eritage. On the one hand there is the
idealism that is lovely and uplifting and will get a man into heaven,
and on the other hand there is the realism that works. The fact that the
Jews cling to both, thus running, as it were, upon two tracks, is what
makes them so puzzling, now and then, to the _goyim_. In one aspect they
stand for the most savage practicality; in another aspect they are
dreamers of an almost fabulous other-worldiness. My own belief is that
the essential Jew is the idealist--that his occasional flashing of hyena
teeth is no more than a necessary concession to the harsh demands of the
struggle for existence. Perhaps, in many cases, it is due to an actual
corruption of blood. The Jews come from the Levant, and their women were
exposed for many centuries to the admiration of Greek, Arab and
Armenian. The shark that a Jew can be at his worst is simply a Greek or
Armenian at his best.

As a statement of post-mortem and super-terrestrial fact, the religion
that the Jews have foisted upon the world seems to me to be as vast a
curse as the influenza that we inherit from the Tatars or the democratic
fallacies set afloat by the French Revolution. The one thing that can
be said in favor of it is that it is not true, and yet we suffer from it
almost as much as if it were true. But with it, encasing it and
preserving it, there has come something that is positively
valuable--something, indeed, that is beyond all price--and that is
Jewish poetry. To compare it to the poetry of any other race is wholly
impossible; it stands completely above all the rest; it is as far beyond
the next best as German music is beyond French music, or French painting
beyond English painting, or the English drama beyond the Italian drama.
There are single chapters in the Old Testament that are worth all the
poetry ever written in the New World and nine-tenths of that written in
the Old. The Jews of those ancient days had imagination, they had
dignity, they had ears for sweet sound, they had, above all, the faculty
of grandeur. The stupendous music that issued from them has swept their
barbaric demonology along with it, setting at naught the collective
intelligence of the human species; they embalmed their idiotic taboos
and fetishes in undying strains, and so gave them some measure of the
same immortality. A race of lawgivers? Bosh! Leviticus is as archaic as
the Code of Manu, and the Decalogue is a fossil. A race of seers? Bosh
again! The