack on Napoleon III, to whom he attributed the identical methods of corrupting and ruining the social system (this book was written in allegorical form). In 1868 the German Goedsche reproduced the same ideas in the form of an attack on Jewish leadership of the revolution, and in 1869 the French Catholic and Royalist Gougenot Des Mousseaux took up the same theme. In that year Bakunin also published his Polemic Against The Jews...

In all these works, in one form or another, the continuity of the basic idea first revealed by Weishaupt's documents appears: namely, that of destroying all legitimate government, religion and nationhood and setting up a universal despotism to rule the enslaved masses by terror and violence. Some of them assailed the Jewish, usurpation of, or succession to the leadership of the revolution.

After that came a pause in the published literature of the conspiracy first disclosed in 1787, until in 1905 one Professor Sergyei Nilus, an official of the Department of Foreign Religions at Moscow, published a book, of which the British Museum in London has a copy bearing its date-stamp, August 10, 1906. Great interest would attach to anything that could be elicited about Nilus and his book, which has never been translated; the mystery with which he and it have been surrounded impedes research. One chapter was translated into English in 1920. This calls for mention here because the original publication occurred in 1905, although the violent uproar only began when it appeared in English in 1 920.

This one chapter was published in England and America as "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion"; I cannot learn whether this was the original chapter heading or whether it was provided during translation. No proof is given that the document is what it purports to be, a minute of a secret meeting of Jewish "Elders". In that respect, therefore, it is valueless."

In every other respect it is of inestimable importance, for it is shown by the conclusive test (that of subsequent events) to be an authentic document of the world-conspiracy first disclosed by Weishaupt's papers. Many other documents in the same series had followed that first revelation, as I have shown, but this one transcends all of them. The others were fragmentary and gave glimpses; this one gives the entire picture of the conspiracy, motive, method and objective. It adds nothing new to what had been revealed in parts (save for the unproven, attribution to Jewish elders themselves), but it puts all the parts in place and exposes the whole. It accurately depicts all that has come about in the fifty years since it was published, and what clearly will follow in the next fifty years unless in that time the force which the conspiracy has generated produces the counter-force.

It is informed by a mass of knowledge (particularly of human weaknesses) which can only have sprung from the accumulated experience and continuing study of centuries, or of ages. It is written in a tone of lofty superiority, as by beings perched on some Olympian pinnacle of sardonic and ancient wisdom, and of mocking scorn for the writhing masses far below ("the mob"... "alcoholized animals"... "cattle"... "bloodthirsty beasts") who vainly struggle to elude the "nippers" which are closing on them; these nippers are "the power of gold" and the brute force of the mob, incited to destroy its only protectors and consequently itself.

The destructive idea is presented in the form of a scientific theory, almost of an exact science, argued with gusto and eloquence. In studying the Protocols I am constantly reminded of something that caught my eye in Disraeli's dictum, earlier quoted. Disraeli, who was careful in the choice of words, spoke of "the destructive principle" (not idea, scheme, notion, plan, plot or the like), and the Protocols elevate the theory of destruction to this status of "a fundamental truth, a primary or basic law, a governing law of conduct" (to quote various dictionary definitions of "principle"). In many passages the Protocols appear, at first sight, to recommend destruction as a thing virtuous in itself, and consequently justifying all the methods explicitly recommended to promote it (bribery, blackmail, corruption, subversion, sedition, mob-incitement, terror and violence), which thus become virtuous too.

But careful scrutiny shows that this is not the case. In fact the argument presented begins at the end, world power, and goes backward through the means, which are advocated simply as the best ones to that end. The end is that first revealed in Weishaupt's documents, and it is apparent that both spring from a much earlier source, although the Protocols, in time, stand to the Weishaupt papers as grandson to grandsire. The final aim is the destruction of all religion and nationhood and the establishment of the super State, ruling the world by ruthless terror.

When the Protocols appeared in English the minor point, who was the author of this particular document, was given a false semblance of major importance by the enraged Jewish attack on the document itself. The asseveration of Jewish leadership of the revolutionary conspiracy was not new at all; the reader has seen that Disraeli, Bakunin and many others earlier affirmed it. In this case the allegation about a specific meeting of Jewish leaders of the conspiracy was unsupported and could have been ignored (in 1913 a somewhat similar publication accused the Jesuits of instigating a world-conspiracy resembling that depicted alike in the Protocols and in Weishaupt's papers; the Jesuits quietly remarked that this was false and the matter was forgotten).

The response of official Jewry in 1920 and afterwards was different. It was aimed, with fury, at the entire substance of the Protocols; it did not stop at denying a Jewish plot, but denied that there was any plot, which was demonstrably untrue. The existence of the conspiracy had been recognized and affirmed by a long chain of high authorities, from Edmund Burke, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton to Disraeli, Bakunin and the many others mentioned in an earlier chapter. Moreover, when the Protocols appeared in English conclusive proof had been given by the event in Russia. Thus the nature of the Jewish attack could only strengthen public doubts; it protested much too much.

This attack was the repetition of the one which silenced those earlier leaders of the public demand for investigation and remedy, Robison, Barruel and Morse, but on this occasion it was a Jewish attack. Those three men made no imputation of Jewish leadership, and they were defamed solely because they drew public attention to the continuing nature of the conspiracy and to the fact that the French revolution was clearly but its first "eruption". The attack on the Protocols in the 1920's proved above all else the truth of their contention; it showed that the standing organization for suppressing public discussion of the conspiracy had been perfected in the intervening 120 years. Probably so much money and energy were never before in history expended on the effort to suppress a single document.

It was brought to England by one of the two leading British correspondents of that day in Moscow, Victor Marsden of the Morning Post (the significant story of the other correspondent belongs to a later chapter). Marsden was an authority on Russia and was much under the enduring effect of the Terror. He was in effect its victim, for he died soon after completing what he evidently felt to be a duty, the translation of the Protocols at the British Museum.

Publication in English aroused worldwide interest. That period (1920 and onward) marks the end of the time when Jewish questions could be impartially discussed in public. The initial debate was free and vigorous, but in following years the attack succeeded in imposing the law of lese majesty in this matter and today hardly any public man or print ventures to mention the Protocols unless to declare them "forged" or "infamous" (an act of submission also foretold in them).

The first reaction was the natural one. The Protocols were received as formidable evidence of an international conspiracy against religion, nationhood, legitimate government and property. All agreed that the attribution to Jewish authorship was unsupported, but that the subject matter was so grave, and so strongly supported by events subsequent to the original publication, that full enquiry was needed. This remedy, "investigation", was the one advocated by many leading men 120 years earlier. In this instance the attack was in effect again on the demand for investigation, not simply on the allegation against "the Elders of Zion".

The Times (of London) on May 8, 1920 in a long article said, "An impartial investigation of these would-be documents and of their history is most desirable... Are we to dismiss the whole matter without inquiry and to let the influence of such a book as this work unchecked?" The Morning Post (then the oldest and soberest British newspaper) published twenty-three articles, also calling for investig.

In The Spectator on August 27, 1921, Lord Sydenham, a foremost authority of that day, also urged investigation: "The main point is, of course, the source from which Nilus obtained the Protocols. The Russians who knew Nilus and his writings cannot all have been exterminated by the Bolsheviks. His book... has not been translated, though it would give some idea of the man... What is the most striking characteristic of the Protocols? The answer is knowledge of a rare kind, embracing the widest field. The solution of this 'mystery', if it is one, is to be found where this uncanny knowledge, on which prophecies now literally fulfilled are based, can be shown to reside". In America Mr. Henry Ford, declaring that "the Protocols have fitted the world situation up to this time; they fit it now", caused his Dearborn Independent to publish a series of articles of which a million and a half reprints were sold.

Within two years the proprietor of The Times was certified insane (by an unnamed doctor in a foreign land; a later chapter will describe this episode) and forcibly removed from control of his publications, and The Times published an article dismissing the Protocols as a plagiarism of Maurice Joly's book. The proprietor of the Morning Post became the object of sustained vituperation until he sold the newspaper, which then ceased publication. In 1 927 Mr. Henry Ford published an apology addressed to a well-known Jew of America; when I was in the United States in later years I was told by credible informants that he was persuaded to do this, at a moment when a new-model Ford automobile was about to be marketed, by hostile threats from dealers on whom the fortunes of his concern depended.

The campaign against the Protocols has never ceased since then. In communized Russia all copies discoverable had been destroyed at the revolution and possession of the book became a capital crime under the law against "anti-semitism". In the direct sequence to that, though twenty-five years later, the American and British authorities in occupied Germany after the Second World War constrained the Western German government to enact laws against "anti-semitism" on the Bolshevik model; and in 1955 a Munich printer who reproduced the Protocols had his business confiscated. In England at the time of publication the sale of the book was temporarily stopped by authority, under the pressure described, and in the course of the years the attack on it continued so violent that publishers feared it and only small local firms ever ventured to print it. In Switzerland, between the wars, a Jewish suit was brought against the book as "improper literature"; the case was won, but the verdict was set aside by a higher court.

The state of affairs thus brought about after 1920, and continuing today, was foretold by the Protocols in 1905: "Through the press we have gained the power to influence while remaining ourselves in the shade... The principal factor of success in the political" (field) " is the secrecy of its undertaking; the word should not agree with the deeds of the diplomat... We must compel the governments... to take action in the direction favoured by our widely-conceived plan, already approaching the desired consummation, by what we shall represent as public opinion, secretly prompted by us through the means of that so-called 'Great Power', the press, which, with a few exceptions that may be disregarded, is already entirely in our hands... We shall deal with the press in the following way:... we shall saddle and bridle it with a tight curb; we shall do the same also with all productions of the printingpress, for where would be the sense of getting rid of the attacks of the press if we remain targets for pamphlets and books?... No one shall with impunity lay a finger on the aureole of our government infallibility. The pretext for stopping any publication will be the alleged plea that it is agitating the public mind without occasion or justification... We shall have a sure triumph over our opponents since they will not have at their disposition organs of the press in which they can give full and final expression to their views owing to the aforesaid methods of dealing with the press..."

Such is the history of the Protocols thus far. Their attribution to Jewish "Elders" is unsupported and should be rejected, without prejudice to any other evidence about Jewish leadership of the world-revolution as such. The Jewish attack on them was bent, not on exculpating Jewry, but on stopping the publication on the plea that it was "agitating the public mind without occasion or justification". The arguments advanced were bogus; they were that the Protocols closely resembled several earlier publications and thus were "plagiaries" or "forgeries", whereas what this in truth showed was the obvious thing: that they were part of the continuing literature of the conspiracy. They might equally well be the product of non-Jewish or of anti-Jewish revolutionaries, and that is of secondary importance. What they proved is that the organisation first revealed by Weishaupt's documents was in existence 120 years later, and was still using the methods and pursuing the aim then exposed; and when they were published in English the Bolshevik revolution had given the proof.

In my opinion the Protocols provide the essential handbook for students of the time and subject. If Lord Sydenham, in 1921, was arrested by the "uncanny knowledge" they displayed, "on which prophecies now literally fulfilled are based", how much more would he be impressed today, in 1956, when much more of them has been as literally fulfilled. Through this book any man can see how the upheavals of the past 150 years were, and how those of the next fifty years will be brought about; he will know in advance just how "the deeds" of his elected representatives will differ from their "word".

In one point I am able from my own experience to test Lord Sydenham's dictum about fulfilled prophecies. The Protocols, speaking of control of published information, say: "Not a single announcement will reach the public without our control. Even now this is already being attained by us inasmuch as all news items are received by a few agencies, in whose offices they are focused from all parts of the world. These agencies will then be entirely ours and will give publicity only to what we dictate to them". That was not the situation in 1905, or in Lord Sydenham's day, or in 1926, when I became a journalist, but it was developing and today is the situation. The stream of "news" which pours into the public mind through the newspapers comes from a few agencies, as if from half a dozen taps. Any hand that can control those valves can control "the news", and the reader may observe for himself the filtered form in which the news reaches him. As to the editorial views, based on this supply of news, the transformation that has been brought about may be comprehended by referring to the impartially critical articles published in The Times, Morning Post, Spectator, Dearborn Independent and thousands of other journals some twenty-five years ago. This could not happen today. The subjugation of the press has been accomplished as the Protocols foretold, and by the accident of my generation and calling I saw it come about.

Comparative study of the Protocols and of the Weishaupt papers leads to the strong deduction that both derive from a common and much older source. They cannot have been the product of any one man or one group of men in the period when they were published; the "uncanny knowledge" displayed in them obviously rests on the cumulative experience of eras. In particular, this applies (in Weishaupt's papers and the Protocols alike) to the knowledge of human weaknesses, which are singled out with analytical exactitude, the method of exploiting each of them being described with disdainful glee.

The instrument to be used for the destruction of the Christian nation-states and their religion is "the mob". The word is used throughout with searing contempt to denote the masses, (who in public are flattered by being called "the people"). "Men with bad instincts are more in number than the good, and therefore the best results in governing them are attained by violence and terrorization... The might of a mob is blind, senseless and unreasoning force ever at the mercy of a suggestion from any side". From this the argument is developed that "an absolute despotism" is necessary to govern "the mob", which is "a savage", and that "our State" will employ "the terror which tends to produce blind submission". The "literal fulfilment" of these precepts in communized Russia must be obvious to all today).

This "absolute despotism" is to be vested in the international super-State at the end of the road. In the meanwhile regional puppet-despots are depicted as essential to the process of breaking down the structure of states and the defences of peoples: "From the premier-dictators of the present day the peoples suffer patiently and bear such abuses as for the least of them they would have beheaded twenty kings. What is the explanation...? It is explained by the fact that these dictators whisper to the peoples through their agents that through these abuses the are inflicting injury on the States with the highest purpose - to secure the welfare of the peoples, the international brotherhood of them all, their solidarity and equality of rights. Naturally they do not tell the peoples that this unification must be accomplished only under our sovereign rule".

This passage is of especial interest. The term "premier-dictator" would not generally have been understood in 1905, when the peoples of the West believed their elected representatives to express and depend on their approval. However, it became applicable during the First and Second World Wars, when American presidents and British prime ministers made themselves, in fact, "premier-dictators" and used emergency powers in the name of "the welfare of peoples... international brotherhood... equality of rights". Moreover, these premier-dictators, in both wars, did tell the peoples that the ultimate end of all this would be "unification" under a world government of some kind. The question, who would govern this world government, was one which never received straightforward answer; so much else of the Protocols has been fulfilled that their assertion that it would be the instrument of the conspiracy for governing the world "by violence and terrorization" deserves much thought.

The especial characteristic of the two 20th Century wars is the disappointment which each brought to the peoples who appeared to be victorious. "Uncanny knowledge", therefore, again seems to have inspired the statement, made in 1905 or earlier, "Ever since that time" (the French Revolution) "we have been leading the peoples from one disenchantment to another", followed later by this: "By these acts all States are in torture; they exhort to tranquillity, are ready to sacrifice everything for peace; but. we will not give them peace until they openly acknowledge our international Super-Government, and with submissiveness". The words, written before 1905, seem accurately to depict the course of the 20th Century.

Again, the document says "it is indispensable for our purpose that wars, so far as possible, should not result in territorial gains". This very phrase, of 1905 or earlier, was made the chief slogan, or apparent moral principle, proclaimed by the political leaders of America and Britain in both world wars, and in this case the difference between "the word" and "the deed" of "the diplomat" has been shown by results. The chief result of the First War was to establish revolutionary- Zionism and revolutionary-Communism as new forces in international affairs, the first with a promised "homeland" and the second with a resident State. The chief result of the Second War was that further "territorial gains" accrued to, and only to, Zionism and Communism; Zionism received its resident State and Communism received half of Europe. The "deadly accuracy" (Lord Sydenham's words) of the Protocol's forecasts seems apparent in this case, where a specious phrase used in the Protocols of 1905 became the daily language of American presidents and British prime ministers in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945.

The reason why the authors of the Protocols held this slogan to be so important, in beguiling the peoples, is also explained. If the nations embroiled in wars are denied "territorial gains", the only victors will then be "our international agentur... our international rights will then wipe out national rights, in the proper sense of right, and will rule the nations precisely as the civil law of States rules the relations of their subjects among themselves". To bring about this state of affairs compliant politicians are needed, and of them the Protocols say: "The administrators whom we shall choose from among the public, with strict regard to their capacities for servile obedience, will not be persons trained in the arts of government, and will therefore easily become pawns in our game in the hands of men of learning and genius who will be their advisers, specialists bred and reared from early childhood to rule the affairs of the whole world".

The reader may judge for himself whether this description fits some of "the administrators" of the West in the last five decades; the test is their attitude towards Zionism, the world-revolution and world-government, and subsequent chapters will offer information in these three respects. But "deadly accuracy" appears to reside even more in the allusion to "advisers".

Here again is "uncanny knowledge", displayed more than fifty years ago. In 1905 the non-elected but powerful "adviser" was publicly unknown. True, the enlightened few, men like Disraeli, knew that "the world is governed by very different persons from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes", but to the general public the passage would have been meaningless.

In the First and Second World Wars, however, the non-elected, unofficial but imperious "adviser" became a familiar public figure. He emerged into the open (under "emergency powers") and became known to and was passively accepted by the public masses; possibly the contempt which the Protocols display for "the mob" was justified by this submission to behind-the-scenes rule even when it was openly exercized. In the United States, for instance, "advisers on Jewish affairs" became resident at the White House and at the headquarters of American armies of occupation. One financier (who publicly recommended drastic measures for "ruling the affairs of the world") was adviser to so many presidents that he was permanently dubbed "Elder Statesman" by the press, and visiting prime ministers from England also repaired to him as if to a supreme seat of authority.

The Protocols foretold this regime of the "advisers" when none understood what was meant and few would have credited that they would openly appear in the high places.

The Protocols repeatedly affirm that the first objective is the destruction of the existing ruling class ("the aristocracy", the term employed, was still applicable in 1905) and the seizure of property through the incitement of the insensate, brutish "mob". Once again, subsequent events give the "forecast" its "deadly accuracy":

"In politics one must know how to seize the property of others without hesitation if by it we secure submission and sovereignty... The words, 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity', brought to our ranks, thanks to our blind agents, whole legions who bore our banners with enthusiasm. And all the time these words were canker-worms boring into the wellbeing of the people, putting an end everywhere to peace, quiet, solidarity and destroying all the foundations of the States... This helped us to our greatest triumph; it gave us the possibility, among other things, of getting into our hands the master card, the destruction of privileges, or in other words the very existence of the aristocracy... that class which was the only defence peoples and countries had against us. On the ruins of the natural and genealogical aristocracy... we have set up the aristocracy of our educated class headed by the aristocracy of money. The qualifications of this aristocracy we have established in wealth, which is dependent upon us, and in knowledge...It is this possibility of replacing the representatives of the people which has placed them at our disposal, and, as it were, given us the power of appointment We appear on the scene as alleged saviours of the worker from this oppression when we propose to him to enter the ranks of our fighting forces; Socialists, Anarchists, Communists... By want and the envy and hatred which it engenders we shall move the mobs and with their hands we shall wipe out all those who hinder us on our way... The people, blindly believing things in print, cherishes... a blind hatred towards all conditions which it considers above itself, for it has no understanding of the meaning of class and condition... These mobs will rush delightedly to shed the blood of those whom, in the simplicity of their ignorance, they have envied from their cradles, and whose property they will then be able to loot. 'Ours' they will not touch, because the moment of attack will be known to us and we shall take measures to protect our own... The word 'freedom' brings out the communities of men to fight against every kind of force, against every kind of authority, even against God and the laws of nature. For this reason we, when we come into our kingdom, shall have to erase this word from the lexicon of life as implying a principle of brute force which turns mobs into bloodthirsty beasts... But even freedom might be harmless and have its place in the State economy without injury to the wellbeing of the peoples if it rested upon the foundation of faith in God... This is the reason why it is indispensable for us to undermine all faith, to tear out of the minds of the masses the very principle of Godhead and the spirit, and to put in its place arithmetical calculations and material needs..."

