You Gentiles

Key Quotations from ‘You Gentiles’ — by Maurice Samuel

 Admin June 14, 2014  Other Writers

Maurice Samuel (1895 – 1972) was a Romanian-born Zionist Jew whose most influential book, You Gentiles, was published in 1924. This offered a penetrating analysis of the Jewish psyche and made the important point that Jews were altogether so superior and spiritually advanced compared to gentiles that there was no possibility of the two groups getting on together. Owing to the baser nature of the gentiles, and the fact that they did not take God seriously like the Jews, it was inevitable that Jews and gentiles should be at loggerheads for ever. (LD)

Here are some key quotations from the book:

I. The Question 

“Wherever the Jew is found he is a problem, a source of unhappiness to himself and to those around him. Ever since he has been scattered in your midst he has had to maintain a continuous struggle for the conservation of his identity.” (p. 10).

“Years of observation and thought have given increasing strength to the belief that we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divided all of you from us.” (p. 12).

“You may even have Jews in your midst who did not learn their way of life from us, and did not inherit it from a Jewish forebear. We may have authentic gentiles in our midst: these single protests are of no account; they are extreme and irrelevant variations.” (p. 21).
“I do not believe that the primal difference between gentile and Jew is reconcilable. You and we may come to an understanding, never to a reconciliation. There will be irritation between us as long as we are in intimate contact. For nature and constitution and vision divide us from all of you forever – not a mere conviction, not a mere language, not a mere difference of national or religious allegiance.” (p. 23-24).

“You have your way of life, we ours. In your system of life we are essentially without ‘honor’. In our system of life you are essentially without morality. In your system of life we must forever appear graceless; to us you must forever appear godless.” (p. 34).

“We belong to the One mastering God: you belong to the republic of playful gods. ” (p. 36).

“These are two ways of life, each utterly alien to the other. Each has its place in the world – but they cannot flourish in the same soil, they cannot remain in contact without antagonism. Though to life itself each way is a perfect utterance, to each other they are enemies.” (p. 36-37)

II Sport

“THE most amazing thing in your life, the most in contrast with ours, is its sport. By this I do not mean simply your fondness for physical exercise, your physical exuberance, but the psychological and social institutionalization of sport, its organization, its predominant rôle as the outlet and expression of your spiritual energies.” (p. 38)

“Your spirit is sport: particularly your young men, who are not yet absorbed in the struggle for existence, and whose emotions are therefore for the largest part free, must find in sport, in games, in contests, the most satisfactory expression of their instincts.” (p. 40)

“The contention of the majority of your educators, that the moral instinct is trained on the football and baseball field, in boxing, rowing, wrestling and other contests, is a true one, is truer, perhaps, than most of them realize. Your ideal morality is a sporting morality. The intense discipline of the game, the spirit of fair play, the qualities of endurance, of good humor, of conventionalized seriousness in effort, of loyalty, of struggle without malice or bitterness, of readiness to forget like a sport – all these are brought out in their sheerest and cleanest starkness in well-organized and closely regulated college sports. And on the experiences and lessons which these sports imply your entire spiritual life is inevitably founded.” (p. 42)

“Sport is for you a serious spiritual matter. It is the proper symbolization, the perfect ritual, wherein your spiritual forces, finding expression, also find exercise and sustenance.” (p. 43)

III Gods

“Our Jewishness is not a creed, it is ourself, our totality. Indeed, it may be fairly said that the surest evidence of your lack of seriousness in religion is the fact that your religions are not national, that you are not compromised and dedicated, en masse, to the faith.” (p. 73).

“But in the Jew, nation and people and faculties and culture and God are all one. We do not say: ‘I am a Jew’, meaning, ‘I am a member of this nationality’: the feeling in the Jew, even in the free-thinking Jew like myself, is that to be one with his people is to be thereby admitted to the power of enjoying the infinite. I might say, of ourselves: ‘We and God grew up together’.” (p. 74).

“You have had patron or appropriated gods: we have a national God. In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew. Is your God an Englishman or an American?
There is no real contradiction between this confessed anthropomorphism and my claim that we Jews alone understand and feel the universality of God. In anthropomorphism we merely symbolize God: we reduce the infinite, temporarily, to tangible proportions: we make it accessible to daily reference. ” (p. 75).

IV Utopia

“We are not free to choose and to reject, to play, to construct, to refine. We are a dedicated and enslaved people, predestined to an unchangeable relationship. Freedom at large was not and is not a Jewish ideal. Service, love consecration, these are ideals with us. Freedom means nothing to us: freedom to do what?” (p. 88)

“For us the end is ecstatic unity, the identification of man with God. Your ideal is eternal youth, ours lifts toward an unchanging climax of adult perfection. You would like to play with your gods forever: we will return to God, to the universe. Yours is a sunlit afternoon, with the combatants swaying forever in a joyous struggle. Ours is a whole world, with the spirit of God poured through all things.
Your Ideal is Plato’s Republic: ours is God’s kingdom.” (p. 89-90)

V Loyalty

“For your system of morality is no less a need to you than ours to us. And the incompatibility of the two systems is not passive. You might say: ‘Well, let us exist side by side and tolerate each other. We will not attack your morality, nor you ours.’ But the misfortune is that the two are not merely different. They are opposed in mortal, though tacit, enmity. No man can accept both, or, accepting either, do otherwise than despise the other.” (p. 95-96)

VI Discipline

“In the colleges, in the street, in the army, we betray ourselves. Indeed, your very breaches of discipline differ from ours by a certain conscious rebelliousness which is partly homage: our breaches of discipline are off-hand, unconscious, insolent.” (p. 110)

“The fact is, of course, that in true discipline, en effectiveness, we are by no means your inferiors. No one would dream of asserting that our religion is not more effective than yours in compelling obedience, or in perpetuating itself. The mere fact that we have persisted for eighty generations in maintaining a racial and spiritual identity in the face of so much persecution (and, more significant, of so much infiltration of blood) bespeaks essential discipline of amazing rigor and power. […] Yet I have no doubt that when Germany and England and America will long have lost their present identity or purpose, we shall still be strong in ours.” (p. 111).

VII The Reckoning

“I say, therefore, that in the conflict between us you have fought us physically, while our attack on your world has been in the spiritual field. It is the nature of the gentile to fight for his honor, in the nature of the Jew to suffer for this. […] And so, since we have lived among you, you have instinctively appealed to brute force in combating our influence.” (p. 128)

“We are a disturbing influence in your life not through our own fault. First: we are not in your midst by our own will, but through your action; and second (which is more to the point): we do not attack you deliberately. We are unwelcome to you because we are what we are. It is our own positive way of life which clashes with yours. Our attack on you is only incidental to the expression of our way of life. You too have this field open to you. As surely as we are a spiritual discomfort to you, you are a spiritual discomfort to us: as surely as we attack you peacefully, so you waste us peacefully and weaken our numbers.” (p. 129-130)

Further Reading: https://www.darkmoon.me/2014/key-quotations-from-you-gentiles-by-maurice-samuel/