THE 
 
 "central synagogue 
 PULPIT 
 
 A SELECTED SERIES 
 OF SERMONS DELIVERED AT THE 
 
 Central Synagogue, Great Portland Street, W. 
 
 No. 8 
 
 ANTI-SEMITISM 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 PREACHED BY 
 
 THE VERY REV. THE CHIEF RABBI 
 
 (Dr. J. H. HERTZ) 
 
 ON THE 
 
 First Day of Tabernacles, 5683 
 
 October tth, 1922
 
 /^^ M^ /i^"^^^^^^^^:^^^ '
 
 THE CENTRAL SYNAGOGUE 
 
 PULPIT 
 
 No. 8 
 
 ANTI-SEMITISM 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 PREACHED BY 
 
 THE CHIEF RABBI 
 
 ON THE 
 
 jFirsit Bap of tabernacles;, 5683 
 
 October 7111. 1922
 
 Williams, Lea & Co., Ltd., Printers. 
 Clifton House, Worship Street, E.C.2.
 
 r. 
 
 " Ye shall not profane My holy Name, bnt 1 will be 
 hallowed anioni^ the Children of Israel." 
 
 Lev. xxii. 32. 
 
 Thesk words from tlu' very first })arai^ra])h of the 
 I'cntateuehal Rt'adin;^ for the b'estival of Tabernaeles 
 arc of the deepest significance, yea, of crneial importance, 
 to Jews of all times and lands. If, in the manner of 
 Hillel of old, it were necessary to find the supreme 
 commandment of Jewish communal duty, we might 
 well point to this one verse. The most noted Jewish 
 preacher of the nineteenth centurx' has called it, " Israel's 
 Bible in little." And the pages of Israel's history 
 testify that the two regulative principles of Judaism 
 which it embodies, \iz., the warning against the cardinal 
 sin of Profaning the Dixinc Name, Dt^'H ^^'^H ■ 
 and the demand that every child of Im;i(| hallow the 
 Name of Ciod, C^H ^Mp lia.\-c indeed exerted 
 a marvellous power both in spurring the Jew to tlie
 
 4 
 
 greatest self-sacrifice and in endowing him with joyful 
 readiness to endure suffering and martyrdom for his 
 Faith and people. 
 
 1. " Ye shall not profane My holy Name." Be ye 
 therefore exceedingly guarded in your actions, say the 
 Rabbis, so that ye do nothing that tarnishes the honour 
 of Judaism or of the Jew. Especially do they warn 
 against any misdeed towards a non-Jew as an unpardon- 
 able sin, because it gives a false impression of the moral 
 standard of Judaism. The Jew should remember that 
 the glory of God is, as it were, entrusted to his care ; 
 and should so live that he hallow the name of God 
 by his conduct. Rabbi Simon ben Shetach one day 
 commissioned his disciples to buy him a camel from an 
 Arab. As they brought him the animal, they gleefully 
 announced that they had found a precious stone in its 
 collar. " Did the seller know of this gem ? " asked the 
 Master. On being answered in the negative, he called 
 out angrily, " Do you think me a barbarian that I 
 should take advantage of the letter of the law by which 
 the gem is mine together with the camel ? Return the 
 gem to the Arab immediately." ^^'hen the heathen 
 received it back he exclaimed : " Blessed be the God 
 of Simon ben Shetach ! Blessed be the God of Israel !" 
 
 Thus, everv Israelite liolds the lionour of his I'aith
 
 and of his entire people in lus hands ; and a snigle 
 Jew's ot^ence can brin^ slianir on the whole Honse of 
 Israel. This has het'n the fate of Israel in all ages ; 
 and notliiuii, it seems, ccill ever break the world of its 
 habit of putting doicn the crimes, vices or failings of a 
 Jew, no matter how estranged from his people or Iiis 
 people's Faith he may be, to his Jeccislniess ; and of 
 fathering them upon the entire Jeicis/i race. The Kabbis 
 
