s.

Perhaps it was wrong of us to think of our Gentile neighbors as a
different species of beings from ourselves, but such madness as that
did not help to make them more human in our eyes. It was easier to be
friends with the beasts in the barn than with some of the Gentiles.
The cow and the goat and the cat responded to kindness, and
remembered which of the housemaids was generous and which was cross.
The Gentiles made no distinctions. A Jew was a Jew, to be hated and
spat upon and used spitefully.

The only Gentiles, besides the few of the intelligent kind, who did
not habitually look upon us with hate and contempt, were the stupid
peasants from the country, who were hardly human themselves. They
lived in filthy huts together with their swine, and all they cared for
was how to get something to eat. It was not their fault. The land laws
made them so poor that they had to sell themselves to fill their
bellies. What help was there for us in the good will of such wretched
slaves? For a cask of vodka you could buy up a whole village of them.
They trembled before the meanest townsman, and at a sign from a
long-haired priest they would sharpen their axes against us.

The Gentiles had their excuse for their malice. They said our
merchants and money-lenders preyed upon them, and our shopkeepers gave
false measure. People who want to defend the Jews ought never to deny
this. Yes, I say, we cheated the Gentiles whenever we dared, because
it was the only thing to do. Remember how the Czar was always sending
us commands,--you shall not do this and you shall not do that, until
there was little left that we might honestly do, except pay tribute
and die. There he had us cooped up, thousands of us where only
hundreds could live, and every means of living taxed to the utmost.
When there are too many wolves in the prairie, they begin to prey upon
each other. We starving captives of the Pale--we did as do the hungry
brutes. But our humanity showed in our discrimination between our
victims. Whenever we could, we spared our own kind, directing against
our racial foes the cunning wiles which our bitter need invented. Is
not that the code of war? Encamped in the midst of the enemy, we could
practice no other. A Jew could hardly exist in business unless he
developed a dual conscience, which allowed him to do to the Gentile
what he would call a sin against a fellow Jew. Such spiritual
deformities are self-explained in the step-children of t