"... We have set one against another the personal and national reckonings of the peoples, religious and race hatreds, which we have fostered into a huge growth in the course of the past twenty centuries. This is the reason why there is not one State which would anywhere receive support if it were to raise its arm, for every one of them must bear in mind that any agreement against us would be unprofitable to itself. We are too strong, there is no evading our power. The nations cannot come to even an inconsiderable private agreement without our secretly having a hand in it... In order to put public opinion into our hands we must bring it into a state of bewilderment by giving expression from all sides to so many contradictory opinions and for such length of time as will suffice to make the peoples lose their heads in the labyrinth and come to see that the best thing is to have no opinion of any kind in matters political, which it is not given to the public to understand, because they are understood only by him who guides the public. This is the first secret. The second secret requisite for the success of our government is comprised in the following: to multiply to such an extent national failings, habits, passions, conditions of civil life, that it will be impossible for anyone to know where he is in the resulting chaos, so that the people in consequence will fail to understand one another... By all these means we shall so wear down the peoples that they will be compelled to offer us international power of a nature that by its possession will enable us without any violence gradually to absorb all the State forces of the world and to form a Super-Government. In place of the rulers of today we shall set up a bogey which will be called the Super-Government administration. Its hands will reach out in all directions like nippers and its organization will be of such colossal dimensions that it cannot fail to subdue all the nations of the world".

That the Protocols reveal the common source of inspiration of Zionism and Communism is shown by significant parallels that can be drawn between the two chief methods laid down in them and the chief methods pursued by Dr. Herzl and Karl Marx:

The Protocols repeatedly lay emphasis on the incitement of "the mob" against the ruling class as the most effective means of destroying States and nations and achieving world dominion. Dr. Herzl, as was shown in the preceding chapter, used precisely this method to gain the ear of European rulers.

Next, Karl Marx. The Protocols say, "The aristocracy of the peoples, as a political force, is dead... but as landed proprietors they can still be harmful to us from the fact that they are self-sufficing in the resources upon which they live. It is essential therefore for us at whatever cost to deprive them of their land... At the same time we must intensively patronize trade and industry... what we want is that industry should drain off from the land both labour and capital and by means of speculation transfer into our hands all the money of the world "

Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto exactly followed this formula. True he declared that Communism might be summed up in one sentence, "abolition of private property", but subsequently he qualified this dictum by restricting actual confiscation to land and implying that other types of private property were to remain intact. (In the later Marxist event, of course, all private property was confiscated, but I speak here of the strict parallel between the strategy laid down before the event alike by the Protocols and Marx).

A passage of particular interest in the present, though it was written before 1905, says, "Nowadays if any States raise a protest against us, it is only proforma at our discretion and by our direction, for their anti-semitism is indispensable to us for the management of our lesser brethren". A distinctive feature of our era is the way the charge of "anti-semitism" is continually transferred from one country to another, the country so accused becoming automatically the specified enemy in the next war. This passage might cause the prudent to turn a sceptical eye on today's periodical reports of sudden "anti-semitic" turns in communized Russia, or elsewhere.

The resemblance to Weishaupt's documents is very strong in the passages which relate to the infiltration of public departments, professions and parties, for instance: "It is from us that the all-engulfing terror proceeds. We have in our service persons of all opinions, of all doctrines, restorating monarchists, demagogues, socialists, communists, and Utopian dreamers of every kind. We have harnessed them all to the task: each one of them on his own account is boring away at the last remnants of authority, is striving to overthrow all established form of order. By these acts all States are in torture; they exhort to tranquillity, are ready to sacrifice everything for peace; but we will not give them peace until they openly acknowledge our international Super-Government, and with submissiveness" ,

The allusions to the permeation of universities in particular, and of education in general, also spring directly from Weishaupt, or from whatever earlier source he received them: "... We shall emasculate the universities... Their officials and professors will be prepared for their business by detailed secret programmes of action from which they will not with immunity diverge, not by one iota. They will be appointed with especial precaution, and will be so placed as to be wholly dependent upon the Government". This secret permeation of universities (which was successful in the German ones in Weishaupt's day, as his documents show) was very largely effective in our generation. The two British government officials who after their flight to Moscow were paraded before the international press in 1956 to state that they had been captured by Communism at their universities, were typical products of this method, described by the Protocols early in this century and by Weishaupt in 1787.

Weishaupt's documents speak of Freemasonry as the best "cover" to be used by the agents of the conspiracy. The Protocols allot the function of "cover" to "Liberalism": "When we introduced into the State organism the poison of Liberalism its whole political complexion underwent a change. States have been seized with a mortal illness, blood-poisoning. All that remains is to await the end of their death agony".

The term "utopian dreamers", used more than once, is applied to Liberals, and its original source probably resides in the Old Testamentary allusion to "dreamers of dreams" with "false prophets", are to be put to death. The end of Liberalism, therefore, would be apparent to the student even if the Protocols did not specify it: "We shall root out liberalism from the important strategic posts of our government on which depends the training of subordinates for our State structure".

The "Big Brother" regimes of our century, are accurately foretold in the passage, "Our government will have the appearance of a patriarchal paternal guardianship on the part of our ruler".

Republicanism, too, is to be a "cover" for the conspiracy. The Protocols are especially contemptuous of republicanism, in which (and in liberalism) they see the weapon of self-destruction forged out of "the mob": "... then it was that the era of republics became possible of realization; and then it was that we replaced the ruler by a caricature of a government, by a president, taken from the mob, from the midst of our puppet creatures, our slaves. This was the foundation of the mine which we have laid under the peoples".

Then the unknown scribes of some time before 1905 describe the position to which American presidents have been reduced in our century. The passage begins, "In the near future we shall establish the responsibility of presidents". This, as the sequence shows, means personal responsibility, as distinct from responsibility curbed by constitutional controls; the president is to become one of the "premier-dictators" earlier foreseen, whose function is to be to break down the constitutional defences of states and thus prepare "unification under our sovereign rule".

During the First and Second World Wars the American presidents did in fact become "premier-dictators" in this sense, claiming that "the emergency" and the need for "victory" dictated this seizure of powers of personal responsibility; powers which would be restored to "the people" when "the emergency" was past. Readers of sufficient years will recall how inconceivable this appeared before it happened and how passively it was accepted in the event. The passage then continues:

"The chamber of deputies will provide cover for, will protect, will elect presidents, but we shall take from it the right to propose new, or make changes in existing laws, for this right will be given by us to the responsible president, a puppet in our hands... Independently of this we shall invest the president with the right of declaring a state of war. We shall justify this last right on the ground that the president as chief of the whole army of the country must have it at his disposal in case of need...It is easy to understand that in these conditions the key of the shrine will lie in our hands, and that no one outside ourselves will any longer direct the force of legislation... The president will, at our discretion, interpret the sense of such of the existing laws as admit of various interpretation; he will further annul them when we indicate to him the necessity to do so, besides this, he will have the right to propose temporary laws, and even new departures in the government constitutional working, the pretext both for the one and the other being the requirements for the supreme welfare of the state. By such measures we shall obtain the power of destroying little by little, step by step, all that at the outset when we enter on our rights, we are compelled to introduce into the constitutions of states to prepare for the transition to an imperceptible abolition of every kind of constitution, and then the time is come to turn every government into our despotism".

This forecast of 1905 or earlier particularly deserves Lord Sydenham's tribute of "deadly accuracy". American presidents in the two wars of this century have acted as here shown. They did take the right of declaring and making war, and it has been used at least once (in Korea) since the Second World War ended; any attempt in Congress or outside to deprive them of this power, or curb them in the use of it meets with violently hostile attack.

So the Protocols continue. The peoples, on their progress "from one disenchantment to another", will not be allowed "a breathing-space". Any country "which dares to oppose us" must be met with war, and any collective opposition with "universal war". The peoples will not be allowed "to contend with sedition" (here is the key to the furious attacks of the 1790's, 1920 and today on all demands for "investigation", "Witch-hunting", "McCarthyism" and the like). In the Super-State to come the obligation will fall on members of one family to denounce dissident s within the family circle (the Old Testamentary dispensation earlier mentioned). The "complete wrecking of the Christian religion" will not be long delayed. The peoples will be kept distracted by trivial amusements ("people's palaces") from becoming troublesome and asking questions. History will be rewritten for their delusion (another precept since fulfilled in communized Russia), for "we shall erase from the memory of men all facts of previous centuries which are undesirable to us, and leave only those which depict all the errors of the national governments". "All the wheels of the machinery of all States go by the force of the engine, which is in our hands, and that engine of the machinery of States is Gold".

And the end of it all: "What we have to get at is that there should be in all the States of the world, beside ourselves, only the masses of the proletariat, a few millionaires devoted to our interests, police and soldiers... The recognition of our despot... will come when the peoples, utterly wearied by the irregularities and incompetence... of their rulers, will clamour: 'Away with them and give us one king over all the earth who will unite us and annihilate the causes of discords, frontiers, nationalities, religions, State debts, who will give us peace and quiet, which we cannot find under our rulers and representatives'".

In two or three of these passages I have substituted "people" or "masses" for "Gqyim ", because the use of that word relates to the unproven assertion contained in the book's title, and I do not want to confuse the issues; evidence about the identity of the authors of the conspiracy must be sought elsewhere than in an unsupported allegation. The authors may have been Jewish, non-Jewish or anti-Jewish. That is immaterial. When it was published this work was the typescript of a drama which had not been performed; today it has been running for fifty years and its title is The Twentieth Century. The characters depicted in it move on our contemporary stage, play the parts foretold and produce the events foreseen.

Only the denouement remains, fiasco or fulfilment. It is a grandiose plan, and in my estimation cannot succeed. But it has existed for at least 180 years and probably for much longer, and the Protocols provided one more proof in a chain of proofs that has since been greatly lengthened. The conspiracy for world dominion through a world slave state exists and cannot at this stage be abruptly checked or broken off; of the momentum which it has acquired it now must go on to fulfilment or failure. Either will be destructive for a time, and hard for those of the time in which the denouement comes.

Chapter 28. THE ABERRATION OF MR. BALFOUR

As the first decade of the 20th Century grew older the signs of the coming storms multiplied. In 1903 the British Government had offered Uganda to Zionism and Max Nordau had publicly foretold "the future world war", in the sequence to which England would procure Palestine for Zionism. In 1905 the Protocols prophetically revealed the destructive orgy of Communism. Then in 1906 one Mr. Arthur James Balfour, Prime Minister of England, met Dr. Weizmann in a hotel room and was captivated by the notion of presenting Palestine, which was not his to give, to "the Jews".

The shape which "the future world war" would take was then determined. Mr. Balfour stood guard over the new century and yielded the pass. A different man, in his place, might have saved it; or another might have done the same, for by 1906 the hidden mechanism for exerting "irresistible pressure on the international affairs of the present" (Leon Pinsker, 1 882) had evidently been perfected. Rabbi Elmer Berger says of that time, "that group of Jews which committed itself to Zionism... entered a peripatetic kind of diplomacy which took it into many chancelleries and parliaments, exploring the labyrinthine and devious ways of international politics in a part of the world where political intrigue and secret deals were a byword. Jews began to play the game of 'practical polities'." The era of the malleable "administrators" and compliant "premier-dictators", all furthering the great plan, was beginning. Therefore any other politician, put in Mr. Balfour's place at that time, might have acted similarly. However, his name attaches to the initial misdeed.

His actions are almost unaccountable in a man of such birth, training and type. Research cannot discover evidence of any other motive than an infatuation, of the "liberal" sort, for an enterprise which he did not even examine in the light of duty and wisdom. "Hard-boiled" considerations of "practical politics" (that is, a cold calculation that money or votes might be gained by supporting Zionism) can hardly be suspected in him. He and his colleagues belonged to the oldest families of England, which carried on a long tradition of public service. Statesmanship was in their blood; understanding of government and knowledge of foreign affairs were instinctive in them; they represented the most successful ruling class in recorded history; and they were wealthy.

Why, then, did instinct, tradition and wisdom suddenly desert them in this one question, at the moment when their Conservative Party, in its old form, for the last time governed England, and their families still guided the country's fortunes from great houses in Piccadilly and Mayfair and from country abbeys? Were they alarmed by the menace that "the mob" would be incited against them if they did not comply? They realized that birth and privilege alone would not continue to qualify for the function of governing. The world had changed much in the century before, and they knew that the process would go on. In the British tradition they worked to ensure continuity, unbroken by violence and eased by conciliation. They were too wise to resist change; they aimed at guiding change. Perhaps they were too eager on that account to shake hands with Progress, when it knocked, without examining the emissaries' credentials.

Mr. Balfour, their leader, was a tall, aloof and scholarly bachelor, impassive and pessimistic; he was of chilly mien but his intimates contend that his heart was warm. His middle-aged love affair with Zionism might be a symptom of unwilling celibacy. In youth he delayed asking his ladylove until she became affianced to another; before they could marry her lover died; and as Mr. Balfour was about to make good his earlier tardiness she died. He then resolved to remain unmarried.

Women may not be good judges of a distinguished bachelor who wears a broken heart on his sleeve, but many of the contemporary comments about him come from women, and I quote the opinions of two of the most beautiful women of that day. Consuelo Vanderbilt (an American, later the Duchess of Marlborough) wrote, 'The opinions he expressed and the doctrines he held seemed to be the products of pure logic... he was gifted with a breadth of comprehension I have never seen equalled"; and Lady Cynthia Asquith said, "As for his being devoid of moral indignation, I often saw him white with anger; any personal injustice enraged him".

The italicised words could not more completely misportray Mr. Balfour, if the result of his actions is any test. The one thought-process which cannot have guided him, in pledging his country to Zionism, was logic, for no logical good could come of this for any of the parties concerned, his own country, the native inhabitants of Palestine, or (in my opinion) the mass of Jews, who had no intention of going there. As for injustice (unless Lady Cynthia intended to distinguish between "personal" and mass injustice), the million innocent beings who today have been driven into the Arabian wilderness (in the manner of the Levitical "scapegoat") offer the obvious answer.

Anyway, there he was, Prime Minister of England, having succeeded "dear Uncle Robert" (Lord Salisbury, of the great house of Cecil) in 1902. Clearly he cannot at that instant have conceived, from nowhere, the notion of giving Uganda to the Zionists, so that "irresistible pressure" must have been at work before he took office. What went on in that earlier period is all mystery or, in truth, conspiracy ("labyrinthine intrigue"). When he became prime minister the mine was already laid, and to the end of his days Mr. Balfour apparently never realized that it was the mine of which all are today aware.

Dr. Herzl, despairing of the Czar, the Kaiser and the Sultan (the three potentates had been amiable but prudent and non-committal; they knew, what Mr. Balfour never learned, that Zionism was dynamite*) had declared: "England, great England, free England, England commanding the seas will understand our aims" (the reader will perceive for what purpose, in this view,

* For that matter, the successors of the Czars were of just the same opinion. Lenin in 1903 wrote, "This Zionist idea is entirely false and reactionary in its essence. The idea of a separate Jewish nation, which is utterly untenable scientifically, is reactionary in its political implications... The Jewish question is: assimilation or separateness? And the idea of ajewish people is manifestly reactionary". And in 1913 Stalin reaffirmed this dictum. The destiny of the Jews, he said, was assimilation (in a Communist world, of course, in this opinion).

England had become great, free, and commander of the seas). When the Uganda offer showed the Talmudic directorate in Russia that Dr. Herzl was wrong in thinking that England would "understand" their needs, Dr. Weizmann was sent to London. He was preparing to overthrow Dr. Herzl and now becomes our chief witness to the hidden events of that time.

A young Englishman, with some modest petition, would have great trouble even today in penetrating the janitorial and secretarial defences of a Cabinet minister's private room. Young Dr. Weizmann from Russia, who wanted Palestine, was quickly ushered into that of Lord Percy ("in charge of African affairs").

Lord Percy was another scion of a great ruling family with an ancient tradition of public service and wise administration. According to Dr. Weizmann, he "expressed boundless astonishment that the Jews should ever so much as have considered the Uganda proposal, which he regarded as impractical on the one hand, and, on the other, a denial of the Jewish religion. Himself deeply religious, he was bewildered by the thought that Jews could even entertain the idea of any other country than Palestine as the centre of their revival; and he was delighted to learn from me that there were so many Jews who had emphatically refused. He added, 'If I were a Jew, I would not give a halfpenny for the proposition'."

Presumably Dr. Weizmann did not inform Lord Percy of the unanimous longing of the jews in Palestine to remove to Uganda. What he had heard, if his record is correct, was virtually an invitation to get rid of Dr. Herzl and a promise to support the claim to Palestine. He went away to prepare Dr. Herzl's discomfiture. He did not go empty-handed.

Possibly, in the fifty years that have elapsed, British ministers have learned that official notepaper should be kept where only those authorized may use it. On leaving Lord Percy's room Dr. Weizmann took some Foreign Office notepaper and on it wrote a report of the conversation, which he sent to Russia (where, under the Romanoffs and the Communist Czars alike, government stationery is not left lying around). In Russia, this document, written on offical Foreign Office paper, must have aroused feelings akin to those which a holy ikon would cause in a moujik. Clearly it meant that the British Government had no further use for Dr. Herzl and would procure Palestine for the Zionists in Russia. Lord Percy, in today's idiom, had started something.

All else followed as if arranged by Greek gods: the triumph of the Zionists from Russia over Dr. Herzl, his collapse and death, the rejection of the Uganda offer. Then Dr. Weizmann moved to England, "the one country which seemed likely to show a genuine sympathy for a movement like ours", and where he could "live and work without let or hindrance, at least theoretically" (any compilation of classical understatements might include this passage in first place).

Dr. Weizmann chose Manchester for his residence. He says "by chance", but credulity balks. Manchester held Mr. Balfour's constituency; Manchester was the Zionist headquarters in England; the chairman of Mr. Balfour's party in Manchester was a Zionist (today the British Conservative Party is still enmeshed in these toils).

The Greek drama continued. Mr. Balfour's prime-ministership ended in a fiasco for his party when in the 1906 election eight out of nine Manchester seats were lost to it. He then faded temporarily from office. At that moment another personage entered the present narrative. Among the triumphant Liberal candidates was a rising young man with a keen nose for political winds, a Mr. Winston Churchill. He also sought election in Manchester and commended himself to the Zionist headquarters there, first by attacking the Balfour government's Aliens Bill (which set a brake on large-scale immigration from such places as Russia) and next by supporting Zionism. Thereon "the Manchester Jews promptly fell into line behind him as though he were a kind of latterday Moses; one of their leaders got up at an all-Jewish-meeting and announced that 'any Jew who votes against Churchill is a traitor to the common cause' " (Mr. R.C. Taylor). Mr. Churchill, elected, became Under Secretary for the Colonies. His public espousal of Zionism was simply a significant episode at that time; three decades later, when Mr. Balfour was dead, it was to have consequences as fateful as Mr. Balfour's own aberration.

To return to Mr. Balfour: his private thoughts were much with Zionism. At no time, as far as the annals disclose, did he give thought to the native inhabitants of Palestine, whose expulsion into the wilderness he was to cause. By coincidence, the election was being mainly fought around the question of the allegedly cruel treatment of some humble beings far away (this is an instance of the method of stirring up the passions of "the mob", recommended by Dr. Herzl and the Protocols). The electors knew nothing of Zionism and when they later became acquainted with it felt no concern for the menaced Arabs, because that side of the matter was not put before them by a press then "submissive". However, in 1906 their feelings were being inflamed about "Chinese slavery" and (Manchester being Manchester) they were highly indignant about it. At that time Chinese Coolies were being indentured for three years work in the South African gold mines. Those chosen counted themselves fortunate, but for electoral and "rabble-rousing" purposes in Manchester this was "slavery" and the battle was fought and won on that score. The victorious Liberals forgot "Chinese slavery" immediately after the counting of the votes, (and when their turn in office came outdid the Conservatives in their enthusiasm for Zionism).

Thus, while shouts of "Chinese slavery" resounded outside his windows, Mr. Balfour, closeted with a Zionist emissary from Russia, prepared something worse than slavery for the Arabs of Palestine. His captivation was complete before the interview began, as his niece and lifelong confidante (Mrs. Dugdale) shows: "His interest in the subject was whetted... by the refusal of the Zionist Jews to accept the Uganda offer... The opposition aroused in him a curiosity which he found no means to satisfy... He had asked his chairman in Manchester to fathom the reasons for the Zionist attitude... Balfour's interest in the Jews and their history... originated in the Old Testament training of his mother and in his Scottish upbringing. As he grew up his intellectual admiration and sympathy for certain aspects of the Jews in the modern world seemed to him of immense importance. I remember in childhood imbibing from him the idea that Christian religion and civilization owed to Judaism an immeasurable debt, ill rep

Such was Mr. Balfour's frame of mind when he received Dr. Weizmann in a room of the old Queen's Hotel in dank and foggy Manchester in 1906. The proposition before him, if accepted, meant adding Turkey, in 1906, to England's enemies in any "future world war" and, if Turkey were defeated in it, engaging in perpetual warfare thereafter with the Arab world.