 say: DtTH b)br\ ^V dSi^"^ HNl n^i n'V], 
 " Wild beasts \-isit and afthet the world becanse of the 
 profanation of the Divine Name." And, hideed, 
 wherever Jews are gnilty of eondnet unworthy <if then- 
 Faith, there the wild beast in man blind prciudiet' 
 and causeless hatred — is unchained against Israel. Xo 
 student of Jewish history will tjuestion the truth of this 
 judgment of the Rabbis. It is certainly so in our own 
 day — -with one imi)ortant difference. The " wild 
 beast " need not be unchained against us by any act 
 on- our part. In most lands, the " wild beast " of 
 anti-Semitism is abroad, idamiiii; and roaring ; in 
 some of them, alas, also rending at wiU. 1 will not, on 
 a festive day, dwell on the tiendish slaughter of 150,000 
 Jewish men, women and children in the Ukraine during 
 the years 1919 and 1920 ; on the torture and nnn-der 
 inflicted on so many of our brethren in Hungar\ : on 
 the tidal wave of hysterical intolerance that swejit
 
 during these years over Western democracies even, and 
 resulted in exhibitions of anti-Semitism that would have 
 been absolutely unbelievable ten years ago. 
 
 2. We may, however, very well venture on an 
 explanation of this phenomenon of anti-Semitism, this 
 " will to hate," that in so many quarters is to-day 
 manifested towards the Jew. 
 
 In all times of upheaval, when men are swayed by 
 elemental passions, the primitive instincts of human 
 nature come to the surface, and there is an eclipse 
 of reason in human affairs. Now, one of the most 
 persistent characteristics of primitive man is to ascribe 
 to personal agents what is really the effect of complex 
 or unknown causes ; in brief, to seek a scapegoat. 
 Thus, when a Central African chief falls ill or is troubled 
 by dreams, the witch-doctor is at hand, and readily 
 finds that the chsease is due to the " evil eye " of someone 
 whom the chief happens to dislike. That unfortunate man 
 IS put out of the way ; his cattle and belongings are appro- 
 priated by the chief ; and everybody feels that the right 
 and proper thing has been done. A similar tendency 
 seems to dominate the mob mind. It, too, ascribes to 
 personal agents what is really the outcome of complex 
 conditions ; and its witch-doctors have never been slow 
 to find in the Jew the most convenient and most plausible
 
 of scapegoats, to point to him as the source and origin 
 of all misft)rtunes, and to urge his expulsion or exter- 
 mination in order to do away with tlie misery of which 
 he was the alk'ged authoi'. In the Middle Ages, for 
 example, when tlu'rt' wa^ ;i total absence of sanitation and 
 a lack of the most elementary hygiene among the masses, 
 the mortalit\' in times of plague was enormous. The 
 great cvcle of epidemics in the fourteenth century, 
 known as the Black Death, carried off 25 millions of 
 human beings, estimated to be about one-quarter of 
 the total population of Europe. The Jews, who did 
 understand hygiene, and whose religious observances 
 sanctify moderation and care of health, were more or 
 less immune from the mortal epidemic. Immediately, 
 all the forces of ignorance and darkness denounced the 
 Jews as the malevolent foes of the human race who 
 had })roduced the calamit}'. " The Jews have poisoned 
 the wells ! " was the cry. The scapegoat had been 
 found ; and the wholesale massacre of Jews became the 
 brder of the day from one end of Europe to the other.* 
 
 Ours is a time of world-wide unrest and of unparalleled 
 convulsion. Mighty empires have crumbled to ruin ; 
 dozens of dynasties have disappeared. Old States have 
 be(in amputated beyond recognition, and new nations 
 
 * Cf. F. Adlcr, The Revival of Anti-Semitism. (The American 
 ICtliiral Tnion.) 1921.
 
 8 
 
 have been called into existence. Economic foundations 
 are everywhere slowly sinking, and in more than one 
 formerly prosperous land have submerged altogether. 
 For years there has been fratricidal war in Ireland ; 
 the entire Moslem \\orld is seething with discontent ; 
 nothing less than social disintegration, decomposition 
 almost, has overwhelmed Russia. Is it to be wondered 
 at that in such a time of cataclysmic change and 
 woe, the desire to find some individual or some group 
 upon whose de\'oted head the total sin of mankind 
 mav be dcvoh'cd, should once again come to the fore. 
 
 To London belongs the melancholy glory of having 
 in recent years been the centre of a particularly noisy 
 and noisome school of witch-doctors — journalists, aristo- 
 crats, reactionaries — who with one voice declared the 
 Jews to have ever been the breeders of revolution in the 
 modern world, as well as the authors of all the ills that 
 the present day is heir to. All political unrest, these 
 pundits declared, was artificial ; as are also the social 
 grievances at the root of this unrest. It was but the 
 product of the " Hidden Hand " ; of a group of Jews 
 who had for generations been secretly working for the 
 overthrow of all Christian civilization. The crowning 
 discovery came in igiq. The so-called Protocols of the 
 mythical " Elders of Zion " suddenly saw the light of 
 da}'. These were disseminated, both East and West,
 
 to show the terrible conspiracN" on the part of world- 
 Jewry to embroil the nations with one another; and 
 to poison this time, not the wells, but the minds of 
 the peoples ! 
 
