by Lawrence Bush on May 8, 2012
“[Y]ou would do better to inoculate your children with typhus and syphillis than to let in the Sassoons, Rothschilds, and Warburgs,” said poet Ezra Pound on Italian radio on this date in 1942, in one of 120 broadcasts he made on behalf of the fascist cause during World War II. In this particular broadcast, Pound focused (like a precursor of Glenn Beck) on the gold standard and the purity of American money. All American wars, he argued, were campaigns to fight “the kikified usurers . . . to git an honest day’s pay for a day’s real work by the people,” and “to have the government money run honest” — and it would make ” any young man more American if he sticks to seein’ American history FIRST before swallowin’ exotic perversions.” Pound, a world-renowned literary figure, would be arrested for treason after the war and spend twelve years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, an institution for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C. In 1949, he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his “Pisan Cantos,” which he wrote while interred in an army prison camp. To read any number of Pound’s broadcasts, click here.
“You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew. . . . Corrupting the whole earth, you have lost yourselves to yourselves. And the big Jew has rotted EVERY nation he has wormed into.” —Ezra Pound, Mach 15, 1942
by Lawrence Bush on April 19, 2012
Twenty-one Jews in Rottingen, Germany, were killed by anti-Semitic mobs on this date in 1298 after a local nobleman named Rindfleish, said to be in debt to a Jewish money-lender, spread rumors about Jews “desecrating the host.” The rioting spread in subsequent months to a total of 146 towns in the region, with tens of thousands of Jews murdered, including nearly the entire Jewish communities of Würzburg and Nuremberg and half of the 500 Jews of Rottenburg. The context for these “Rindfleish persecutions” was a German civil war that ended with Albert I on the throne as Holy Roman Emperor, a stern ruler who nevertheless protected both serfs and Jews.
“The massacres followed a series of blood libels in Mainz (1281, 1283), Munich (1285), and Oberwesel (1287). In Munich, Jews were burned alive in 1290. Likewise, there was an accusation of desecration of the host in Paris in 1290.” —Ami Isseroff
by Lawrence Bush on April 6, 2012
The Code of Justinian, the first of four parts of the Corpus Juris Civilis (“Body of Civil Law”) compiled by command of Justinian I, the Emperor of Rome, was issued on this date in 529. Among its principles was Servitus Judaeorum (“Servitude of the Jews”), enforced by new laws that would further reduce the status of Jews beyond the century-old discriminatory edicts of the Theodosian Code. Jews (and other non-Christians) were now denied citizenship and disqualified from holding public office; they could not testify in court against Christians. Hebrew prayer was banned, the Sh’ma was condemned as being anti-trinitarian, and synagogues were liable to confiscation. Passover seders were banned if they preceded Easter. Conversion to Christianity was encouraged through inheritance laws and taxation policies; conversion to Judaism became a capital offense, as did the ownership of Christian slaves by Jews. The Corpus Juris Civilis summarized centuries of Roman jurisprudence and completed the merging of church and state in Roman lands. It was not immediately influential in the collapsed western provinces, but was rediscovered in the Late Middle Ages and would strongly affect the Canon Law of the Catholic Church as well as civil and international law throughout Europe.
“[C]ircumcision was allowed only for Jews by birth but prohibited for proselytes and slaves. Judaism ceased to be a permitted religion, although some Jewish practices were still allowed. The purpose of this and other legislation was to induce Jews to convert to Christianity and to show Christians the superiority of the church over the synagogue.” —Richard S. Levy, Anti-Semitism: A Historical Encyclopedia
by Lawrence Bush on April 5, 2012
The United States entered World War I on this date in 1917. About a quarter of a million Jews were in the American armed forces during the war, close to 6 percent of the total enlistment, from a Jewish population that was under 4 percent of the general population. Among German and Austrian Jews, over 100,000 served and 12,000 died, yet the post-war period saw the festering of German anti-Semitism, with Jews blamed for the country’s defeat. An additional 350,000 Jews fought for Russia, and 20,000 for Britain and France. More than four million Jews lived in the areas of Europe where the war was most intense, and a quarter of a million of them died in battle. Many yeshivas and Jewish religious centers were destroyed, and over a million Jews became refugees, particularly after the Russian Tsar accused them of being German collaborators. This unprecedently violent, useless conflagration — and the Bolshevik revolution that ended it for Russia — radicalized Jews around the world. It also produced the Balfour Declaration, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and a rise in the hopes of the Zionist movement. The war also catalyzed Jewish communal tsedoke (philanthropy) with the formation of the Jewish Welfare Board and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
“Before World War I, radical, racist antisemitism was confined to the fringe of right-wing politics throughout most of Europe and in the United States. . . . World War I brought antisemitism, including its racist variant, into the mainstream of European politics.” —United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
“[Y]ou would do better to inoculate your children with typhus and syphillis than to let in the Sassoons, Rothschilds, and Warburgs,” said poet Ezra Pound on Italian radio on this date in 1942, in one of 120 broadcasts he made on behalf of the fascist cause during World War II. In this particular broadcast, Pound focused (like a precursor of Glenn Beck) on the gold standard and the purity of American money. All American wars, he argued, were campaigns to fight “the kikified usurers . . . to git an honest day’s pay for a day’s real work by the people,” and “to have the government money run honest” — and it would make ” any young man more American if he sticks to seein’ American history FIRST before swallowin’ exotic perversions.” Pound, a world-renowned literary figure, would be arrested for treason after the war and spend twelve years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, an institution for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C. In 1949, he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his “Pisan Cantos,” which he wrote while interred in an army prison camp. To read any number of Pound’s broadcasts, click here.