But calculations of national interest, moral principle and statesmanship, if the above quotations are the test, had deserted Mr. Balfour's mind.

He was in the grip of a "whetted" interest and an unsatisfied "curiosity"; it sounds like a young girl's romantic feeling about love. He had not been elected to decide what "debt" Christianity owed to Judaism, or if he decided that one was owing, to effect its repayment, from a third party's funds, to some canvasser professing title to collect. If there were any identifiable debt and any rational cause to link his country with it, and he could convince the country of this, he might have had a case. Instead, he decided privately that there was a debt, and that he was entided to choose between claimants in favour of a caller from Russia, when the mass of Jews in England repudiated any notion of such a debt. History does not tell of a stranger thing.

Dr. Weizmann, forty years later, recorded that the Mr. Balfour whom he met "had only the most naive and rudimentary notion of the movement"; he did not even know Dr. Herzl's name, the nearest he could get to it being "Dr. Herz". Mr. Balfour was already carried away by his enthusiasm for the unknown cause. He posed formal objections, but apparently only for the pleasure of hearing them overborne, as might a girl object to the elopement she secretly desires. He was much impressed (as Dr. Weizmann says) when his visitor said, "Mr. Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?" "But, Dr. Weizmann, we have London", he answered. Dr. Weizmann retorted, "But we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh".

Mr. Balfour apparently felt this to be a conclusive reason why the Ashkenazic Jews from Russia should be removed to Palestine. However, the only body of Jews whose interest he had any right to consider, those of England, had been working hard to dissuade him from getting entangled in Zionism, and he made a last feeble objection: "It is curious, Dr. Weizmann, the Jews I meet are quite different". Dr. Weizmann replied, "Mr. Balfour, you meet the wrong kind of Jew".

Mr. Balfour never again questioned the claim of the Zionists from Russia to be the right kind of Jew. "It was from that talk with Weizmann that I saw that the Jewish form of patriotism was unique. It was Weizmann's absolute refusal even to look at it" (the Uganda proposition) "which impressed me"; to these words Mrs. Dugdale adds the comment, "The more Balfour thought about Zionism, the more his respect for it and his belief in its importance grew. His convictions took shape before the defeat of Turkey in the Great War, transforming the whole future for the Zionists", He also transformed the whole future for the entire West and for two generations of its sons. In this hotel-room meeting of 1906 Max Nordau's prophecy of 1903 about the shape of "the future world war" was given fulfilment.

As that war approached, the number of leading public men who privily espoused Zionism grew apace. They made themselves in fact co-conspirators, for they did not inform the public masses of any intention about Palestine. None outside the inner circle of "labyrinthine intrigue" knew that one was in their minds and would be carried out in the confusion of a great war, when parliamentary and popular scrutiny of acts of State policy was in suspense. The secrecy observed stamps the process as a conspiratorial one, originating in Russia, and it bore fruit in 1917.

The next meeting between Dr. Weizmann and Mr. Balfour was on December 14, 1914*. Then the First World War had just begun. The standing British army had been almost wiped out in France, and France itself faced catastrophe, while only the British Navy stood between England and the gravest dangers. A war, costing Britain and France some three million lives, lay ahead, and the youth of Britain was rushing to join in the battle. The great cause was supposed to be that of overthrowing "Prussian militarism", liberating "small nations", and restoring "freedom and democracy".

* An instance of the difficulty of eliciting facts in this matter: Mrs. Dugdale quoted Dr. Weizmann as saying, "did not see him again until 1916", but contradicts this statement by another of her own, "On December, 1914, Dr. Weizmann had an appointment to see Balfour". This implicit mention of a second meeting on that date appears to be confirmed by Dr. Weizmann's own statement, that after seeing Mr. Lloyd George on December 3, 1914, he "followed up at once Lloyd George's suggestion about seeing Mr. Balfour".

Mr. Balfour was soon to be restored to office. His thoughts, when he met Dr. Weizmann again, were apparently far from the great battle in France. His mind was not with his country or his people. It was with Zionism and Palestine. He began his talk with Dr. Weizmann by saying, "I was thinking about that conversation of ours" (in 1 906) "and I believe that when the guns stop firing you may get your Jerusalem".

People who lived at that time may recall the moment and see how far from anything which they supposed to be at stake were these thoughts of Mr. Balfour. In the person of Mr. Balfour the Prophet Monk reappeared, but this time armed with power to shape the destiny of nations. Obviously "irresistible pressure" behind the scenes had gained great power and was already most effective in 1914.

By that time the American people were equally enmeshed in this web of "labyrinthine intrigue", hidden from the general view, though they did not suspect it. They feared "foreign entanglements"; they wished to keep out of the war and had a president who promised he would keep them out of it. In fact, they were virtually in it, for "irresistible pressure" by that time was working as effectively in Washington as in London.

Chapter 29 THE AMBITION OF MR. HOUSE

While Mr. Balfour and his associates in this still secret enterprise moved towards power in England during the First World War, a similar group of men secredy took shape in the American Republic. The political machine they built produced its full result nearly fifty years later, when President Truman in effect set up the Zionist state in Palestine.

In 1900 Americans still clung to their "American dream", and the essence of it was to avoid "foreign entanglements". In fact the attack on Spain in Cuba in 1898 had already separated them from this secure anchorage, and the mysterious origins of that little war are therefore of continuing interest. The American public was caused to explode in warlike frenzy, in the familiar way, when it was told that the Maine was blown up in Havana harbour by a Spanish mine. When she was raised, many years later, her plates were found to have been blown out by an inner explosion (but by then "the mob" had long lost interest in the matter).

The effect of the Spanish- American war (continuing American "entanglement" in the affairs of others) lent major importance to the question: who was to exercise the ruling power in America, for the nature of any "entanglements" clearly depended on that. The answer to this question, again, was governed by the effect of an earlier war, the American Civil War of 1861-1865. The chief consequences of it (little comprehended by the contending Northerners and Southerners) was sensibly to change the nature, first of the population, and next of the government of the Republic.

Before the Civil War the American population was predominantly Irish, Scots-Irish, Scottish, British, German and Scandinavian, and from this amalgam a distinctly "American" individual evolved. In the direct sequence to that war the era of unrestricted immigration began, which in a few decades brought to America many millions of new citizens from Eastern and Southern Europe. These included a great mass of Jews from the Talmudic areas of Russia and Russian Poland. In Russia the rabbinate had stood between them and "assimilation" and this continued when they reached America. Thus the 20th Century, at its start, threw up the question, what part would their leaders acquire in the political control of the Republic and of its foreign undertakings. The later events showed that the Eastern conspiracy, in both its forms, entered America through this mass-immigration. The process of acquiring an ever-increasing measure of political power began, behind the scenes, about 1900 and was to become the major issue of American national life in the ensuing fifty years.

The man who first involved America in this process was a Mr. Edward Mandell House (popularly known as Colonel House, but he had no military service), a Southern gentleman, chiefly of Dutch and English descent, who grew up inTexas during the bitter Reconstruction period that followed the Civil War. He is a remarkable character in this tale. As other connoisseurs might exult in the taste of rare brandy, he loved the secret exercise of power through others, and candidly confided this to his diary. He shunned publicity (says his editor, Mr. Charles Seymour) "from a sardonic sense of humour which was tickled by the thought that he, unseen and often unsuspected, without great wealth or office, merely through the power of personality and good sense, was actually deflecting the currents of history". Few men have wielded so much power in complete irresponsibility: "it is easy enough for one without responsibility to sit down over a cigar and a glass of wine and decide what is best to be done", wrote Mr. House.

His editor's choice of words is exact; Mr. House did not guide American State policy, but deflected it towards Zionism, the support of the world-revolution, and the promotion of the world-government ambition. The fact of his exercise of secret power is proven. His motives for exercizing it in those directions are hard to discover, for his thoughts (as revealed by his diary and his novel) appear to have been so confused and contradictory that no clear picture emerges from them.

His immense daily record of his secret reign (the Private Papers) fully exposed how he worked. It leaves unanswered the question of what he ultimately wanted, or if he even knew what he wanted; as to that, his novel shows only a mind full of half-baked demagogic notions, never clearly thought out. The highfalutin apostrophe on the flyleaf is typical: "This book is dedicated to the unhappy many who have lived and died lacking opportunity, because, in the starting, the worldwide social structure was wrongly begun"; apparently this means that Mr. House, who held himself to be a religious man, thought poorly of the work of an earlier authority, described in the words, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth".

In the search for the origins of Mr. House's political ideas (which at first were akin to Communism; in later life, when the damage was done, he became more moderate) the student is cast on significant clues. His editor finds in his early thought a note "reminiscent of Louis Blanc and the revolutionaries of 1848". With this in mind I earlier directed the readers attention to Louis Blanc, the French revolutionary who for a moment, in 1848, seemed likely to play Lenin's part and summoned the assembly of workers' delegates which was an anticipation of the 1917 Soviets.

Such notions, in a Texan of the late 19th Century, are as unexpected as Buddhism in an Eskimo. Nevertheless, Mr. House in youth acquired these ideas; someone had implanted them in him. His middle name, Mandell, was that of "a Jewish merchant in Houston, who was one of his father's most intimate friends; the fact that the elder House conferred a Jewish name upon his son indicates the family's attitude towards the race" (Mr. Arthur D. Howden, his biographer). In Mr. House's novel the hero refuses all preferment to go and live in a humble East Side room with a Polish Jew, come to America after anti-Jewish disturbances in Warsaw caused by the murder there, by "a young Jew, baited beyond endurance", of the son of a high government official. In later life Mr. House's brother-in-law and counsellor was a Jew, Dr. Sidney Mezes, who was one of the initiators of this century's world-government plan in its earliest form (The League to Enforce Peace).

That is about all that can be elicited about the intellectual atmosphere of Mr. House's mind-formative period. In one of his most revealing passages Mr. House himself comments on the suggestion of ideas to others and shows, apparently without realizing it, how powerless he ultimately was, who thought himself all-powerful: "With the President, as with all other men I sought to influence, it was invariably my intention to make him think that ideas he derived from me were his own... Usually, to tell the truth, the idea was not original with me... The most difficult thing in the world is to trace any idea to its source... We often think an idea to be original with ourselves when, in plain truth, it was subconsciously absorbed from someone else".

He began to learn about politics in Texas when he was only eighteen, then discerning during a presidential election (1876) that "two or three men in the Senate and two or three in the House and the President himself ran the government. The others were merely figureheads... Therefore I had no ambition to hold office, nor had I any ambition to speak". (He puts the same idea into the mouth of a politician in his novel of 1912; "In Washington... I found that the government was run by a few men; that outside of this little circle no one was of much importance. It was my ambition to break into it if possible and my ambition now leaped so far as to want, not only to be of it, but later, to be IT... The President asked me to undertake the direction of his campaign... He was overwhelmingly nominated and re-elected... and I was now well within the charmed circle and within easy reach of my further desire to have no rivals... tightened a nearly invisible coil around the people, which held them fast... ")

In that spirit Mr. House entered Texan politics: "I began at the top rather than at the bottom... it has been my habit to put someone else nominally at the head, so that I could do the real work undisturbed by the demands which are made on a chairman... Each chairman of the campaigns which I directed received the publicity and the applause of both the press and the people during the campaign... they passed out of public notice within a few months... and yet when the next campaign came around, the public and the press as eagerly accepted another figurehead".

Mr. House used Texas somewhat as a rising actor may use the provinces. He was so successful as a party-organizer there that at the turn of the century he was the real ruler of the state and sat daily in the office of its governor (appointed by Mr. House and long forgotten) at the State Capitol, where he chose State senators and congressmen and handled the requests of the many office-holders who habitually besiege a State governor. The provincial tour accomplished, he prepared to conquer the capital. By 1900 he was "tired of the position I occupied in Texas" and was "ready to take part in national affairs". After further preparation he began, in 1910 as the First World War approached, "to look about for a proper candidate for the Democratic nomination for President".

Thus Mr. House, aged fifty, was a president-maker. Until I read his Private Papers I was much impressed by the "uncanny knowledge" displayed by a leading American Zionist, Rabbi Stephen Wise, who in 1910 told a New Jersey audience: "On Tuesday Mr. Woodrow Wilson will be elected governor of your State; he will not complete his term of office as governor; in November 1912 he will be eleeted President of the United States; he will be inaugurated for the second time as president". This was fore-knowledge of the quality shown by the Protocols, Leon Pinsker and Max Nordau, but further research showed that Rabbi Wise had it from Colonel House!

Evidently Mr. Wilson had been closely studied by the group of secret men which then was coalescing, for neither Mr. House nor Rabbi Wise at that moment had met him! But Mr. House "became convinced that he had found his man, although he had never met him... 'I turned to Woodrow Wilson... as being the only man... who in every way measured up to the office' " (Mr. Howden). The standard measurement used is indicated by a later passage: "The trouble with getting a candidate for president is that the man that is best fitted for the place cannot be nominated and, if nominated, could not be elected. The People seldom take the best man fitted for the job; therefore it is necessary to work for the best man who can be nominated and elected, and just now Wilson seems to be that man". (This description, again, is qualified by the allusion in Mr. House's novel to the methods used by a powerful group to elect "its creature" to the presidency).

The Zionist idea coupled itself to the revolutionary idea, among the group of men which was secretly selecting Mr. Woodrow Wilson for the presidency, in the person of this Rabbi Stephen Wise (born in Budapest, like Herzl and Nordau). He was the chief Zionist organizer in America and as such still something of a curiosity among the Jews of America, who at that time repudiated Zionism and distrusted the "Eastern Jews". Until 1900, as Rabbi Wise says, Zionism in America was confined to the immigrant Jews from Russia, who brought it with them from the Talmudic ghettoes there; the mass of American Jews were of German origins and would have none of it. Between 1900 and 1910, a million new Jewish immigrants arrived from Russia and under Zionist organization began to form an important body of voters; here was the link between Mr. House (whose election-strategy will be described) and Rabbi Wise. Rabbi Wise, who was known chiefly as a militant orator, if not an agitator, in labour questions, was not then a representative Jewish figure, and nevertheless (like Dr. Weizmann in England) he was the man to whom the political potentates secretly gave access and ear.

The strength of this secret group is shown by the fact that in 1910, when Mr. House had privately decided that Mr. Wilson should be the next president, Rabbi Wise publicly proclaimed that he would be that, and for two terms. This called for a rearrangement of the rabbi's politics, for he had always supported the Republican party; after Mr. House's secret selection of Mr. Wilson, he changed to the Democratic one. Thus Mr. House's confused "revolutionary" ideas and Zionism's perfectly clear ones arrived together on the doorstep of the White House. Agreement between the group was cordial: Mr. Wise states that (after the election) "we received warm and heartening help from Colonel House, close friend of the president... House not only made our cause the object of his very special concern but served as liaison officer between the Wilson administration and the Zionist movement". The close parallel between the course of these hidden processes in America and in England is here shown.

The secret of Mr. House's hold over the Democratic Party lay in the strategy which he had devised for winning elections. The Democratic party had been out of office for nearly fifty unbroken years and he had devised a method which made victory almost a mathematical certainty. The Democratic party was in fact to owe its victories in 1912 and 1916, as well as President Roosevelt's and President Truman's victories in 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944 and 1948 to the application of Mr. House's plan. In this electoral plan, which in its field perhaps deserves the name of genius, lies Mr. House's enduring effect on the life of America; his political ideas were never clearly formed and were frequently changed, so that he forged an instrument whereby the ideas of others were put into effect; the instrument itself was brilliantly designed.

In essence, it was a plan to gain the vote of the "foreign-born", the new immigrants, solidly for the Democratic party by making appeal to their racial feelings and especial emotional reflexes. It was worked out in great detail and was the product of a master hand in this particular branch of political science.

The unique, fantastic thing about this plan is that Mr. House published it, anonymously, in the very year, 1912, when Mr. Wilson, secretly "chosen", was publicly nominated and elected. In that busy year Mr. House found time to write, in thirty days, a novel called Philip Dru: Administrator (the unusual word recalls the allusion in the Protocols to "The Administrators whom we shall choose..."). The chapter entitled "The Making of a President", which is obviously not fiction, makes this almost unreadable novel a historical document of the first importance.

In this chapter of his novel (which Mr. House was prompted to publish by his assiduous mentor, Dr. Sidney Mezes) an American Senator called Selwyn is depicted as setting about to "govern the Nation with an absolute hand, and yet not be known as the directing power". Selwyn is Mr. House. Apparently he could not resist the temptation to give a clue to his identity, and he caused "Selwyn" to invite the man he selected as his puppet-president ("Selwyn seeks a Candidate") to "dine with me in my rooms at the Mandell House".

Before that, Selwyn has devised "a nefarious plan", in concert with one John Thor, "the high priest of finance", whereby "a complete and compact organization", using "the most infamous sort of deception regarding its real opinions and intentions", might "elect its creature to the Presidency". The financing of this secret league was "simple". "Thor's influence throughout commercial America was absolute... Thor and Selwyn selected the thousand" (millionaires) "that were to give each ten thousand dollars... Thor was to tell each of them that there was a matter, appertaining to the general welfare of the business fraternity, which needed twenty thousand dollars, and that he, Thor, would put up ten and wanted him to put up as much... There were but few men of business... who did not consider themselves fortunate in being called to New York by Thor and in being asked to join him in a blind pool looking to the safeguarding of wealth". The money of this "great corruption fund" was placed by Thor in different banks, paid at request by Selwyn to other banks, and from them transferred to the private bank of Selwyn's son-in-law; "the result was that the public had no chance of obtaining any knowledge of the fund or how it was spent".

On this basis of finance Selwyn selects his "creature", one Rockland, (Mr. Wilson), who on dining with Selwyn at "Mandell House" is told, that his responsibility as president will be "diffuse": "while a president has a consitutional right to act alone, he has no moral right to act contrary to the tenets and traditions of his party, or to the advice of the party leaders, for the country accepts the candidate, the party and the party advisers as a whole and not severally" (the resemblance between this passage and the allusions in the Protocols to "the responsibility of presidents" and the ultimate authority of their "advisers" is strong).

Rockland humbly agrees to this. (After the election, "drunk with power and the adulation of sycophants, once or twice Rockland asserted himself, and acted upon important matters without having first conferred with Selwyn. But, after he had been bitterly assailed by Selwyn's papers... he made no further attempts at independence. He felt that he was utterly helpless in that strong man's hands, and so, indeed, he was". This passage in Mr. House's novel of 1912, written before Mr. Wilson's inauguration, may be compared with one in Mr. House's Private Papers of 1926, recording his actual relationship with the candidate during the election campaign. It states that Mr. House edited the presidential candidate's speeches and instructed him not to heed any other advice, whereon Mr. Wilson admitted indiscretions and promised "not to act independently in future". In the novel Selwyn is shown as telling Thor of Rockland' s attempt to escape the thrall: "When he told how Rockland had made an effort for freedom, and how he brought him back, squirming under his defeat, they laughed joyously"; this chapter is called "The Exultant Conspirators").

Another chapter shows how the election of the "creature" was achieved. The plan described makes electioneering almost into an exact science and still governs electioneering in America. It is based on Mr. House's fundamental calculation that about 80 percent of the electors would in any circumstance whatever vote for one of the two opposed parties in roughly equal proportions, and that expenditure of money and effort must therefore be concentrated on "the fluctuating 20 percent". Then it analyzes this 20 percent in detail until the small residue is isolated, on which the utmost effort is to be bent. Every ounce or cent of wasteful expenditure is eliminated and a mass of energy released to be directed against the small body of voters who can sway the result. This plan has done so much to "deflect" the course of events in America and the world that it needs to be summarized here at some length.

