«So how,» someone asked, «do we explain their invasion into musical theater? Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn and Giuditta Pasta—all Jewish.»
«Perhaps it is not true that music is a higher art,» suggested another. «Didn’t that German philosopher say that it is lower than painting and literature because it also disturbs those who don’t want to listen? If someone near you plays a tune you dislike, you’re forced to listen, in the same way as when someone takes out a handkerchief scented with an essence that disgusts you. The Aryan glory is literature, now in crisis. But music, a sensorial art for milksops and convalescents, triumphs. After the crocodile, the Jew is the most musical of all animals. All Jews are musicians. Pianists, violinists, violoncellists—they’re all Jews.»
«Yes, but they’re performers, parasites of great composers,» retorted Drumont. «You have mentioned Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, second-rate musicians, but Delibes and Offenbach are not Jews.»
A great argument grew out of this—whether the Jews were alien to music or whether music was the Jewish art par excellence—and views differed.
Anti-Semitic fury had reached its height back at the time when the Eiffel Tower was being planned, not to mention when it had been completed. It was the work of a German Jew, the Jewish response to the Sacré-Coeur, explained Jacques de Biez. He was perhaps the most combative anti-Semite in the group, who began his demonstration of Jewish inferiority from the fact that they write in the opposite way, unlike normal people. «The very form of this Babylonian construction,» he said, «demonstrates that their brain is not made like ours.»
They moved on to talk about alcoholism, then a major problem in France. It was said that more than fourteen million liters were drunk annually in Paris!
«Alcohol,» someone said, «is distributed by Jews and Masons, who have perfected their own traditional form of poison, Aqua Tofana. They’re now producing a toxin that seems like water but contains opium and Spanish fly. It produces apathy or madness, then leads to death. When mixed into alcoholic drinks it induces suicide.»
«Alcohol,» someone said, «is distributed by Jews and Masons, who have perfected their own traditional form of poison, Aqua Tofana.»
«And pornography? Toussenel (even socialists can sometimes tell the truth) has written that the swine is the emblem of the Jew, who is not ashamed to wallow in baseness and ignominy. After all, the Talmud says it is a good omen to dream about excrement. All obscene publications are produced by Jews. Go to rue du Croissant, the market selling pornographic magazines. There are a number of Jewish stalls, one after the other: scenes of fornication, monks copulating with young girls, priests whipping naked women who have only their hair to cover them, priapic scenes, drunken, debauched priests. The people pass by and laugh, even families with children! The triumph—excuse the word—of the anus. Sodomite priests, buttocks of nuns who allow themselves to be whipped by lecherous curates…»
Another regular topic was the nomadic nature of the Jews.
«The Jew is a nomad, but to escape from something, not to explore new lands,» observed Drumont. «The Aryan travels, he discovers America and unknown places; the Semite waits for the Aryans to discover new lands and then goes and exploits them. And look at folktales. The Jews don’t have enough imagination to think up a good story, but their Semitic brothers, the Arabs, told the stories of The Thousand and One Nights, in which someone discovers a pot of gold, a cavern with thieves’ diamonds, a bottle containing a kind genie—and all are gifts from heaven. And in the Aryan tales, the quest for the Holy Grail, for instance, everything has to be achieved through combat and sacrifice.»
«Despite all this,» said one of Drumont’s friends, «the Jews have managed to overcome all adversity.»
«Naturally,» said Drumont, foaming with resentment. «It’s impossible to destroy them. When any other race of people migrates to another place, it cannot resist the change of climate and different food, and it becomes weak. Yet when the Jews move about, they become stronger, like insects.»
«They’re like the Gypsies, who never get sick. Even if they feed on dead animals. Perhaps cannibalism helps them, which is why they kidnap children.»
«I’m not sure, though, that cannibalism lengthens life. Look at the Negroes in Africa: they’re cannibals and yet they die like flies in their villages.»
«Then how do you explain the immunity of the Jew? He has an average lifespan of fifty-three years, while for Christians it’s thirty-seven. They appear more resistant to disease than Christians, through a phenomenon that’s been noted since the Middle Ages. They seem to have within them a permanent pestilence that protects them from ordinary plague.»