 3. We looked to the common sense and the enhghten- 
 mcnt of the age to laugh such insane vapourings out of 
 court. We certainly did not expect that " this grotesque 
 n)\th, founded on malice and h\'steria, built up of garbled 
 history and syntheti/.etl by impudent forgery,"* would 
 be taken serioush- by anyone. We soon learned that 
 in the words of the Prophetical Lesson of this Festival — 
 our day was a dav without daylight, when the heax'enly 
 luminaries contracted themselves. We found that the 
 leaders of opinion in \'arious lands resigned tlieir sacred 
 task of moral guidance. With very few exceptions, they 
 either remained silent in the presence of all this ma- 
 licious indictment of a whole race, or they shamelessly 
 swelled the howling of the mob. And so the agitation 
 has, alas, been too successful. Wherever the World War 
 ended in disaster, defeat or disilJusion — and where has it 
 not ended in one of these things? the tendenc\- asserted 
 itself, if not to beat the Jew, as in Hungarv ; or to 
 butcher the Jew, as in the Ukraine ; at least to blame 
 
 * I.ucien Wolf, The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World 
 Affairs, or, the Truth about the forged Protocols of the Elders of 
 y.iott. (Tlic- Maciuillan Company.) 19^1.
 
 TO 
 
 the Jew for all the crimes and stupidities and mis- 
 fortunes of present-day humanity. Nearly two years 
 passed before there was a partial return to sanity. A 
 full expose of the criminal forgery of the Protocols 
 appeared in the world's leading newspapers in the 
 summer of 1921 ; and gradually signs multiplied of an 
 awakening on the part of responsible men to the dangers 
 that active Jew-baiting brings to society. 
 
 The moral of all this is something very pertinent to 
 the teaching of the historical festival we celebrate to-day. 
 " Ye shall not profane My holy Name," proclaims 
 Tabernacles. Throughout the War, Israel has nowhere 
 "profaned the Name of God." On every battle-field of 
 every theatre of war, on land and in the air, on sea and 
 under the sea, the Jew did his duty. And yet, the " wild 
 beast " is raging against us. It is for us to recognize the 
 fact that it is a wild beast, driven by hallucinations of 
 hatred against Israel. We shall then no longer join, as 
 many of us do, in any wholesale condemnation of our own 
 people ; and, on account of the sins and crimes of 
 a handful of Jewish outcasts, plead guilty off-hand to 
 the fantastic crimes or failings that hireling scribblers or 
 demented reactionaries choose to fasten upon the Jew. 
 
 To conclude : communities, like individuals, are under 
 the obligation of the ethical precept, " Be not wicked
 
 II 
 
 in thiiu- own esteem." *|/t:^J7 ^"33 J^ii'T ^HH '':'J^ 
 It was a noble son of Israel — the late Mr. Frederic 
 Mocatta — who wrote a striking message to Anglo- 
 Jewry on "The Duty of Self - Respect." And 
 self-respect, sensitiveness to the honour of Israel's 
 Faith, is the fruit ajul fine flower of loyalty to Jewish 
 tradition ; of joy in Jewi^^h observance, as symbolized by 
 our Ft^tiA-a) ; of age-long obedience to the divine 
 command, " Ye shall not profane M^' holy Name ; 
 but I will be hallowed among the Children of Israel."
 
 MEMORIAL CANDELABRUM 
 
 IN THE CENTRAL SYNAGOGUE, 
 
 in remembrance of Sons of the Congrefjation 
 who fell in the Great War, 1914-1918. 
 
 " Our British Jeivs have played a splendid 
 part in the War. 
 
 " They have provided us with one of the 
 finest Generals of all, Monash, the Head of 
 the Australian Army. 
 
 "Jewry has to its credit 5 Victoria 
 Crosses, 50 Distinguished Service Orders, 
 242 Military Crosses, 80 Distinguished 
 Condtict Medals, 308 Military Medals, and 
 374 Mentioned in Dispatches- 
 
 " Nearly 9,000 .Texvs in the British Army 
 alone fell in Action or were ivoiinded and 
 missing, and missing, of course, means 
 dead. ' 
 
 Lord Northcuffe.
 
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