Selwyn begins the nomination campaign by eliminating all states where either his party or the other was sure to win. In this way he is free to give his entire thought to the twelve doubtful States, upon whose votes the election would turn. He divides these into units of five thousand voters, appointing for each unit a man on the spot and one at national headquarters. He calculated that of the five thousand, four thousand, in equal parts, probably could not be diverted from his own or the other party, and this brought his analysis down to one thousand doubtful voters, in each unit of five thousand in twelve States, on whom to concentrate. The local man was charged to obtain all possible information about their "race, religion, occupation and former party ties", and to forward this to the national man in charge of the particular unit, who was then responsible for reaching each individual by means of "literature, persuasion or perhaps by some more subtle argument". The duty of the two agents for each unit, one in the field and one at headquarters, was between them to "bring in a majority of the one thousand votes within their charge".

Meanwhile the managers of the other party were sending out "tons of printed matter to their State headquarters, which, in turn, distributed it to the country organizations, where it was dumped into a corner and given to visitors when asked for. Selwyn's committee used one-fourth as much printed matter, but it went in a sealed envelope, along with a cordial letter, directed to a voter that had as yet not decided how to vote. The opposition was sending speakers at great expense from one end of the country to the other... Selwyn sent men into his units to personally persuade each of the one thousand hesitating voters to support the Rockland ticket".

By means of this most skilful method of analysis, elimination and concentration Rockland, in the novel, (and Mr. Wilson, in fact) was elected in 1912. The concentrated appeal to the "one thousand hesitating voters" in each unit was especially directed to the "race, creed and colour" emotion, and the objects of attention were evidently singled out with that in mind. "Thus Selwyn won and Rockland became the keystone of the arch he had set out to build".

The remainder of the novel is unimportant but contains a few other significant things. Its sub-title is "A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935". The hero, Philip Dm, is a young West Pointer under the influence of Karl Marx, who is elected leader of a mass movement by acclamation at an indignation meeting after Selwyn's and Thor's conspiracy has become known. The manner of this exposure is also interesting; Thor has a microphone concealed in his room (something little known in 1912 but today almost as familiar in politics as the Statesman's Yearbook) and, forgetting to disconnect it, his "exultant" talk with Selwyn after Rockland's election becomes known to his secretary, who gives it to the press; a most implausible episode is that the press published it! Then Dru assembles an army (armed, apparently by magic, with rifles and artillery), defeats the government forces at a single battle, marches on Washington, and proclaims himself "Administrator of the Republic". His first major action (and President Wilson's) is to introduce "a graduated income tax exempting no income whatsoever" (Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto demanded "a heavy progressive or graduated income tax"; the Protocols, "a progressive tax on property").

Dru next attacks Mexico, and the Central American Republics, also defeating them in one battle and thereafter uniting them under the American flag, which in the next chapter becomes also "the undisputed emblem of authority" over Canada and the British, French and other Possessions in the West Indies. Selwyn and Philip Dru are obviously both Mr. House. Selwyn is the superbly efficient party-organizer and secret wielder of Power; Dru is the muddled "utopian dreamer" (the Protocols) who does not know what to do with Power when he gets it. Inevitably, at the end, Mr. House did not know what to do with two characters who were in truth one man, and was compelled to merge them, as it were, by making Selwyn, the original villain of the piece, the confidant and bosom companion of Dru. After that, equally clearly, he did not know what to do with Dru, short of having him chased off by bears. Therefore he put him on a ship bound for an unknown destination with Gloria (a love-hungry girl who for fifty chapters has had to listen to Dru's incoherent plans for remoulding the world), and concludes: "Happy Gloria! Happy Philip!... Where were they bound? Would they return? These were the questions asked by all, but to which none could give answer".

In fact hardly anybody can have persisted to the end of this novel, and nobody would have cared where Philip and Gloria went, with one exception. There was one solitary being in the world for whom the story must have held a meaning as terrible and true as Dorian Gray's Portrait for Dorian: Mr. Woodrow Wilson. In that respect Philip Drew: Administrator is a unique work. Two questions haunt the student. Did Mr. Wilson read it? What prompted Mr. House (or his prompter) to publish this exact picture of what was going on at the very moment when "the creature" was being nominated and elected? Considered in that light the book becomes a work of sadistic mockery, and the reader becomes aware that the group of men around Mr. House must have been as malevolent as they are depicted to be in the chapter, "The Exultant Conspirators".

Is it conceivable that Mr. Wilson did not read it? Between his enemies and his friends, during an election campaign, someone must have put it in his hands. The student of history is bound to wonder whether the perusal of it, either then or later, may have caused the mental and physical state into which he soon fell. A few contemporary descriptions of him may be given as illustration (although they anticipate the chronology of the narrative a little). Mr. House later wrote of the man he had "chosen" and had elected ("the only one who in every way measured up to the office"), "I thought at that time" (1914) "and on several occasions afterwards, that the President wanted to die; certainly his attitude and his mental state indicated that he found no %est in life". When Mr. Wilson had not long been president Sir Horace Plunkett, the British Ambassador, wrote to Mr. House, "I paid my respects to the President, and was shocked to see him looking so worn; the change since January last is terribly marked". Six years later Sir William Wiseman, a British governmental emissary, told Mr, House, "I was shocked by his appearance... His face was drawn and of a grey colour, and frequendy twitching in a pitiful effort to control nerves which had broken down" (1919)*.

* Strong resemblances occur in contemporary descriptions of Mr. Roosevelt, whom Mr. House also believed that he chose as a "figurehead". Mr. Robert E. Sherwood says with emphasis that Mr. Roosevelt was ever haunted "by r the ghost of Wilson", When Mr, Roosevelt had been president two years his party manager, Mr. James Farley, wrote, "The President looked bad... face drawn and his reactions slow" (1935), and two y r ears later he was "shocked 21 the President's appearance" (1937). In 1943 Madame Chiang Kai-shek was "shocked by the President's looks"; in 1944, says Mr. Merriman Smith, "he looked older than I have ever seen him and he made an irrelevant speech", and Mr. John T. Flynn says the President's pictures " 'shocked the nation". In 1945 Miss Frances Perkins, a member of his cabinet, emerged from his office saydng, "I can't stand it, the President looks horrible".

Apparently a sure way to unhappiness is to receive high office as the instrument of others who remain unseen. Mr. Wilson inevitably looks wraithlike when contemplated against this record, now unfurled. Mr. House, Rabbi Wise and others around him seem to have gazed on him as collectors might on a specimen transfixed by a pin. In the circumstances, he must have been guided by guesswork, rather than by revelation, when at the age of twenty he decided that he would one day be president. This was known and Rabbi Wise once asked him, "When did you first think or dream of the presidency?" As the rabbi knew so much more than the President of the way in which the dream had been realized, he may have spoken tongue in cheek, and was evidently startled out of his customary deference when Mr. Wilson answered, "There never was a time after my graduation from Davidson College in South Carolina when I did not expect to become president", so that the rabbi asked sardonically, "Even when you were a teacher in a girls' college!" Mr. Wilson, apparently still oblivious, repeated, "There never was a time when I did not expect and prepare myself to become president".

Between Mr. Wilson's secret "choice" by Mr. House in 1910 and his public nomination for president in 1912 he was prompted to make public obeisance to Zionism; at that point the American people became involved, as the British people had in fact been committed by the Uganda offer of 1903. Mr. Wilson, under coaching for the campaign, made a speech on "The rights of the Jews", in which he said, "I am not here to express our sympathy with our Jewish fellow-citizens but to make evident our sense of identity with them. This is not their cause; it is America' s" ,

This could only have one meaning; it was a declaration of foreign policy, if Mr. Wilson were elected. No need existed to "make evident the sense of identity" between Americans and Americans, and Jews in America were in every respect free and equal; only a refusal to identify themselves with America could alter that and Mr. Wilson in effect proclaimed this refusal. He was specifically stating that Jewish "identity" was different and separate and that America, under him, would support this self-segregation as a cause.

To the initiates it was a pledge to Zionism. It was also an oblique allusion and threat to Russia, for the implication of Mr. Wilson's words was that he recognized the Jews in Russia (who were then the only organized Zionists) as representing all Jews. Thus he took the Balfourean part in the American production of this drama.

At that time all the Zionist propaganda was directed against Russia. Some thirty years had passed since the assassination of Czar Alexander II, who had incurred the enmity of the revolutionaries by his attempt to introduce a parliamentary constitution (Dr. Kastein remarked that Jewish participation in the assassination was "natural"). His successor, Alexander III, was forced to devote himself to combating the revolution. In Mr. Wilson's time Czar Nicholas II was resuming Alexander the Liberator's attempt to pacify and unify his country by enfranchising the people, and once more was being fiercely opposed by the Talmudic Zionists.

Then, at the very moment when Mr. Wilson made his implicit attack on Russian "intolerance", assassination was again used in Russia to destroy Nicholas II's work. During the revolution of 1906 he had issued an imperial decree making Russia a constitutional monarchy, and in 1907 he introduced universal suffrage. The revolutionaries feared this liberating measure more than they feared any Cossacks and used the People's Assembly, when it first met, for riotous uproar, so that it had to be dissolved. The Czar then chose as his prime minister an enlightened statesman, Count Stolypin, who by decree enacted a land reform followed by new elections. The result was that in the second parliament he received a great ovation and the revolutionaries were routed (some 3,000,000 landless peasants became owners of their land).

The future of Russia at that moment looked brighter than ever before. Stolypin was a national hero and wrote, "Our principal aim is to strengthen the agricultural population. The whole strength of the country rests on it... Give this country ten years of inner tranquility and you will not know Russia".

Those ten tranquil years would have changed the course of history for the better; instead, the conspiracy intervened and produced the ten days that shook the world. In 1911 Count Stolypin went to Kieff, where the Czar was to unveil a monument to the murdered Liberator, Alexander II, and was shot at a gala performance in the theatre by a Jewish revolutionary, Bagroff (in 1917 a Jewish commissar, discovering that a girl among some fugitives was Count Stolypin's daughter, promptly shot her).

That happened in September 1911; in December 1911 Mr. Wilson, the candidate, made his speech expressing "a sense of identity" with the Jewish "cause". In November 1911 Mr. Wilson had for the first time met the man, Mr. House, who had "chosen" him in 1910 (and who had then already "lined up all my political friends and following" on Mr. Wilson's behalf). Mr. House reported to his brother-in-law, "Never before have I found both the man and the opportunity".

Before the election Mr. House drew up a list of cabinet ministers (see Philip Dru) in consultation with a Mr. Bernard Baruch, who now enters this tale. He might be the most important of all the figures who will appear in it during the ensuing fifty years, for he was to become known as "the adviser" to several Presidents and in the 1950's was still advising President Eisenhower and Mr. Winston Churchill: In 1912 he was publicly known only as a highly successful financier. His biographer states that he contributed $50,000 to Mr. Wilson's campaign.

Then during the election campaign Mr. Wilson was made to feel the bit. After initial indiscretions he promised Mr. House (as earlier quoted, and compared with Philip Dru) "not to act independently in future". Immediately after the election he received Rabbi Stephen Wise "in a lengthy session" at which they discussed "Russian affairs with special reference to the treatment of Jems" (Mr. Wise). At the same moment Mr. House lunched with a Mr. Louis D. Brandeis, an eminent jurist and a Jew, and recorded that "his mind and mine are in accord concerning most of the questions that are now to the fore".

Thus three of the four men around Mr. Wilson were Jews and all three, at one stage or another, played leading parts in promoting the re-segregation of the Jews through Zionism and its Palestinian ambition. At that time Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Wise were the leading Zionists in America, and Mr. Brandeis, at his entrance into the story, deserves a paragraph.

He was distinguished in appearance and in intellect, but neither he nor any other lawyer could have defined what constituted, in him, "a Jew". He did not practise the Judaist religion, either in the Orthodox or Reformed versions, and once wrote, "During most of my life my contact with Jews and Judaism was slight and I gave little thought to their problems". His conversion was of the irrational, romantic kind (recalling Mr. Balfour's): one day in 1897 he read at breakfast a report of Dr. Herzl's speech at the First Zionist Congress and told his wife, "There is a cause to which I could give my life".

Thus the fully assimilated American Jew was transformed in a trice. He displayed the ardour of the convert in his subsequent attacks on "assimilation": "Assimilation cannot be averted unless there be re-established in the Fatherland a centre from which the Jewish spirit may radiate". The Zionists from Russia never trusted this product of assimilation who now wanted to de-assimilate himself. They detested his frequent talk about "Americanism". He said, "My approach to Zionism was through Americanism", and to the Talmudists this was akin to saying that Zionism could be approached through "Russianism", which they were bent on destroying. In fact it was illogical to advocate the fiercest form of racial segregation while professing to admire American assimilationism, and Mr. Brandeis, for all his lawyer's skill, seems never truly to have understood the nature of Zionism. He became the Herzl of American Zionists (Rabbi Stephen Wise was their Weizmann) and was rudely dropped when he had served his turn. However, at the decisive moment, in 1917, he played a decisive part.

Such was the grouping around a captive president as the American Republic moved towards involvement in the First World War, and such was the cause which was to be pursued through him and through his country's involvement. After his election Mr. House took over his correspondence, arranged whom he should see or not receive, told Cabinet officers what they were to say or not to say, and so on. By then he had also found time to write and publish that astonishing novel. He wanted poiver, and achieved it, but what else he wanted, in the sequence, he never decided. Thus his ambition was purposeless, and in retrospect he now looks like Savrola, the hero of another politician's novel, of whom its author, Mr. Winston Churchill, said "Ambition was the motive force, and Savrola was powerless to resist it". At the end of his life Mr. House, lonely and forgotten, greatly disliked Philip Dru.

But between 1911 and 1919 life was delightful for Mr. House. He loved the feeling of power for its own sake, and withal was too kind to want to hurt Rockland in the White House:

"It was invariably my intention, with the President as with all other men I sought to influence, to make him think that ideas he derived from me were his own. In the nature of things I have thought more on many things than had the President, and I had had opportunities to discuss them more widely than he. But no man honestly likes to have another man steer his conclusions. We are all a little vain on that score. Most human beings are too much guided by personal vanity in what they do. It happens that I am not. It does not matter to me who gets the credit for an idea I have imparted. The main thing is to get the idea to work. Usually, to tell the truth, the idea was not original with me " (and as previously quoted, from Mr. Howden).

Thus someone "steered" Mr. House, who steered Mr. Wilson, to the conclusion that a body of men in the Talmudic areas of Russia ought to be put in possession of Palestine, with the obvious consequence that a permanent source of world warfare would be established there, and that the Jews of the world ought to be re-segregated from mankind. In this plan the destruction of Russia and the spread of the world-revolution also were foreseeably involved.

At that period (1913) an event occurred which seemed of little importance then but needs recording here because of its later, large consequence. In America was an organization called B'nai B'rith (Hebrew for "Children of the Covenant"). Founded in 1843 as a fraternal lodge exclusively for Jews, it was called "purely an American institution", but it put out branches in many countries and today claims to "represent all Jews throughout the world", so that it appears to be part of the arrangement described by Dr. Kastein as "the Jewish international". In 1913 B'nai B'rith put out a tiny offshoot, the "Anti-Defamation League". It was to grow to great size and power; in it the state-within-states acquired a kind of secret police and it will reappear in this story.

With the accession of Mr. Wilson and the group behind his presidential chair, the stage was set for the war about to begin. The function of America, in promoting the great supernational "design" through that war, was to be auxiliary. In that first stage England was cast for the chief part and the major objective, control of the British government, had not been fully attained when the war began.

Thus the story now recrosses the Atlantic to England, where Mr. Balfour was moving again towards office. The leading men there were still resistant to the hidden purpose and plan and were intent on fighting the war, and winning it as quickly as possible, in the place where it began, Europe. They had to be brought into line if the process foretold by Max Nordau in 1903 was to be accomplished. Therefore the resistant men had to be disciplined or removed.

From 1914 to 1916, then, the story becomes that of the struggle to displace these men in England, and to supplant them by others who, like Mr. Wilson, would fall into line.

[ht=toc30]Chapter 30. THE DECISIVE BATTLE[/h4]

The 1914-1918 war was the first war of nations, as distinct from armies; the hands that directed it reached into every home in most European, and many non-European countries, This was a new thing in the world, but it was foretold by the conspirators of Communism and Zionism. The Protocols of 1905 said that resistance to the plan therein unfolded would be met by "universal war"; Max Nordau in 1903 said that the Zionist ambition in Palestine would be achieved through "the coming world war".

If such words were to be fulfilled, and thus to acquire the status of "uncanny knowledge" revealed in advance of the event, the conspiracy had to gain control of the governments involved so that their acts of State policy, and in consequence their military operations, might be diverted to serve the ends of the conspiracy, not national interests. The American president was already (i.e., from 1912) the captive of secret "advisers", as has been shown; and if Mr. House's depictment of him (alike in the anonymous novel and the acknowledged Private Papers) is correct, he fits the picture given in the earlier Protocols, "... we replaced the ruler by a caricature of a president, taken from the mob, from the midst of our puppet creatures, our slaves".

However, Mr. Wilson was not required to take much active part in furthering the great "design" in the early stages of the First World War; he fulfilled his function later. At its start the main objective was to gain control of the British Government. The struggle to do this lasted two years and ended in victory for the intriguers, whose activities were unknown to the public masses. This battle, fought in the "labyrinth" of "international politics", was the decisive batde of the First World War. That is to say (as no decision is ever final, and can always be modified by a later decision), it produced the greatest and most enduring effects on the further course of the 20th Century; these effects continued to dominate events between the wars and during the Second World War, and in 1956 may be seen to form the most probable cause of any third "universal war". No clash of arms during the 1914-1918 war produced an effect on the future comparable with that brought about by the capture of the British Government in 1916. This process was hidden from the embroiled masses. From start to finish Britons believed that they had only to do with an impetuous Teutonic warlord, and Americans, that the incorrigible quarrelsomeness of European peoples was the root cause of the upheaval.

In England in 1914 the situation brought about in America by the secret captivity of President Wilson did not prevail. The leading political and military posts were held by men who put every proposal for the political and military conduct of the war to one test: would it help win the war and was it in their country's interest. By that test Zionism failed. The story of the first two years of the four-year war is that of the struggle behind the scenes to dislodge these obstructive men and to supplant them by other, submissive men.

Before 1914 the conspiracy had penetrated-only into antechambers (apart from the Balfour Government's fateful step in 1903). After 1914 a widening circle of leading men associated themselves with the diversionary enterprise, Zionism. Today the "practical considerations" (of public popularity or hostility, votes, financial backing and office) which influence politicians in this matter are well known, because they have been revealed by many authentic publications. At that time, a politician in England must have been exceptionally astute or far-sighted to see in the Zionists the holders of the keys to political advancement. Therefore the Balfourean motive of romantic infatuation may have impelled them; the annals are unclear at that period and do not explain the unaccountable. Moreover, the English have always tended to give their actions a guise of high moral purpose, and to persuade themselves to believe in it; this led Macaulay to observe that "we know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality". Possibly, then, some of the men who joined in this intrigue (which it undoubtedly was) thought they were doing right. This process of self-delusion is shown by the one statement, discoverable by me, which clearly identifies a group of pro-Zionists in high English places at that time, and offers a motive of the kind satirized by Lord Macaulay.

This comes from a Mr. Oliver Locker-Lampson, early in this century a Conservative Member of parliament. He played no great part and was notable, if at all, only for his later, fanatical support of Zionism in and outside parliament, but he was a personal friend of the leading men who fathered Zionism on the British people. In 1952, in a London weekly journal, he wrote:

"Winston, Lloyd George, Balfour and I were brought up vigorous Protestants, who believe in the coming of a new Saviour when Palestine returns to Jews". This is the Messianic idea of Cromwell's Millenarians, foisted on the 20th Century. Only the men named could say if the statement is true, and but one of them survives. Whether this is the true basis of Protestantism, vigorous or otherwise, readers may judge for themselves. None will contend that it is a sound basis for the conduct of State policy or military operations in war. Also, of course, it expresses the same impious idea that moved the Prophet Monk and all such men: that God has forgotten his duty and, having defaulted, must have it done for him. Anyway, a group had formed and we may as well use for it the name which this man gave it: the Vigorous Protestants.