Simonini pointed out that these arguments had already been dealt with by Gougenot, but Drumont and his coterie were less concerned about the originality of ideas than about their truth.
«All right,» said Drumont, «they are more resistant than we are to physical illness, but they are more susceptible to mental illness. Constant involvement in commercial dealings, speculation and scheming affects their nervous system. In Italy there is one lunatic for every three hundred and forty-eight Jews, and one for every seven hundred and seventy-eight Catholics. Charcot has carried out some interesting studies on Russian Jews—we have information about them because they’re poor, whereas French Jews are rich and pay a great deal of money to hide their sick patients in Doctor Blanche’s clinic. You know that Sarah Bernhardt keeps a white coffin in her bedroom?»
«They’re producing children twice as fast as we are. They now number more than four million throughout the world.»
«It was written in the Book of Exodus: ‘And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and became mighty and filled the earth.'»
«And now they are here. And here they’ve been, even when we had no suspicion they were here. Who was Marat? His true name was Mara, a Sephardic family driven out of Spain who turned Protestant to hide their Jewish origins. Marat: ravaged by leprosy, died in filth, mentally ill, affected by persecution mania, then a homicidal maniac, a typical Jew who avenges himself on Christians by sending as many as he can to the guillotine. Look at his picture in the Carnavalet Museum and you’ll immediately see the crazed neuropath, like Robespierre and other Jacobins, and that asymmetry in the two halves of the face which is indicative of an unbalanced mind.»
«The Revolution, as we know, was caused to a large extent by the Jews. But Napoleon, with his hatred of the pope and his Masonic alliances, was he a Semite?»
«So it would seem. Even Disraeli said he was. The Balearic Islands and Corsica provided shelter for the Jews driven from Spain, who then became Marranos and took the names of the lords they served, such as Orsini and Bonaparte.»
In every group of people there’s the gaffeur, the one who asks the wrong question at the wrong moment. And that was how the insidious question emerged: «And Jesus, then? He was a Jew. Yet he dies young, has no interest in money and thinks only about the kingdom of heaven.»
The reply came from Jacques de Biez: «Gentlemen, the idea that Christ was Jewish is a legend created by people who were Jews themselves, like Saint Paul and the four evangelists. Jesus was in fact of the Celtic race, like we French, who were only much later conquered by the Romans. And before being emasculated by the Romans, the Celts were a population of conquerors. Have you heard of the Galatians, who reached as far as Greece? Galilee is thus named for the Gauls who had colonized it.
Then again, the legend of a virgin who gave birth to a son is a Celtic and a Druidic myth. Just look at all the portraits we have of Jesus—he was fair-haired and blue-eyed. And he spoke against the customs, superstitions and vices of the Jews. And unlike what the Jews expected from the messiah, he said that his kingdom was not of this earth. And while the Jews were monotheists, Christ launched the idea of the Trinity, inspired by Celtic polytheism. That’s why they killed him. Caiaphas, who condemned him, was a Jew…Judas, who betrayed him, was a Jew…Peter, who denied him, was a Jew…»
The same year that Drumont founded La Libre Parole, he had the good fortune, or intuition, to ride the Panama scandal.
«It’s quite simple,» he explained to Simonini before launching his campaign. «Ferdinand de Lesseps, the very same man who opened the Suez Canal, is appointed to open up the Isthmus of Panama. Six hundred million francs had to be raised, and Lesseps creates a joint-stock company. Work begins in 1881, hampered by countless problems. Lesseps needs more money and launches a public subscription. But he uses part of the money received to corrupt journalists and conceal the difficulties that were gradually emerging, such as the fact that by ’87 barely half the isthmus had been dug and one thousand four hundred million francs had already been spent. Lesseps seeks the help of Eiffel, the Jew who built that ugly tower, then continues to collect funds and uses them to corrupt the press as well as various ministries. The canal company went bankrupt four years later, and eighty-five thousand decent Frenchmen who had invested in the company lost all their money.»
«That’s well known.»
«Yes, but we can now show that the people who were aiding and abetting Lesseps were Jewish financiers, including Baron Jacques de Reinach—a baron of Prussian title! Tomorrow’s La Libre Parole will cause