The First World War began, with these Vigorous Protestants ambitious to attain power so that they might divert military operations in Europe to the cause of procuring Palestine for the Zionists. Dr. Weizmann, who had not been idle since we last saw him closeted with Mr. Balfour at Manchester in 1906, at once went into action: "now is the time... the political considerations will be favourable", he wrote in October 1914. He sought out Mr. C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, which was much addicted (then as now) to any non-native cause. Mr. Scott was enchanted to learn that his visitor was "a Jew who hated Russia" (Russia, England's ally, at that moment was saving the British and French armies in the west by attacking from the east) and at once took him to breakfast with Mr. Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Lloyd George (whom Dr. Weizmann found "extraordinarily flippant" about the war in Europe) was "warm and encouraging" about Zionism and suggested another meeting with Mr. Balfour. This ensued on December 14, 1914. Mr. Balfour, recalling the 1906 conversation, "quite nonchalantly" asked if he could help Dr. Weizmann in any practical way, receiving the answer, "Not while the guns are roaring; when the military situation becomes clearer I will come again" (Mrs. Dugdale, with whose account Dr. Weizmann's agrees: "I did not follow up this opening, the time and place were not propitious". This was the meeting at which Mr. Balfour gratuitously said that "when the guns stop firing you may get your Jerusalem").

Dr. Weizmann did not grasp eagerly at Mr. Balfour's "quite nonchalant" offer for a good reason. The Zionist headquarters at that moment was in Berlin and Dr. Weizmann's colleagues there were convinced that Germany would win the war. Before they put any cards on the table they wished to be sure about that. When, later, they resolved to stake on the Allied card, "the guns" were still "roaring". Dr. Weizmann was not deterred by thought of the carnage in Europe from "following up the opening". As he truly told Mr. Balfour (and Mr. Balfour certainly did not understand just what was in his visitor's mind), "the time... was not propitious", and Dr. Weizmann meant to wait "until the military situation becomes clearer".

Significantly, some of the men concerned in these publicly-unknown interviews seem to have sought to cover up their dates; at the time the fate of England was supposed to be their only preoccupation. I have already given one apparent instance of this: the confusion about the date of Mr. Balfour's second meeting with Dr. Weizmann, the one just described. Mr. Lloyd George, similarly, wrote that his first meeting with Dr. Weizmann occurred in 1917, when he was Prime Minister, and called it a "chance" one. Dr: Weizmann disdainfully corrected this: "actually Mr. Lloyd George's advocacy of the Jewish homeland long predated his accession to the premiership and we had several meetings in the interveningyears".

A third meeting with Mr. Balfour followed, "a tremendous talk which lasted several hours" and went off "extraordinarily well". Dr. Weizmann, once more, expressed his "hatred for Russia", England's hard-pressed ally. Mr. Balfour mildly wondered "how a friend of England could be so anti-Russian when Russia was doing so much to help England win the war". As on the earlier occasion, when he alluded to the anti-Zionist convictions of British Jews, he seems to have had no true intention to remonstrate, and concluded, "It is a great cause you are working for; you must come again and again".

Mr. Lloyd George also warned Dr. Weizmann that "there would undoubtedly be strong opposition from certain Jewish quarters" and Dr. Weizmann made his stock reply, that in fact "rich and powerful Jews were for the most part against us". Strangely, this insinuation seems greatly to have impressed the Vigorous Protestants, who were mostly rich and powerful men, and they soon became as hostile to their fellow-countrymen, the Jews of England, as their importuner, Dr. Weizmann from Russia.

Opposition to Zionism developed from another source. In the highest places still stood men who thought only of national duty and winning the war. They would not condone "hatred" of a military ally or espouse a wasteful "sideshow" in Palestine. These men were Mr. Herbert Asquith (Prime Minister), Lord Kitchener (Secretary for War), Sir Douglas Haig (who became Commander-in-Chief in France), and Sir William Robertson (Chief-of-Staff in France, later Chief of the Imperial General Staff).

Mr. Asquith was the last Liberal leader in England who sought to give "Liberalism" a meaning concordant with national interest and religious belief, as opposed to the meaning which the term has been given in the last four decades (the one attributed to it by the Protocols: "When we introduced into the State organism the poison of Liberalism its whole political complexion underwent a change; States have been seized with a mortal illness, blood-poisoning..."). With his later overthrow Liberalism, in the first sense, died in England; and in fact the party itself fell into decline and collapsed, leaving only a name used chiefly as "cover" by Communism and its legion of "utopian dreamers".

Mr. Asquith first learned of the intrigue that was brewing when he received a proposal for a Jewish state in Palestine from a Jewish minister, Mr. Herbert Samuel, who had been present at the Weizmann-Lloyd George breakfast in December 1914; these two were informed of it beforehand. Mr. Asquith wrote, "...Samuel's proposal in favour of the British annexation of Palestine, a country of the size of Wales, much of it barren mountain and part of it waterless. He thinks we might plant in this not very promising territory about three or four million Jews... I am not attracted to this proposed addition to our responsibilities... The only other partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George, and I need not say that he does not care a damn for the Jews or their part of the future..."

Mr. Asquith (who correctly summed-up Mr. Lloyd George) remained of the same opinion to the end. Ten years later, when long out of office, he visited Palestine, and wrote, "This talk of making Palestine a Jewish National Home seems to me just as fantastic as it has always been". In 1915, by his adverse response, he made himself, and his removal from office, the object of the intrigue. As long as he could he kept his country out of the Palestinian adventure; he accepted the opinion of the military leaders, that the war could only be won (if at all) on the main battlefield, in Europe.

Lord Kitchener, who held this view, was of immense authority and public popularity. The paramount military objective at that stage, he held, was to keep Russia in the war (the Zionists wanted Russia's destruction and so informed the Vigorous Protestants). Lord Kitchener was sent to Russia by Mr. Asquith in June 1916. The cruiser Hampshire, and Lord Kitchener in it, vanished. Good authorities concur that he was the one man who might have sustained Russia. A formidable obstacle, both to the world-revolution there and to the Zionist enterprise, disappeared. Probably Zionism could not have been foisted on the West, had he lived. I remember that the soldiers on the Western Front, when they heard the news, felt that they had lost a major battle. Their intuition was truer than they knew.

After that only Asquith, Robertson, Haig and the Jews of England stood between Zionism and its goal. The circle of intrigue widened. The Times and Sunday Times joined the Manchester Guardian in its enthusiasm for Zionism, and in or around the Cabinet new men added themselves to Balfour and Lloyd George. Lord Milner (about to join it) announced that "if the Arabs think that Palestine will become an Arab country they are much mistaken"; at that moment Colonel Lawrence was rousing the Arabs to revolt against an enemy of the Allies, the Turk. Mr. Philip Kerr (Later Lord Lothian, at that time Mr. Lloyd George's amanuensis) decided that "a Jewish Palestine" must come out of the chastisement of "the mad dog in Berlin" (as the Kaiser was depicted to "the mob"). Sir Mark Sykes, Chief Secretary of the War Cabinet, was "one of our greatest finds" (Dr. Weizmann), and broadened the idea into "the liberation of the Jews, the Arabs and the Armenians".

By means of such false suggestions is "the multitude" ever and again "persuaded". The Arabs and Armenians were where they always had been and did not aspire to be removed elsewhither. The Jews in Europe were as free or unfree as other men; the Jews of Palestine had demonstrated their eagerness to go to Uganda, the Jews of Europe and America wanted to stay where they were, and only the Judaized Khazars of Russia, under their Talmudic directors, wanted possession of Palestine. Sir Mark's invention of this formula was one more misfortune for posterity, for it implied that the Palestinian adventure was but one of several, all akin. Unlike the other Vigorous Protestants, he was an expert in Middle Eastern affairs and must have known better.

Another recruit, Lord Robert Cecil, also used this deceptive formula, "Arabia for the Arabs, Judea for the Jews, Armenia for the Armenians" (Armenian liberation was quite lost sight of in the later events), and his case also is curious, for statesmanship is inborn in the Cecils. Zionism had strange power to produce aberrations in wise men. Mr. Balfour (a half Cecil) had a Cecilian wisdom in other matters; he produced a paper on the reorganization of Europe after the war which stands today as a model of prudent statesmanship, whereas in the question of Zionism he was as a man drugged.

Lord Cecil's case is similarly unaccountable. I remember a lecture he gave in Berlin (in the 1930's) about the League of Nations. Tall, stooped, hawk-visaged, ancestrally gifted, he uttered warnings about the future as from some mountain-top of revelation, and sepulchrally invoked "the Hebrew prophets". As a young journalist I was much impressed without comprehending what he meant. Today, when I have learned a little, it is still mysterious to me; if Jeremiah, for instance, was anything he was an anti-Zionist.

Yet Dr. Weizmann says specifically of Lord Robert, "To him the re-establishment of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine and the organisation of the world in a great federation were complementary features of the next step in the management of human affairs... One of the founders of the League of Nations, he considered the Jewish Homeland to be of equal importance with the League itself.

Here the great secret is out; but did Lord Robert discern it? The conquest of Palestine for the Zionists from Russia was but "the next step" in "the management of human affairs" (Lord Acton's dictum about "the design" and "the managers" recurs to mind). The "world federation" is depicted as a concurrent part of the same plan. The basic theory of that league, in its various forms, has proved to be that nations should surrender their sovereignty, so that separate nationhood will disappear (this, of course, is also the basic principle of the Protocols). But if nations are to disappear, why should the process of their obliteration begin with the creation of one new nation, unless it is to be the supreme authority in "the management of human affairs" (this conception of the one supreme nation runs alike through the Old Testament, the Talmud, the Protocols and literal Zionism).

Thus Lord Robert's espousal of Zionism becomes incomprehensible, for his inherited wisdom made him fully aware of the perils of world-despotism and at that very period he wrote to Mr. House in America:

"That we ought to make some real effort to establish a peace machinery when this war is over, I have no doubt... One danger seems to me to be that too much will be aimed at Nothing did more harm to

the cause of peace than the breakdown of the efforts after Waterloo in this direction. It is now generally forgotten that the Holy Alliance was originally started as a league to Enforce 'Peace. Unfortunately, it allowed its energies to be diverted in such a way that it really became a league to uphold tyranny, with the consequence that it was generally discredited, besides doing infinite harm in other ways... The example shows how easily the best intended schemes may come to grief.

The quotation shows that Lord Cecil should have been aware of the danger of "diverting energies"; it also shows that he misunderstood the nature of Zionism, if the opinion attributed to him by Dr. Weizmann is correct. When he wrote these words, a new '"League to Enforce Peace" was being organized in America by Mr. House's own brother-in-law. Dr. Mezes; it was the precursor of the various world-government flotations that have followed, in which the intention of powerful groups to set up "a league to uphold tyranny" in the world has been plainly revealed.

Thus, as the second twelvemonth of the First World War ended, the Vigorous Protestants, who looked toward Palestine, not Europe, were a numerous band of brothers, husking the Russian-Zionist core. Messrs. Leopold Amery, Ormsby-Gore and Ronald Graham joined the "friends" above named. Zionism had its foot in every department of government save the War Office. Whatever the original nature of their enthusiasm for Zionism, material rewards at this stage undeniably beckoned; the intrigue was aimed at dislodging men from office and taking their places.

The obstructive prime minister, Mr. Asquith, was removed at the end of 1916. The pages of yesterday now reveal the way this was done, and the passage of time enables the results to be judged. The motive offered to the public masses was that Mr. Asquith was ineffective in prosecuting the war. The sincerity of the contention may be tested by what followed; the first act of his successors was to divert forces to Palestine and in the sequence to that Mr. Lloyd George nearly lost the war entirely.

On November 25, 1916 Mr. Lloyd George recommended that his chief retire from the chairmanship of the War Council in favour of Mr. Lloyd George. Normally such a demand would have been suicidal, but this was a coalition government and the Liberal Mr. Lloyd George was supported in his demand by the Conservative leaders, Mr. Bonar Law and Sir Edward Carson, so that it was an ultimatum. (These two presumably had honest faith in Mr. Lloyd George's superior abilities; they cannot be suspected of Tory duplicity deep enough to foresee that he would ultimately destroy the Liberal Party!)

Mr. Lloyd George also required that the incompetent (and Conservative) Mr. Balfour be ousted from the First Lordship of the Admiralty. The Liberal prime minister indignantly refused either to surrender the War Council or to dismiss Mr. Balfour (December 4). He then received Mr. Balfour's resignation, whereon he at once sent Mr. Balfour a copy of his own letter refusing to dismiss Mr. Balfour. Thereon Mr. Balfour, though kept indoors by a bad cold, found strength to send another letter in which he insisted on resigning, as Mr. Lloyd George had demanded, and Mr. Lloyd George also resigned:

Mr. Asquith was left alone. On December 6 Mr. Balfour (resigned at Mr. Lloyd George's dictate) felt well enough to receive Mr. Lloyd George. That afternoon the party leaders met and announced that they would gladly serve under Mr. Balfour. Mr. Balfour declined but offered gladly to serve under Mr. Lloyd George. Mr. Lloyd George then became Prime Minister and appointed the incompetent Mr. Balfour Foreign Secretary. Thus the two men privily committed to support Zionism moved into the highest political offices and from that moment the energies of the British Government were directed to the procurement of Palestine for the Zionists above all other purposes. (In 1952 I read a letter in the Jewish journal Commentary, of New York, intimating that the Jews of North Wales had by their votes played the decisive part in effecting Mr. Lloyd George's election. I am credibly informed, also, that in his attorney's practice he received much Zionist business, but cannot myself vouch for that. In his case the explanation of venal motives cannot be discounted, in my judgment; the inaccuracy of his statements about his relations with Zionism, which Dr. Weizmann twice corrects, is suggestive).

Thus the central figures on the stage regrouped themselves. Mr. Lloyd George, a small, smart-lawyer in a cutaway among taller colleagues, many still in the old frock coat, looked like a cocksparrow among crows. Beside him stood Mr. Balfour, tall, limp, ever ready with a wearily cynical answer to an honest question, given to a little gentle tennis; I see him now, strolling dreamily across Saint James's Park to the House. Around these two, the Greek chorus of cabinet ministers, junior ministers and high officials who had discovered their Vigorous Protestantism. Some of these fellow-travellers of Zion may have been honestly deluded, and not have realized in what chariot they rode. Mr. Lloyd George was the first major figure in a long line of others who knew a band-wagon when they saw one; through them the innocent words, "twentieth century politician", gained an ominous meaning and the century owes much of its ordeal to them.

As to the diversion of British military strength to an alien purpose, one stout resistant alone remained after the death of Lord Kitchener and removal of Mr. Asquith. The sturdy figure of Sir William Robertson faced the group around Mr. Lloyd George. Had he joined it, he could have had titles, receptions, freedoms, orders, gilt boxes, and ribbons down to his waistbelt; he could have had fortunes for "the rights" of anything he wrote (or any ghost for him); he could have had boulevards named after him and have paraded through cheering cities in Europe and America; he could have had Congress and the House of Commons rise to him and have entered Jerusalem on a white horse. He did not even receive a peerage, and is rare among British field marshals in this.

He was the only man ever to have risen to that highest rank from private. In England of the small professional army this was a great achievement. He was simple, honest, heavy, rugged in feature; he was of the people and looked like a handsome sergeant-major. His only support, in his struggle, lay in the commander in France, Sir Douglas Haig, who was of the cavalry officer caste, goodlooking and soldierly, the private soldier's ideal of what an officer should bee. Robertson, the gruff old soldier, had (reluctantly) to attend some of the money-raising festivities with which society ladies, in wartime, keep themselves occupied, and at one such saw Lady Constance Stewart Richardson, who felt moved to perform dances in the draperies and manner of Isadora Duncan. A general, noticing Robertson's impatience, said, "You must admit she has a very fine leg". "Umph, just like any other damn leg", growled Robertson.

On this last man felt the task of thwarting the diversion of British armies to Palestine, if he could. He considered all proposals exclusively in their military bearing on the war and victory; if it would help win the war, motive was to him indifferent; if it would not, he opposed it without regard for any other consideration. On that basis he decided that the Zionist proposal was for a dangerous "sideshow" which could only delay and imperil victory. He never discussed and may not even have suspected any political implications; these were irrelevant to him.

He had told Mr. Asquith in 1915, "Obviously the most effective method" (of defeating the Central Powers) "is to defeat decisively the main German armies, which are still on the Western Front". Therefore he counselled urgently a.ga.mst,"auxiliary campaigns in minor theatres and the depletion of the forces in France... The one touchstone by which all plans and proposals must be tested is their bearing on the object of the war".

Peoples engaged in war, are fortunate if their leaders reason like this, and unfortunate if they deviate from this reasoning. By that conclusive logic the Palestinian enterprise (a political one) was out. When Mr. Lloyd George became prime minister he at once bent all his efforts on diverting strength to a major campaign in Palestine: "When I formed my government I at once raised with the War Office the question of a further campaign into Palestine. Sir William Robertson, who was most anxious to avert the danger of any troops being sent from France to Palestine... strongly opposed this and for the time being won his point".

Sir William Robertson corroborates: "Up to December 1916" (when Mr. Lloyd George became prime minister) "operations beyond the Suez Canal had been essentially defensive in principle, the government and General Staff alike... recognising the paramount importance of the struggle in Europe and the need to give the armies there the utmost support. This unanimity between ministers and soldiers did not obtain after the premiership changed hands... The fundamental difference of opinion was particularly obtrusive in the case of Palestine... The new War Cabinet had been in existence only a few days when it directed the General Staff to examine the possibility of extending the operations in Palestine... The General Staff put the requirements at three additional divisions and these could only be obtained from the armies on the Western Front... The General Staff said the project would prove a great source of embarrassment and injure our prospects of success in France... These conclusions were disappointing to Ministers,... who wished to see Palestine occupied at once, but they could not be refuted... In February the War Cabinet again approached the Chief of the General Staff, asking what progress was being made with the preparation of an autumn campaign in Palestine".

These passages show how the course of State policy and of military operations in war may be "deflected" by political pressure behind the scenes. In this case, the issue of the battle between the politicians and the soldier affects the lives of nations at the present time, the 1950's.

Mr. Lloyd George then reinforced himself by a move which once more shows the long thought that must have gone into the preparation of this enterprise, and the careful selection of "administrators", to support it, that must have gone before. He proposed that the War Cabinet "take the Dominions into counsel in a much larger measure than hitherto in the prosecution of the war". Put in that way, the idea appealed greatly to the public masses in England. Fighting-men from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were campaigning shoulder to shoulder with their own sons. The immediate response of the overseas countries to the "old country's" danger had touched the native Briton's heart, and he was very happy that their leaders should join more closely with his own in "prosecuting the war".

However, "the diplomat's word" (and his intention) differed greatly from his deed; Mr. Lloyd George's proposal was merely a "cover" for bringing to London General Smuts from South Africa, who was regarded by the Zionists as their most valuable "friend" outside Europe and America, and General Smuts was brought across to propose the conquest of Palestine!

The voting-population in South Africa is so equally divided between Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans that the "fluctuating 20 percent" was, if anything, more decisive there than in America. The Zionists felt able, and possibly General Smuts believed they were able, to "deliver" an election-winning vote. One of his colleagues, a Mr. B.K. Long (a Smuts Member of Parliament and earlier of the London Times) wrote that "the substantial Jewish vote, which was firmly loyal to Smuts and his party", greatly helped him to such electoral victories. His biography mentions a large legacy from "a rich and powerful Jew" (an example of the falsity of Dr. Weizmann's charge against rich and powerful Jews; apropos, the same Sir Henry Strakosch bequeathed a similar gift to Mr. Winston Churchill) and gifts from some unnamed quarter of a house and car. Thus the party-political considerations which weighed with him were similar to those of Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. House and later others, and material factors are reasonably apparent in his case.

However, the religious (or pseudo-religious) motive is frequently invoked in his biographies (as it was sometimes claimed by Mr. Lloyd George). They state that he preferred the Old Testament to the New, and quote him as saying, "The older I get the more of an Hebraist I become". I met him many years later, when I knew how important a part he played in this earlier story. He was then (1948) much troubled about the declining situation in the world, and the explosive part of Palestine in it. He was of fine appearance, fit and erect when nearly eighty, keen-eyed, and wore a litde beard. He was ruthless and on occasion could have been depicted in a cruel light (had the mass-newspapers been arrayed against instead of behind him) and his political astuteness equalled Mr. Lloyd George's. Propaganda portrayed him as the great architect of Anglo-Boer reconciliation; when he died at his lonely Transvaal farm the two races were more at variance than ever, so that true reconciliation remained for later generations to effect. In South Africa he was a divisive force and all knew that the real power behind his party was that of the gold and diamond mining group, not of England; Johannesburg was the base of his political strength. In 1948, when the test came, he was the first to support Zionism against a hard-pressed British Government.

On March 17, 1917 General Smuts reached London, amid unprecedented ovations, and the overthrow of Sir William Robertson at last loomed near. General Smuts's triumphant reception was an early example of the now familiar "build-up" of selected public figures by a push-button press. The method, in another form, is known among the primitive peoples of his native Africa, where "M'Bongo", the Praisemaker, stalks before the chief, proclaiming him "Great Elephant, Earth Shaker, Stabber of Heaven" and the like.

General Smuts was presented to the Imperial War Cabinet as "one of the most brilliant generals of the war" (Mr. Lloyd George). General Smuts had in fact conducted a small colonial campaign in South West Africa, and when he was summoned to London was waging an uncompleted one in East Africa against "a small but efficiently bush-trained army of 2,000 German officers and 20,000 native askaris" (his son, Mr. J.C. Smuts). The tribute thus was generous (Mr. Lloyd George's opinion of professional soldiers was low: "There is no profession where experience and training count less in comparison with judgment and flair").

By that time, the better to seclude themselves from "the generals" (other than General Smuts) Mr. Lloyd George and his small war-waging committee had taken a private house "where they sit twice a day and occupy their whole time with military policy, which is my job; a little body of politicians, quite ignorant of war and all its needs, are trying to run the war themselves" (Sir William Robertson). To this cloistered body, in April 1917, General Smuts by invitation presented his recommendations for winning the war. It was couched in this form: "The Palestine campaign presents very interesting military and even political possibilities... There remains for consideration the far more important and complicated question of the Western Front... have always looked on it as a misfortune... that the British forces have become so entirely absorbed by this front". (When this advice was tendered Russia was in collapse, the transfer of German armies to the Western Front was an obvious and imminent event, and the threat to that front had suddenly increased to the size of a deadly peril).

This recommendation gave Mr. Lloyd George the high military support (from East Africa) which he needed, and he at once had the War Cabinet order the military commander in Egypt to attack towards Jerusalem. General Murray objected that his forces were insufficient and was removed. Thereon the command was offered to General Smuts, whom Mr. Lloyd George considered "likely to prosecute a campaign in that quarterwith great determination".

Sir William Robertson then won his greatest victory of the war. He had a talk with General Smuts. His visitor's qualities as a general can never be estimated because he never had an opportunity to test them, in the small campaigns in which he served. His qualities as a politician, however, are beyond all doubt; he was the wariest of men, and strongly averse to exchanging the triumphs of London for the risk of a fiasco in the field which might destroy his political future in South Africa. Therefore, after his talk with Sir William Robertson, he declined Mr. Lloyd George's offer. (As events turned out he would have been spared the fiasco, but that was unforeseeable, and thus one more conqueror missed the chance of entering Jerusalem on a charger. As politicians habitually love such moments, despite the comic aspect which time often gives them, he later regretted this: "To have entered Jerusalem! What a memory!"). At the time he told Mr. Lloyd George, "My strong conviction is that our present military situation does not really justify an offensive campaign for the capture of Jerusalem and the occupation of Palestine".

Mr. Lloyd George was not to be deterred even by this volte-face, or by the collapse of Russia and the new danger in the West. In September 1917 he decided that "the requisite troops for a big campaign in Palestine could be spared from the Western Front during the winter of 1917-1918 and could complete the task in Palestine in time to be back in France for the opening of active work in the spring".

Only God can have preserved Mr. Lloyd George's fellow countrymen from the full penalties of this decision. The war could not be won in Palestine; it still could be lost in France, and the danger was grave. But Mr. Lloyd George, failed even by General Smuts, had found military support at last, for at this moment another figure, crying "mud-months", advanced from the wings of the central stage.

This was one Sir Henry Wilson, who thus portrays himself during a wartime mission to Russia in January 1917: "Gala dinner at the Foreign Office... I wore the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour and the Star and Necklace of the Bath, also Russian shoulder-straps and grey astrakhan cap, and altogether I was a fine picture of a man. I created quite a sensation at the Foreign Office dinner and the reception afterwards. I was much taller than the Grand Duke Serge and altogether a 'notable', as I was told. Superb!"

To this man, posturing against the tragic Russian background, Mr. Lloyd George and Zionism owed their golden opportunity, arrived at last, and England very nearly a catastrophe. Sir Henry Wilson was very tall, thin, smooth and smiling; one of those dapper, polished-leather-bound, red-tabbed, beribboned and brass-edged elegants of the Staff who discouraged the muddied, trenchweary soldiers in France. He spoke native French (by the chance of a French governess) and on this account "Henri" was beloved by the French generals, who thought him refreshingly free from English stiffness (indeed, he was an Irishman and on Irish questions disagreed with other Irishmen, by two of whom he was shot on his London doorstep in 1922, they being hanged).

Sir Henry earlier had agreed with all other military leaders about the paramountcy of the main front and the madness of wasteful "sideshows" and excelled others in the vigour with which he stated this principle: "The way to end this war is to kill Germans, not Turks... The place where we can kill most Germans is here" (France) "and therefore every pound of ammunition we have in the world ought to come here. All history shows that operations in a secondary and ineffectual theatre have no bearing on major operations except to weaken the forces there engaged" (1915).

No staff graduate, or any fighting private, would dispute that. Sir Henry cannot by 1917 have discovered any military reason to abandon this basic principle of war for its opposite. The explanation of his volt-face can only be the obvious one. He had observed the rise of Zion and the nature of Mr. Lloyd George's dispute with his own chief, Sir William Robertson. Sir Henry saw the way to occupy Sir William's shoes. Hence Dr. Weizmann's account of his "discoveries of friends" at that period include an allusion to the "sympathy" of General Wilson, "a great friend of Lloyd George". On August 23, 1917 Sir Henry reported to Mr. Lloyd George "the strong belief that if a really good scheme was thoroughly well worked out, we could clear the Turks out of Palestine and very likely knock them completely out during the mud-months without in any way interfering with Haig's operations next spring and winter" (in France).

In this report Mr. Lloyd George at long last found the support he needed for his order of September 1917, quoted six paragraphs back. He seized on the alluring phrase "mud-months"; it gave him a military argument! General Wilson explained to him that these "mud-months" in France, which by bogging down the armies would preclude a major German offensive while they continued, comprized "five months of mud and snow from the middle of November to the middle of April" (1918). On this counsel Mr. Lloyd George founded his decision to take from France "the requisite troops for a big campaign in Palestine" and to have them back in France in time for any emergency there. As to that, General Wilson, alone among military leaders, advised Mr. Lloyd George that the big German attack probably would never happen (it came in the middle of March).

Sir William Robertson vainly pointed out that the time-table was illusory; the movement of armies entailed major problems of transport and shipping, and by the time the last divisions landed in Palestine the first ones would be re-embarking! In October he again warned that troops taken from France could not be back there in time for summer fighting: "the right military course to pursue is to act on the defensive in Palestine... and continue to seek a decision in the West... all reserves should be sent to the Western Front".

At that fateful instant chance, ever the arch-conspirator in this story, struck in favour of the Zionists. Cabinet Ministers in London (who apparently had almost forgotten the Western Front) were badgering Sir William Robertson to "give us Jerusalem as a Christmas box" (the phrase appears to reveal again the "extraordinary flippancy" about the war which Dr. Weizmann earlier attributed to Mr. Lloyd George). In Palestine General Allenby, under similar pressure, made a probing advance, found to his surprise that the Turks offered little opposition, and without much difficulty marched into Jerusalem.

The prize was of no military value, in the total sum of the war, but Mr. Lloyd George thenceforward was not to be restrained. Troops were diverted from France without regard to what impended there. On January 6, 1918 Sir Douglas Haig complained of the weakening of his armies in France on the eve of the greatest battle; he was "114,000 infantry down". On January 10,1918 the War Office was forced to issue orders to reduce all divisions from 12 to 9 battalions of infantry.

A free press might at that period have given Sir William Robertson the backing he needed, in public opinion, to avert all this. He was denied that, too, for at that stage the state of affairs foretold by the Protocols of 1905 was being brought about: "We must compel the governments... to take action in the direction favoured by our widely-conceived plan... by what we shall represent as public opinion, secretly prompted by us through the means of that so-called 'Great Power', the Press, which, with a few exceptions that may be disregarded, is already entirely in our hands". Writers of great repute were ready to inform the public of the imminent danger; they were not allowed to speak.

Colonel Repington, of The Times, was the best-known military writer of that day; his reputation in this field was the highest in the world. He noted in his diary, "This is terrible and will mean the reduction of our infantry in France by a quarter and confusion in all our infantry at the moment of coming crisis, I have never felt so miserable since the war began... I can say very little because the editor of The Times often manipulates my criticisms or does not publish them...If The Times does not return to its independent line and act as watchdog of the public I shall wash my hands of it".

When the fulfilment of his warnings was at hand, Sir William Robertson was removed. Mr. Lloyd George, resolved to obtain authority for his Palestinian adventure, put his plan to the Supreme War Council of the Allies at Versailles, whose technical advisers, in January 1918, approved it "subject to the Western Front being made secure". Sir William Robertson, at M. Clemenceau's request, restated his warning that it would mortally endanger the Western Front. When the meeting broke up Mr. Lloyd George angrily rebuked him and he was at once supplanted by Sir Henry Wilson.

Before he left his post he used his last moments in it to make a final attempt to avert the coming disaster. He went (also in January) to Paris to ask help from General Pershing, the American commander, in replenishing the depleted front (only four and a half American divisions then had reached France). General Pershing, a soldier true to his duty, made the reply which Sir William expected and would himself have made in General Pershing's place: "He shrewdly observed that it was difficult to reconcile my request for assistance in defence of the Western Front with Mr. George 's desire to act offensively in Palestine. There was, unfortunately, no answer to that argument, except that, so far as I was personally concerned, not a man or gun would be sent to Palestine from anywhere".

After that Sir William Robertson was no longer "concerned". His account differs from the memoirs of Mr. Lloyd George and other politicians in that it shows no rancour; his sole theme is duty. Of his treatment he merely says, "It had frequently been my unpleasant duty during 1917 to object to military enterprises which the Prime Mnister wished the army to carry out and this opposition had doubtless determined him to try another Chief of the Imperial General Staff... On the point of supersession, therefore, there was nothing to say and I said nothing". Thus an admirable man passes from this story of many lesser men, but his work endured, because, up to the time of his dismissal, he may have saved just enough men and guns for the crumbling line to hold at the last extremity, in March, as a rending hawser may hold by a single thread.

When he was gone two men outside the government and army continued the struggle, and their efforts deserve record because theirs were among the last attempts to preserve the principle of free, independent and vigilant reporting. Colonel Repington was a former cavalry officer, an admirer of pretty women, a lover of good talk, a beau sabreur. His diaries give a lasting picture of the frothy life of the drawing-rooms that went on while armies fought in France and in London intriguers conspired in the political antechambers. He enjoyed it and although he felt its incongruity he realized that gloom alone was no remedy. He was as honest and patriotic as Robertson, and incorruptible; lavish offers (which might have lured him into silence, and possibly were so intended) had no effect on him.

He wrote, "We are feeding over a million men into the sideshow theatres of war and are letting down our strengths in France at a moment when all the Boche forces from Russia may come against us... I am unable to get the support from the editor of The Times that I must have to rouse the country and I do not think I will be able to go on with him much longer". (I discovered Colonel Repington's diaries through my work on this book and then realized that his experience was identical with mine, just twenty years later, with the same editor). A month later he wrote, "In a stormy interview I told Mr. Geoffrey Dawson that his subservience to the War Cabinet during this year was largely the cause of the dangerous position of our army... I would have nothing more to do with The Times".

This left one man in England who was able and willing to publish the truth. Mr. H.A. Gwynne, of the Morning Tost, printed Colonel Repington's article, which exposed the weakening of the French front on the eve of its attack, without submitting it to the censor. He and Colonel Repington then were prosecuted, tried and fined (public opinion was apparently too much on their side for harshe retribution). Sir William Robertson wrote to Colonel Repington, "Like yourself, I did what was best in the general interests of the country and the result has been exacdy what I expected... But the great thing is to keep on a straight course and then one may be sure that good will eventually come of what may now seem to be evil".*

* In the sequel to all this Sir Edward Carson, who had unwittingly helped Mr. Lloyd George into the premiership, resigned from the government and told the editor of The Times that it was but Mr. Lloyd George's mouthpiece, the Morning Post being the truly independent paper. Mr. Gwynne told Colonel Repington that the government wished to destroy the Morning Post "as it is one of the few independent papers left". Before the Second War came it 'was "destroyed", as already related. After that only one weekly publication survived in England which, in my opinion, for many years sought to uphold the principle of impartial and independent reporting, but in 1953 Truth too, was by a change of ownership brought into line.

Thus the two wartime years of Mr. Lloyd George's leadership in England were momentous in their effects on the present time, and I believe I have shown how he achieved office and what paramount purpose he pursued through it. After eighteen months he had overcome all opposition, diverted a mass of men from France to Palestine, and was ready at last for the great venture.

On March 7, 1918 he gave orders for "a decisive campaign" to conquer all Palestine, and sent General Smuts there to instruct General Allenby accordingly.

On March 21, 1918 the long-awaited German attack in France began, embodying all the men, guns and aircraft released from the Russian front.

The "decisive campaign" in Palestine was immediately suspended and every man who could be squeezed out of Palestine was rushed to France. The total number of men employed in Palestine was 1,192,511 up to October 1918 (General Robertson).

On March 27, 1918 Colonel Repington wrote, "This is the worst defeat in the history of the army". By June 6 the Germans claimed 1 75,000 prisoners and over 2,000 guns.

At that point the truth was shown of the last words above quoted from Sir William Robertson's letter to Colonel Repington, and they are of continuing hopeful augury to men of goodwill today. By keeping on a straight course he had saved enough for the line to hold, at breaking point, until the Americans began to arrive in strength. Therewith the war was virtually at an end. Clearly, if Russia had been sustained, the Palestinian excursion avoided, and strength concentrated in France it could have been concluded earlier, and probably without the "entanglement" of America. However, that would not have furthered the great plan for "the management of human affairs".

At this point in the tale I write with the feelings of a participant, and they probably influence what I have written of the long earlier story, because the effects, as I have seen them in my generation, appear to me to be bad. I recall the great German attack of March 21, 1918; I saw it from the air and on the ground and was in the fighting for the first month, until I was removed by stretcher. I remember Sir Douglas Haig's order, that every man must fight and die where he stood; it was posted on the walls of my squadron's mess. I have no complaints about the experience, and would not delete it from my life if I could. Now that I have come to see by what ulterior means and motives it was all brought about, I think coming generations might be a little better able to keep Sir William Robertson's "straight course", and so to ensure that good will eventually come of what seems to them to be evil, if they know a little more of what went on then and has continued since. This is my reason for writing the present book.

As a result of the victory in Europe the coveted territory in Palestine was at length acquired. But it is one thing to acquire land and another to build something on it. On this land a Zionist "homeland" was to be erected, then a "state" (and last a "commonwealth"?). None of these things could be done by England alone. No precedent existed for the donation of Arabian territory, by a European conqueror, to an Asiatic beneficiary. For such a transaction other nations had to be co-opted, many nations, and a company promoted, so that it might be given the semblance of honest business. In fact, a "league of nations" was required, and America, above all, had to be "entangled". This other part of the plan was also in preparation; while British armies seized the tract of land desired, the smart lawyers had been looking for ways to amend the rightful title deeds to it, float a company and generally promote the undertaking.

Mr. Lloyd George had served his turn and his day was nearly done. The reader may now turn his eyes across the Atlantic and see what Mr. House, Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise have been up to. A Mr. Woodrow Wilson plays a shadowy part in these proceedings.

[ht=toc31]Chapter 31. THE WEB OF INTRIGUE[/h4]

Such words as "conspiracy" and "intrigue", often used in this narrative, are not original with me; they come from authoritative sources. Mr. Arthur D. Howden, who wrote his biography in consultation with the man depicted, supplies the chapter title above; he describes the process of which Mr. House was (in America) the centre during the 1914-1918 war in the words, "a web of intrigue was spun across the Atlantic".

In England the Lloyd George government and in America the president were at first separately enmeshed. Between 1914 and 1917 these "webs" in London and Washington were joined together by the transoceanic threads which Mr. Howden depicts in the spinning. Thereafter the two governments were caught in the same web and have never since freed themselves from it.

In President Wilson's America the real president was Mr. House ("liaison officer between the Wilson administration and the Zionist movement", Rabbi Wise). Mr. Justice Brandeis, who had decided to "give his life" to Zionism, was the president's "adviser on the Jewish question" (Dr. Weizmann); this is the first appearance in the Presidential household of an authority theretofore unknown in it and now apparently permanent. The chief Zionist organizer was Rabbi Wise, constantly in touch with the two other men.

Mr. House (and Mr. Bernard Baruch), chose the president's cabinet officers, so that one of them had to introduce himself to Mr. Wilson thus: "My name is Lane, Mr. President, I believe I am the Secretary of the Interior". The president lived at the White House in Washington but was frequently seen to visit a small apartment in East 35th Street, New York, where a Mr. House lived. In time this led to pointed questions and one party-man was told, "Mr. House is my second personality; he is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one". Mr. House was often in Washington, where he conducted the president's interviews and correspondence, and, stopping cabinet officers outside the cabinet room, instructed them what to say inside it. Even from New York he directed America by means of private telephone lines linking him with Washington: "it is only necessary to lift off the receiver and I reach the Secretary of State's desk immediately".

The president's assent to acts of State policy was not required. Mr. House "did not expect affirmative commendation... if the President did not object, I knew that it was safe to go ahead". Thus Mr. Wilson had to express dissent, to delay or amend any action (and immediately after election he had been made to promise "not to act independently in future").

In 1914 Mr. House, who in 1900 had resolved to extend his power from Texan to national politics, prepared to take over international affairs: "he wanted to exercise his energy in a broader field... From the beginning of 1914 he gave more and more thought to what he regarded as the highest form of politics and that for which he was peculiarly suited: international affairs". In fact, Texan upbringing did not so qualify Mr. House. In Texas the words "international affairs' had, in the public mind, a sound akin to "skunk", and there, more than anywhere in America, "the traditions of the 19th century still held the public mind; traditions which laid down, as the primary principle of American policy, a complete abstention from the political affairs of Europe" (Mr. Seymour). Mr. House, who somewhere in Texas had absorbed "the ideas of the revolutionaries of 1848" was to destroy that tradition, but this did not prove him "peculiarly suited" to intervene in "international affairs".

Mr. House was of different type from the languid Mr. Balfour, with his background of Scottish hills and mists, and Mr. Lloyd George, the Artful Dodger of Zionism from Wales, but he acted as if he and they had together graduated from some occult academy of political machination. In 1914 he began to appoint American ambassadors (as he says) and made his first calls on European governments as "a personal friend of the President".

Mr. Seymour, his editor, says: "It would be difficult in all history to find another instance of diplomacy so unconventional and so effective. Colonel House, a private citizen, spreads all the cards on the table and concerts with the Ambassador of a foreign power the despatches to be sent to the American Ambassador and Foreign Minister of that power". Mr. Howden, his confidant, expatiates: "Mr. House had the initiative in what was done... The State Department was relegated to the status of an intermediary for his ideas, a depository of public records. Much of the more confidential diplomatic correspondence passed directly through the little apartment in East 35th Street. The Ambassadors of the belligerents called on him when they wanted to influence the Administration or sought assistance in the web of intrigue that was being spun across the Atlantic".

Mr. House: "The life I am leading transcends in interest and excitement any romance... Information from every quarter of the globe pours into this little, unobtrusive study". Mr. Seymour again: "Cabinet members in search of candidates, candidates in search of positions made of his study a clearing house. Editors and journalists sought his opinion and despatches to the foreign press were framed almost at his dictation. United States Treasury officials, British diplomats... and metropolitan financiers came to his study to discuss their plans".

A rising man across the Atlantic also was interested in "financiers". Mrs. Beatrice Webb says that Mr. Winston Churchill, somewhat earlier, at a dinner party confided to her that "he looks to haute finance to keep the peace and for that reason objects to a self-contained Umpire as he thinks it would destroy this cosmopolitan capitalism, the cosmopolitan financier being the professional peacemaker of the modern world and to his mind the acme of civilization". Later events did not support this notion that leading financiers ("metropolitan" or "cosmopolitan") were "professional peacemakers".

Such was the American picture, behind-the-scenes in 1915 and 1916. The purpose of the ruling group whose web now began to span the Atlantic is shown by the events which followed. Mr. Asquith was overthrown in the pretext that his incompetency imperilled victory; Mr. Lloyd George risked total defeat by diverting armies to Palestine. Mr. Wilson was re-elected in the pretext that he, in the old tradition, would "keep America out of the war"; elected, at once involved America in the war. "The diplomat' s word" and his "deed" were different.

Mr. House privately "concluded that war with Germany is inevitable" on May 30, 191 5, and in June 1916 devised the election- winning slogan for Mr. Wilson's second campaign: "He kept us out of the war". Rabbi Stephen Wise, before the election, supported Mr. House's efforts: in letters to the President the rabbi "deplored his advocacy of a preparedness programme" and from public platforms he preached against war. All went as planned: "the House strategy worked perfectly" (Mr. Howden), and Mr. Wilson was triumphantly re-elected.

Mr. Wilson seems at that point to have believed the words put into his mouth. Immediately after the election he set up as a peacemaker and drafted a note to the belligerents in which he used the phrase, "the causes and objects of the war are obscure". This was a culpable act of "independence" on the president's part, and Mr. House was furious. The harassed president amended the phrase to "the objects which the statesmen and the belligerents on both sides have in mind in this war are virtually the same". This made Mr. House even angrier, and Mr. Wilson's efforts to expose the nature of "the web" in which he was caught thereon expired. He remained in ignorance of what his next act was to be for a little, informing Mr. House on January 4, 1917, "There will be no war. This country does not intend to become involved in the war... It would be a crime against civilisation for us to go in".

The power-group moved to dispel these illusions as soon as Mr. Wilson's second inauguration was safely past (January 20, 1917). Rabbi Stephen Wise informed the president of a change of mind; he was now "convinced that the time had come for the American people to understand that it might be our destiny to have part in the struggle". Mr. House (who during the "no war" election had noted, "We are on the verge of war") confided to his diary on February 12, 1917, "We are drifting into war as rapidly as I expected" (which gave a new meaning to the word "drift").

Then on March 27, 1917 President Wilson asked Mr. House "whether he should ask Congress to declare war or whether he should say that a state of war exists", and Mr. House "advised the latter", so that the American people were informed, on April 2, 1917, that a state of war existed.* Between November 1916 and April 1917, therefore, "the web of intrigue", spanning the ocean, achieved these decisive aims: the overthrow of Mr. Asquith in favour of Mr. Lloyd

* Lord Sydenham, when he wrote of the "deadly accuracy" of the forecast in the "Protocols" of about 1 900, might have had particularly in mind the passage, "... We shall invest the president with the right of declaring a state of war. We shall justify this last right on the ground that the president as chief of the whole army of the country must have it at his disposal in case of need". The situation here described became established practice during the present century. In 1950 President Truman sent American troops into Korea, "to check Communist aggression", without consulting Congress. Later this was declared to be a "United Nations" war and they were joined by troops of seventeen other countries under an American commander, General MacArthur. This was the first experiment in a "world government"-type war and its course produced Senator Taft's question of 1952. "Do we really mean our anti-Communist policy?" General MacArthur was dismissed after protesting an order forbidding him to pursue Communist aircraft into their Chinese sanctuary and in 1953, under President Eisenhower, the war was broken off, leaving half of Korea in "the aggressor's" hands. General MacArthur and other American commanders later charged that the order forbidding pursuit was made known to the enemy by "a spy ring responsible for the purloining of my top secret reports to Washington" (Life, Feb. 7, 1956), and the Chinese Communist commander confirmed this (New York Daily News, Feb. 13, 1956). In June 1951 two British Foreign Office officials, Burgess and Maclean, disappeared and in September 1955 the British Government, after refusing information for four years, confirmed the general belief that they were in Moscow and "had spied for the Soviet Union over a long period". General MacArthur then charged that these two men had revealed the non-pursuit order to the Communist "aggressor" (Life, above-quoted).

On April 4, 1956 President Eisenhower was asked by a reporter at his regular news conference whether he would order a United States marine battalion, then recently sent to the Mediterranean, into war "without asking Congress first" (by that time war in the Middle East was an obvious possibility). He answered angrily. "I have announced time and time again I will never be guilty of any kind of action that can be interpreted as war until the Congress, which has the constitutional authority". On January 3, 1957, the first major act of his second term, he sent a draft resolution to Congress designed to invest him with unlimited, standing authority to act militarily in the Middle East "to deter Communist armed aggression".

George, the commitment of British armies to the Palestinian diversion, the re-election of a president who would be constrained to support that enterprise, and the embroilment of America.

The statement of existing war made to Congress said the purpose of the war (which Mr. Wilson, a few weeks before, had declared in his draft to be "obscure") was "to set up a new international order 1'. Thus a new purpose was openly, though cryptically revealed. To the public masses the words meant anything or nothing. To the initiates they carried a commitment to support the plan, of which Zionism and Communism both were instruments, for establishing a "world federation" founded on force and the obliteration of nationhood, with the exception of one "nation" to be recreated.

From this moment the power-groups in America and England worked in perfect synchronization, so that the two stories become one story, or one "web". The apparently powerful men in Washington and London co-ordinated their actions at the prompting of the inter-communicating Zionists on both sides of the ocean. Foreknowledge of what was to happen had earlier been displayed by Dr. Weizmann in London, who in March 1915 wrote to his ally, Mr. Scott of the Manchester Guardian, that he "understood" the British Government to be willing to support Zionist aspirations at the peace conference to come (the event also foretold by Max Nordau in 1903). This was exactly what Mr. Asquith would not consider, so that Dr. Weizmann, in March 1915, was already describing Mr. Asquith's supplanters of December 1916 as "the British Government".

This "British Government", said Dr. Weizmann, would leave "the organization of the Jewish commonwealth' 'in Palestine "entirely to the care of the Jews". However, the Zionists could not possibly, even in a Palestine conquered for them, have set up "a commonwealth" against the native inhabitants. They could only do that behind the protection of a great power and its armies. Therefore Dr. Weizmann (foretelling in 1915 exactly what was to happen in 1919 and the following two decades) considered that a British "protectorate" should be set up in Palestine (to protect the Zionist intruders). This would mean, he said, that "the Jews take over the country; the whole burden of organization falls on them, but for the next ten or fifteen years they work under a temporary British protectorate".

Dr. Weizmann adds that this was "an anticipation of the mandate system", so that today's student also learns where the notion of "mandates" was born. The idea of ruling conquered territories under a "mandate" bestowed by a self-proclaimed "league of nations" was devised solely with an eye to Palestine. (Events have proved this. All the other "mandates" distributed after the 1914-1918 war, to give the appearance of a procedure generally applicable, have faded away, either by relinquishment of the territory to its inhabitants or by its conversion, in fact, into a possession of the conqueror. The concept of the "mandate" was maintained for just as long as was needed for the Zionists to amass enough arms to take possession of Palestine for themselves).

Thus, after the elevation of Mr. Lloyd George and the second election of Mr. Wilson, the shape of the future, far beyond the war's end, was fully known to Dr. Weizmann at the web's centre, who went into action.

In a memorandum to the British Government he demanded that "The Jewish population of Palestine... shall be officially recognized by the Suzerain government as the Jewish Nation", The "first full-dress conference leading to the Balfour Declaration" was then held. This committee, met to draft a British governmental document, met in a private Jewish house and consisted of nine Zionist leaders and one representative of the government concerned, Sir Mark Sykes (who attended "in his private capacity"). As a result Mr. Balfour at once arranged to go to America to discuss the matter.

Dr. Weizmann and his associates had to steer a very narrow course between two difficulties at that moment, and might have failed, had not "the web" enabled them to dictate what Mr. Balfour would be told by the men he crossed the ocean to see. The British Government, for all its zeal, took alarm at the prospect of acting as sole protector of the Zionists and wanted America to share the armed occupation of Palestine. The Zionists knew that this would violently upset American opinion, (had it come about America, from bitter experience shared, would have been much harder to win for the deed of 1948) and did not want the question of American co-occupation raised. Dr. Weizmann's misgivings were increased when, in "a long talk" he found Mr. Balfour, before his departure, eager for "an Anglo-American protectorate".

Dr. Weizmann at once wrote to Mr. Justice Brandeis warning him to oppose any such plan, but to assure Mr. Balfour of American support for the proposal of a solely British protectorate, (April 8, 1917), and this letter to Mr. Brandeis "must have reached him about the time of Balfour's arrival". Mr. Brandeis, risen to the United States Supreme Court, had retired from the public leadership of Zionism in America. In the tradition of his office, he should have remained aloof from all political affairs, but in fact, as Mr. Wilson's "adviser on the Jewish question", he informed the president that he was "in favour of a British protectorate and utterly opposed to a condominium" (that is, joint Anglo-American control).

When Mr. Balfour reached America (then in a state of "existing war" for just eighteen days) he apparently never discussed Palestine with the American President at all. Mr. Wilson's part at this stage "was limited to a humble undertaking to Rabbi Wise, "Whenever the time comes and you and Justice Brandeis feel that the time is ripe for me to speak and act, I shall be ready". By that time the rabbi had "briefed" Mr. House: "He is enlisted in our cause. There is no question about it whatever. The thing will go through Washington, I think, without delay" (April 8, 1917, six days after the "existing war" proclamation).

Mr. Balfour saw Mr. Brandeis. Clearly he might as well have stayed at home with Dr. Weizmann, as Mr. Brandeis merely repeated the contents of Dr. Weizmann's letters; Mr. Balfour simply moved from one end of "the web of intrigue" to the other. Mr. Brandeis (as Mrs. Dugdale records) "became' increasingly emphatic about the desire of the Zionists to see a British administration in Palestine", Mr. Balfour, his biographer adds, "pledged his own personal support to Zionism; he had done it before to Dr. Weizmann, but now he was British Foreign Secretary",

A later American comment on the part played by Mr. Brandeis in this affair is here relevant. Professor John O. Beaty of the Southern Methodist University of the United States says that the day when Mr. Brandeis's appointment to the Supreme Court was confirmed was "one of the most significant days in American history, for we had for the first time, since the first decade of the 19th Century, an official of the highest status whose heart ' s interest was in something besides the United States",

Mr. Brandeis "did more than press the idea of a Jewish Palestine under a British protectorate" (Dr. Weizmann). He and Mr. House issued (over the president's signature) the famous declaration repudiating secret treaties). This declaration was popular with the masses, who heard in it the voice of the Brave New World rebuking the bad old one. The words evoked pictures of becloaked diplomats climbing dark backstairs to secret chancelleries; now that America was in the war these feudal machinations would be stopped and all done above the board.

Alas for a pleasant illusion; the noble rebuke was another submission to Zionism. Turkey had still to be defeated so that the French and British governments (whose fighting men were engaged) wished to win over the Arabs and with them had made the "Sykes-Picot agreement", which foresaw an independent confederation of Arab States and, among them, an international administration for Palestine. Dr. Weizmann had learned of this agreement and saw that there could be no Zionist state if Palestine were under international control; exclusive British "protection" was essential. Pressure was applied and President Wilson's ringing denunciation of "secret treaties" was in fact aimed solely at the Arabs of Palestine and their hopes for the future. America insisted that England hold the baby.

Of this secret achievement Mr. Balfour's biographer happily records that it showed "a Jewish national diplomacy was now in being"; the words may be used as an alternative heading to this chapter, if any so desire. The British Foreign Office at last "recognized, with some slight dismay, that the British Government was virtually committed". America, though in the war, was not at war with Turkey, and yet had been secretly committed (by Mr. Brandeis) to support the transfer of Turkish territory to an outside party. Therefore American participation in the intrigue had to remain publicly unknown for the moment, though Mr. Balfour had been informed of it in imperative tones.

The summer of 1917 passed while the Balfour Declaration was prepared, America thus having become secretly involved in the Zionist adventure. The only remaining opposition, apart from that of generals and a few high Foreign Office or State Department officials, came from the Jews of England and America. It was ineffective because the leading politicians, in both countries, were even more hostile to their Jewish fellow-citizens than were the Zionists. (The part played in all this by non-Jews was so great, even if it was the part of puppets, that one is constantly reminded of the need to regard with suspicion the attribution of the Protocols to solely Jewish authorship).

In England in 1915 the Anglo-Jewish Association, through its Conjoint Committee, declared that "the Zionists do not consider civil and political emancipation as a sufficiently important factor for victory over the persecution and oppression of Jews and think that such a victory can only be achieved by establishing a legally secured home for the Jewish people. The Conjoint Committee considers as dangerous and provoking anti-semitism the 'national' postulate of the Zionists, as well as special privileges for Jews in Palestine. The Committee could not discuss the question of a British Protectorate with an international organisation which included different, even enemy elements".

In any rational time the British and American governments would have spoken thus, and they would have been supported by Jewish citizens. In 1914, however, Dr. Weizmann had written that such Jews "have to be made to realize that we and not they are the masters of the situation". The Conjoint Committee represented the Jews long established in England, but the British Government accepted the claim of the revolutionaries from Russia to be "the masters" of Jewry.

In 1917, as the irrevocable moment approached, the Conjoint Committee again declared that the Jews were a religious community and nothing more, that they could not claim "a national home", and that Jews in Palestine needed nothing more than "the assurance of religious and civil liberty, reasonable facilities for immigration and the like".

By that time such statements infuriated the embattled Gojim around Dr. Weizmann from Russia. Mr. Wickham Steed of The Times expressed "downright annoyance" after discussing "for a good hour" (with Dr. Weizmann) "the kind of leader which was likely to make the best appeal to the British public", produced "a magnificent presentation of the Zionist case".

In America, Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise were equally vigilant against the Jews there. The rabbi (from Hungary) asked President Wilson, "What will you do when their protests reach you?" For one moment only he was silent. Then he pointed to a large wastepaper basket at his desk. "Is not that basket capacious enough for all their protests?"

In England Dr. Weizmann was enraged by "outside interference, entirely from Jews". At this point he felt himself to be a member of the Government, or perhaps the member of the Government, and in the power he wielded apparently was that. He did not stop at dismissing the objections of British Jews as "outside interference"; he dictated what the Cabinet should discuss and demanded to sit in Cabinet meetings so that he might attack a Jewish minister! He required that Mr. Lloyd George put the question "on the agenda of the War Cabinet for October 4, 1917" and on October 3 he wrote to the British Foreign Office protesting against objections which he expected to be raised at that meeting "by a prominent Englishman of the Jewish faith".

Mr. Edwin Montagu was a cabinet minister and a Jew. Dr. Weizmann implicitly urged that he be not heard by his colleagues, or that if he were heard, Dr. Weizmann should be called in to reply! On the day of the meeting Dr. Weizmann appeared in the office of the prime minister's secretary, Mr. Philip Kerr (another "friend") and proposed that he remain there in case the Cabinet "decide to ask me some questions before they decide the matter". Mr. Kerr said, "Since the British Government has been a government, no private person has been admitted to one of its sessions", and Dr. Weizmann then went away.

But for that Mr. Lloyd George would have set the precedent, for Dr. Weizmann was scarcely gone when, after hearing Mr. Montagu, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Balfour sent out to ask Dr. Weizmann to come in. Mr. Montagu then succeeded, in the teeth of the Gentiles arrayed against him, in obtaining minor modifications in the draft, and Dr. Weizmann later rebuked Mr. Kerr for this petty compromise: "The Cabinet and even yourself attach undue importance to the opinion held by so-called 'British Jewry'. "Two days later (October 9) Dr. Weizmann cabled triumphantly to Mr. Justice Brandeis that the British Government had formally undertaken to establish a "national home for the Jewish race" in Palestine.

The draft experienced revealing adventures between October 9 and November 2, when it was published. It was sent to America, where it was edited by Mr. Brandeis, Mr. Jacob de Haas and Rabbi Wise before being shown to President Wilson for his "final approval". He simply sent it to Mr. Brandeis (who had already had it from Dr. Weizmann), who passed it to Rabbi Stephen Wise, "to be handed to Colonel House for transmission to the British Cabinet".

In this way one of the most fateful actions ever taken by any British Government was prepared. The draft, incorporated in a letter addressed by Mr. Balfour to Lord Rothschild, became "the Balfour Declaration". The Rothschild family, like many leading Jewish families, was sharply divided about Zionism. The name of a sympathetic Rothschild, as the recipient of the letter, was evidently used to impress Western Jewry in general, and to divert attention from the Eastern Jewish origins of Zionism. The true addressee was Dr. Weizmann. He appears to have become an habitue of the War Cabinet's antechamber and the document was delivered to him, Sir Mark Sykes informing him, "Dr. Weizmann, it's a boy!" (today the shape of the man may be seen).

No rational explanation for the action of leading Western politicians in supporting this alien enterprise has ever been given, and as the undertaking was up to that point secret and conspiratorial no genuine explanation can be given; if an undertaking is good conspiracy is not requisite to it, and secrecy itself indicates motives that cannot be divulged. If any of these men ever gave some public reason, it usually took the form of some vague invocation of the Old Testament. This has a sanctimonious ring, and may be held likely to daunt objectors. Mr. Lloyd George liked to tell Zionist visitors (as Rabbi Wise ironically records), "You shall have Palestine from Dan to Beersheba", and thus to present himself as the instrument of divine will. He once asked Sir Charles and Lady Henry to call anxious Jewish Members of Parliament together at breakfast "so that I may convince them of the rightfulness of my Zionist position". A minyan (Jewish religious quorum of ten) was accordingly assembled in the British Prime Minister's breakfast room, where Mr. Lloyd George read a series of passages which, in his opinion, prescribed the transplantation of Jews in Palestine in 1917: Then he said, "Now, gentlemen, you know What your Bible says; that is the end of the matter".

On other occasions he gave different, and mutually destructive, explanations. He told the Palestine Royal Commission of 1937 that he acted to gain "the support of American Jewry" and that he had "a definite promise" from the Zionist leaders "that if the allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause"...

This was brazen untruth at the very bar of history. America was already in the war when Mr. Balfour went there to agree the Balfour Declaration, and Mr. Balfour's biographer scouts the notion of any such bargain. Rabbi Elmer Berger, a Jewish commentator, says the alleged promise by Zionist leaders inspires in him, "...an irrepressible indignation, for myself, my family, my Jewish friends, all of whom are just ordinary Jews... it constitutes one of the most obscene libels in all history. Only callousness and cynicism could imply that Jews in the Allied nations were not already giving their utmost to the prosecution of the war".

Mr. Lloyd George's third explanation ("Acetone converted me to Zionism") is the best known. According to this version Mr. Lloyd George asked Dr. Weizmann how he could be requited for a useful chemical discovery made during the war (when Dr. Weizmann worked for the government, in any spare time left by his work for Zionism). Dr. Weizmann is quoted as replying, "I want nothing for myself, but everything for my people", whereon Mr. Lloyd George decided to give him Palestine! Dr. Weizmann himself derides this story ("History does not deal in Aladdin's lamps. Mr. Lloyd George's advocacy of the Jewish homeland long predated his accession to the premiership"). For that matter, it is British practice to make cash awards for such services and Dr. Weizmann, far from wanting nothing for himself, received ten thousand pounds. (If chemical research were customarily rewarded in land he might have claimed a minor duchy from Germany in respect of a patent earlier sold to the German Dye Trust, and presumably found useful in war as in peace; he was naturally content with the income he received from it for several years).

The conclusion cannot be escaped: if any honest explanation of his actions in this matter could be found Mr. Lloyd George would have given it. From this period in 1916-1917 the decay of parliamentary and representative government can be traced, both in England and America. If secret men could dictate major acts of American state policy and major operations of British armies, then clearly "election" and "responsible office" were terms devoid of meaning. Party distinctions began to fade in both countries, once this hidden, supreme authority was accepted by leading Western politicians, and the American and British electors began to be deprived of all true choice. Today this condition is general, and now is public. Leaders of all parties, before elections, make obeisance to Zionism, and the voter's selection of president, prime minister or party makes no true difference.

In November 1917 the American Republic thus became equally involved with Great Britain in Zionism, which has proved to be a destructive force. However, it was only one agency of "the destructive principle". The reader will recall that in Dr. Weizmann's Russian youth the mass of Jews there, under their Talmudic directors, were united in the revolutionary aim, and only divided between revolutionary-Zionism and revolutionary-Communism.

In the very week of the Balfour Declaration the other group of Jews in Russia achieved their aim, the destruction of the Russian nation-state. The Western politicians thus bred a bicephalous monster, one head being the power of Zionism in the Western capitals, and the other the power of Communism advancing from captive Russia. Submission to Zionism weakened the power of the West to preserve itself against the world-revolution, for Zionism worked to keep Western governments submissive and to deflect their policies from national interests; indeed, at that instant the cry was first raised that opposition to the world-revolution, too, was "anti-semitism". Governments hampered by secret capitulations in any one direction cannot act firmly in any other, and the timidity of London and Washington in their dealings with the world-revolution, during the four decades to follow, evidently derived from their initial submission to "the web of intrigue" spun across the Atlantic between 1914 and 1917.

After 1917, therefore, the question which the remainder of the 20th Century had to answer was whether the West could yet find in itself the strength to break free, or prise its political leaders loose, from this double thrall. In considering the remainder of this account the reader should bear in mind what British and American politicians were induced to do during the First World War.

Chapter 32. THE WORLD REVOLUTION AGAIN

The simultaneous triumphs of Bolshevism in Moscow and Zionism in London in the same week of 1917 were only in appearance distinct events, The identity of their original source has been shown in an earlier chapter, and the hidden men who promoted Zionism through the Western governments also supported the world-revolution. The two forces fulfilled correlative tenets of the ancient Law: "Pull down and destroy... rule over all nations"; the one destroyed in the East and the other secretly ruled in the West.

1917 gave proof of Disraeli's dictum about the revolution in its 1848 phase, when he said that Jews headed "every one" of the secret societies and aimed to destroy Christianity. The controlling group that emerged in 1917 was so preponderantly Jewish that it may be called Jewish. The nature of the instigating force then became a matter of historical fact, not of further polemical debate. It was further identified by its deeds: the character of its earliest enactments, a symbolic mockery of Christianity, and a special mark of authorship deliberately given to the murder of the monarch. All these bore the traits of a Talmudic vengeance.

In the forty years that have passed great efforts have been made to suppress public knowledge of this fact, which has been conclusively established, by non-sequential rebukes to any who claim to discuss history. For instance, in the 1950's an able (and deservedly respected) Jewish writer in America, Mr. George Sokolsky, in criticizing a book previously cited wrote, "It is impossible to read it without reaching the conclusion that Professor Beaty seeks to prove that Communism is a Jewish movement". In respect of the leadership it was that for a long period before 1917 (as to later and the present situation, subsequent chapters will look at the evidence). It was not a conspiracy of all Jews, but neither were the French revolution, Fascism and National Socialism conspiracies of all Frenchmen, Italians or Germans. The organizing force and the leadership were drawn from the Talmudic-controlled Jewish areas of Russia, and in that sense Communism was demonstrably Eastern Jewish.

As to the purposes revealed when the revolution struck in 1917, these showed that it was not episodic or spontaneous but the third "eruption" of the organization first revealed through Weishaupt. The two main features reappeared: the attack on all legitimate government of any kind whatsoever and on religion. Since 1917 the world-revolution has had to cast aside the earlier pretence of being directed only against "kings" or the political power of priests.

One authority of that period knew and stated this. In the tradition of Edmund Burke and John Robison, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton and Disraeli, Mr. Winston Churchill wrote:

"It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of anti-Christ were designed to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical... From the days of 'Spartacus' Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Nesta Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution... has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation oj Bolshevism and in the bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others".

This is the last candid statement (discoverable by me) from a leading public man on this question. After it the ban on public discussion came down and the great silence ensued, which continues to this day. In 1953 Mr. Churchill refused permission (requisite under English law) for a photostat to be made of this article (Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920), without saying why.

The fact of Jewish leadership was a supremely important piece of knowledge and the later suppression of it, where public debate would have been sanative, produced immense effects in weakening the West. The formulation of any rational State policy becomes impossible when such major elements of knowledge are excluded from public discussion; it is like playing billiards with twisted cues and elliptical balls. The strength of the conspiracy is shown by its success in this matter (as in the earlier period, of Messrs. Robison, Barruel and Morse) more than by any other thing.

At the time, the facts were available. The British Government's White Paper of 1919 (Russia, No. 1, a Collection of Reports on Bolshevism) quoted the report sent to Mr. Balfour in London in 1918 by the Netherlands Minister at Saint Petersburg, M. Oudendyke: "Bolshevism is organized and worked by Jews, who have no nationality and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things". The United States Ambassador, Mr. David R. Francis, reported similarly: "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and they are trying, to start a worldwide social revolution". M. Oudendyke's report was deleted from later editions of the British official publication and all such authentic documents of that period are now difficult to obtain. Fortunately for the student, one witness preserved the official record.

This was Mr. Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times, who experienced the Bolshevik revolution. The French edition of his book included the official Bolshevik lists of the membership of the ruling revolutionary bodies (they were omitted from the English edition).

These records show that the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, which wielded the supreme power, contained 3 Russiansftncluding Lenin) and 9 Jews. The next body in importance, the Central Committee of the Executive Commission (or secret police) comprized 42 Jews and 19 Russians, Letts, Georgians and others. The Council of People's Commissars consisted of 17 Jews and five others. The Moscow Che-ka (secret police) was formed of 23 Jews and 13 others. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially published in 1918-1919, were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central committees of small, supposedly "Socialist" or other non-Communist parties (during that early period the semblance of "opposition" was permitted, to beguile the masses, accustomed under the Czar to opposition parties) were 55 Jews and 6 others. All the names are given in the original documents reproduced by Mr. Wilton. (In parentheses, the composition of the two short-lived Bolshevik governments outside Russia in 1918-1919, namely those of Hungary and Bavaria, was similar).

Mr. Wilton made a great and thankless effort to tell newspaper readers what went on in Russia (broken, he survived only a few years and died in his fifties). He did hot choose the task of reporting the most momentous event that ever came in any journilist's path of duty; it devolved on him. Educated in Russia, he knew the country and its language perfectly, and was held in high esteem by the Russians and the British Embassy alike. He watched the rioting from the window of The Times office, adjoining the Prefecture where the ministers of the collapsing regime took refuge. Between the advent of the Kerensky government in the spring of 1917 and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in November 1917, his duty was to report an entirely new phenomenon in world affairs: the rise of a Jewish regime to despotic supremacy in Russia and to overt control of the world-revolution. At that moment he was made to realize that he would not be allowed faithfully to report the fact.

The secret story is told, with surprising candour, in the Official History of his paper, The Times, published in 1952. It shows the hidden mechanism which operated, as early as 1917, to prevent the truth about the revolution reaching the peoples of the West.

This volume pays tribute to the quality of Mr. Wilton's reporting, and his standing in Russia, before 1917. Then the tone of the references to him abruptly changes. Mr. Wilton's early warnings of what was to come in 1917, says the book, "did not at once affect the poliy of the paper, partly because their writer did not command full confidence".

Why, if his earlier work and reputation were so good? The reason transpires. The narrative continues that Mr. Wilton began to complain about the "burking" or suppression of his messages. Then The Times began to publish articles about Russia from men who had little knowledge of that country. As a result the editorial articles about Russia took on the tone, exasperating to Mr. Wilton, with which newspaper-readers became familiar in the following decades: "those who believe in the future of Russia as a free and efficient democracy will watch the vindication of the new regime with patient confidence and earnest sympathy", (Every incident of Mr. Wilton's experience in Moscow, which Colonel Repington was sharing in London, was repeated in my own experience, and in that of other correspondents, in Berlin in 1933-1938).

The "interregnum of five months began, during which a Jewish regime was to take over from Kerensky. At this very moment his newspaper lost "confidence" in Mr. Wilton. Why? The explanation emerges. The Official History of The Times says, "It was not happy for Wilton that one of his messages... should spread to Zionist circles, and even into the Foreign Office, the idea that he was an anti-semite".

"Zionist circles", the reader will observe; not even "Communist circles"; here the working partnership becomes plain. Why should "Zionists" (who wanted the British government to procure them "a homeland" in Palestine) be affronted because a British correspondent in Moscow reported that a Jewish regime was preparing to take over in Russia? Mr. Wilton was reporting the nature of the coming regime; this was his job. In the opinion of "Zionists", this was "anti-semitism", and the mere allegation was enough to destroy "confidence" in him at his head office. How, then, could he have remained "happy" and have retained "confidence". Obviously, only by misreporting events in Russia. In effect, he was expected not to mention the determining fact of the day's news!

When I read this illuminating account I wondered by what route "Zionist circles" had spread to "the Foreign Office", and the Foreign Office to Printing House Square the "idea" that Mr. Wilton was "an anti-semite". The researcher, like the lonely prospector, learns to expect little for much toil, but in this case I was startled by the large nugget of truth which I found in The Times Official History thirty-five years after the event. It said that "the head of propaganda at the Foreign Office sent to the Editor a paper by one of his staff repeating the "allegation", (which apparently was first printed in some Zionist sheet). The Official History revealed even the identity of this assiduous "one".

It was a young Mr. Reginald Leeper, who three decades later (as Sir Reginald) became British Ambassador in Argentina. I then looked to Who's Who for information about Mr. Leeper's career and found that his first recorded employment began (when he was twenty-nine) in 1917: "entered International Bureau, Department of Information in 1917". Mr. Leeper's memorandum about Mr. Wilton was sent to The Times early in May 1917. Therefore, if he entered the Foreign Office on New Year's day of 1917, he had been in it just four months when he conveyed to The Times his "allegation" about the exceptionally qualified Mr. Wilton, of seventeen years service with that paper, and the effect was immediate; the Official History says that Mr. Wilton's despatches thereafter, during the decisive period, either miscarried or "were ignored". (The editor was the same of whom Colonel Repington complained in 1917-1918 and to whom the present writer sent his resignation in 1938 on the same basic principle of reputable journalism.)

Mr. Wilton Struggled on for a time, continually protesting against the "burking" and suppression of his despatches, and then as his last service to truthful journalism put all that he knew into his book. He recognized and recorded the acts which identified the especial nature of the regime: the law against "anti-semitism", the anti-Christian measures, the canonization of Judas Iscariot, and the Talmudic fingerprint mockingly left in the death-chamber of the Romanoffs.

The law against "anti-semitism" (which cannot be defined) was in itself a fingerprint. An illegal government, predominantly Jewish, by this measure warned the Russian masses, under pain of death, not to interest them selves in the origins of the revolution. It meant in effect that the Talmud became the law of Russia, and in the subsequent four decades this law has in effect and in growing degree been made part of the structure of the west.

The short-lived anti-Christian deeds of the French phase of the revolution reappeared in more open form. The dynamiting of churches and the installation of an anti-God museum in the Cathedral of Saint Basil were the most ostentatious indications of the nature of the regime, which Mr. Wilton indicated: "Taken according to numbers of population, the Jews represented one in ten; among the commissars that rule Bolshevist Russia they are nine in ten; if anything the proportion of Jews is still greater". This was plain reporting, and if the report had related to "Ukrainians", for instance, instead of "Jews", none would have objected; the mere act of reporting a fact became the ground for secret denunciation because the fact related to Jews.

The memorial to Judas Iscariot, recorded by Mr. Wilton, was another deliberate intimation to Christendom. If the Jewish rulers merely wanted to bring about an equalitarian society in 1917, there was no relevance in bestowing a halo of heroism on a deed of AD 29; the revolution in Russia cannot be understood at all unless the symbolism of this act is comprehended.

The aspect of a Talmudic vengeance on "the heathen" was unmistakably given to the massacres of hat period. In August 1918 a Jew, Kanegisser, shot a Jew, Uritsky; thereon a Jew, Peters, at the head of the Petrograd Cheka ordered "mass terror" on Russians and another Jew, Zinovieff, demanded that ten million Russians be "annihilated"; the British Government's White Book on Bolshevism (1919) records the massacre of Russian peasants which followed.

By far the most significant act was the form given to the murder of the Romanoff family. But for Mr. Wilton this story would never have reached the world, which to this day might believe that the Czar's wife and children ended their lives naturally in "protective" custody.

The Czar acted constitutionally to the end, abdicating at the advice of his ministers (March 5, 1917). Thereafter (during the Kerensky period and its first aftermath) he was relatively well treated for a year as the prisoner at Tobolsk of a Russian commandant and Russian guards. In April 1918, when the Jewish regime had gained control, he was transferred, by order from Moscow, to Ekaterinburg. The Russian guards were then withdrawn and their place inside his prison house was taken by men whose identity has never been established: The local Russians later recalled them as "Letts" (the only foreign-speaking Red soldiers known to them), but they seem to have been brought from Hungary.

The Russian commandant's place was taken by a Jew, Yankel Yurovsky (July 7). That completed a chain of Jewish captors from the top, Moscow, through the regional Urals Soviet, to his prison at Ekaterinburg (which is in the Urals). The real ruler of Russia then was the terrorist Yankel Sverdloff, president of the Moscow Cheka, who was a Jew. The Ekaterinburg Cheka was run by seven Jews, one of them Yankel Yurovsky. On July 20 the Urals Soviet announced that it had shot the Czar and sent his wife and son to "a place of security". The Moscow Cheka issued a similar announcement, signed by Sverdloff, "approving the action of the Regional Soviet of the Urals". At that time the entire family was dead.

The truth only became known through the chance that Ekaterinburg fell to the White armies on July 25, that Mr. Wilton accompanied them, and that their commander, General Diterichs, a famous Russian criminologist, M. Sokoloff, and Mr. Wilton uncovered the buried evidence. When the White troops withdrew Mr. Wilton brought away the proofs; they appear in his book and include many photographs.

The murders had been carried out by order from and in constant consultation with Sverdloff in Moscow; records of telephone conversations between him and the Chekists in Ekaterinburg were found. Among these was a report to him from Ekaterinburg saying "Yesterday a courier left with the documents that interest you". This courier was the chief assassin, Yurovsky, and the investigators believed that the "documents" were the heads of the Romanoffs, as no skulls or skull-bones were found.

The deed was described by witnesses who had not been able to escape, and at least one was a participant. At midnight on July 16 Yurovsky awoke the Czar and his family, took them to a basement room and there shot them. The actual murderers were Yurovsky, his seven unidentified foreign accomplices, one Nikulin from the local Cheka, and two Russians, apparently professional gunmen employed by the Cheka. The victims were the Czar, his wife, ailing son (who was held in his father's arms as he could not walk), four daughters, Russian doctor, manservant, cook and maid. The room was still a shambles, from the shooting and bayoneting, when M. Sokoloff and Mr. Wilton saw it, and his book includes the picture of it.

The circumstances having been determined, the investigators almost despaired of finding the bodies, or their remains; they learned that Yurovsky, before escaping the town, had boasted that "the world will never know what we did with the bodies". However, the earth at length gave up its secret. The bodies had been taken by five lorries to a disused iron pit in the woods, cut up and burned, 150 gallons of petrol being used; one Voikoff of the Urals Cheka (a fellow-passenger of Lenin in the train from Germany) as Commissar of Supplies had supplied 400 lbs. of sulphuric acid for dissolving the bones. The ashes and fragments had been thrown down the shaft, the ice at the bottom having first been smashed so that the mass would sink; then a flooring had been lowered and fixed over the place. When this was removed the search reached its end. On top lay the corpse of a spaniel belonging to one of the princesses; below were fragments of bone and skin, a finger, and many identifiable personal belongings which had escaped destruction. A puzzling find was a small collection of nails, coins, pieces of tinfoil and the like. This looked like the contents of a schoolboy's pockets, and was; the little boy's English tutor, Mr. Sidney Gibbes, identified it. The precautions taken to dispose of the bodies and of other evidence were of the kind that only criminals of long experience in their trade could have devised; they resemble the methods used in gang warfare, during the Prohibition period, in the United States.

These discoveries, becoming known in the outer world, exposed the untruth of Sverdloffs announcement that only the Czar had been "executed" and his family sent to "a place of security". The murderers staged a mock trial of "28 persons on the accusation of having murdered the Czar and his family". Only eight names were published, all of them unknown in connection with the crime, and five persons were said to have been shot, who if they existed at all cannot have had any part in it. The arch-assassin, Sverdloff, was soon afterwards killed in some party dispute and thousands of innocent people died in the indiscriminate massacres which followed. Ekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk to give enduring fame to his part in the symbolic deed.

The chief reason for recounting the details of the pogrom of the Romanoffs is to point to the "fingerprint" which was left in the room where it was done. One of the assassins, presumably their leader, stayed to exult and put a significant signature on the wall, which was covered with obscene or mocking inscriptions in Hebrew, Magyar and German. Among them was a couplet which deliberately related the deed to the Law of the Torah-Talmud and thus offered it to posterity as an example of the fulfilment of that law, and of Jewish vengeance as understood by the Levites. It was written in German by someone who parodied the Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine's lines on the death of Belshazzar, the imaginary potentate whose murder is portrayed in Daniel as God's punishment for an affront offered to Judah:

Belsazar ward aber in selbiger Nacht Von selbigen Knechten umgebracht.

The parodist, sardonically surveying the shambles, adapted these lines to what he had just done:

Belsazar ward in selbiger Nacht Von semen Knechten umgebracht.

No clearer clue to motive and identity was ever left behind.

The revolution was not Russian; the eruption was brought about in Russia, but the revolution had its friends in high places everywhere. At this period (1917-1918) the student for the first time is able to establish that leading men began to give that secret support to Communism which they were already giving to its blood brother, Zionism. This happened on both sides of the fighting-line; once the secret, but overriding purposes of the war came into play the distinction between "friend" and "foe" disappeared. The Zionists, though they concentrated "irresistible pressure" on the politicians of London and Washington, long kept their headquarters in Berlin; the Communists obtained decisive support from Germany at one moment and from Germany's enemies the next.

For instance, Germany when the 1914-1918 war began started "sending back to Russia Russians of revolutionary tendencies who were prisoners here, with money and passports, in order that they may stir up trouble at home" (Ambassador Gerard in Berlin to Mr. House). Mr. Robert Wilton says the decision to Foment the revolution in Russia was formally taken at a German and Austrian General Staff meeting at Vienna late in 1915. The German Chief-of-Staff, General Ludendorff, later regretted this: "By sending Lenin to Russia our government assumed... a great responsibility. From a military point of view his journey was justified, for Russia had to be laid low; but our government should have seen to it that we were not involved in her fall".

That, taken as an isolated case, might be a simple human error: what appeared to be a sound military move produced catastrophic political consequences not foreseen when it was made. But what explanation can be found for American and British politicians, whose foremost military and political principle should have been to sustain Russia and yet who supported the alien revolutionaries who "laid Russia low"?

I have already quoted the editorial about the revolution ("... a free and efficient democracy... the vindication of the new regime...") which appeared in The Times of London while its experienced correspondent's despatches were being "ignored" and "confidence" withdrawn from him because the newspaper had received "an allegation" that he was "an anti-semite". On the other side of the Atlantic the true ruler of the Republic, Mr. House was confiding to his diary similar sentiments. For him the alien revolutionaries smuggled into Russia during wartime from the West ("this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America", Mr. Churchill) were honest agrarian reformers: "the Bolshevists appeared to the peace-hungry and land-hungry Russians as the first leaders who made a sincere effort to satisfy their needs".

Today all know what happened to the Russians' "land-hunger" under Bolshevism. In 1917 the Czars and their ministers for fifty years had been toiling to satisfy this "land-hunger" and by assassination had been thwarted. Apparently Mr. House was ignorant of that. When the revolution was accomplished he instructed the shadow-president: "that literally nothing be done further than that an expression of sympathy be offered for Russia's efforts to weld herself into a virile democracy and to proffer our financial, industrial and moral support in every way possible".*

* It might be significant of the influences which continued to prevail in the entourage of American presidents during the next two generations that President Eisenhower in 1955, from his hospital room in Denver, sent a personal message of congratulations to the Soviet Premier, Bulganin, on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, November 7. The democratic and parliamentary revolution, legitimized by the Czars abdication, occurred in March 1917; November 7 was a day on which the Bolsheviks overthrew the legitimate regime. By 1955 American presidents were habitually warn