And He himself may continue to strike them. He alone. Vengeance is His, and His also is the object of His vengeance.
Whoever attempts to take their own vengeance on the Jews in the name of God as His representative on earth is presumptuous and commits a mortal sin.
And whoever, in consideration of the fact that he is baptized and the Jews are not, tries to take vengeance against the Jews when, in fact, vengeance belongs only to God, is a twofold sinner. For he appropriates for himself, through the grace of his baptism, the authority to execute vengeance. He reveals the fact that the heathen yet lives within him, the heathen who does not deserve the grace of baptism.
He who hates the Jews is a heathen and not a Christian.
He who can hate at all, whomsoever may be the object of his hatred, is a heathen and not a Christian. And he who believes that he is a Christian solely because he is not a Jew is twice and even thrice a heathen. Cast him out of the community of Christians!
If the Church does not cast him out then God Himself will cast him out.
The Jews whom I saw in the villages and small towns of Eastern Europe are no different in character or nature from other people.
That is to say, I saw in them no special characteristics other than that which we already know, namely that the sexual organs of the male Jews are circumcised.
I saw Jewish farmers and Jewish craftsmen, Jewish traders, Jewish soldiers, Jewish artists, Jewish poor and rich, Jewish nobles and Jewish commoners, satiated Jews and hungry Jews, destitute and wealthy Jews.
And I saw other men around who were not Jews, and they said: ‘The poor, the rich, the satiated and the hungry, the soldiers and the artists, the traders and the craftsmen — they are all Jews. They don’t believe in Jesus Christ.’
‘They don’t believe in Jesus Christ,’ I said to them, ‘but you are even worse, for you believe in a false Jesus Christ who is made in your image.
‘You are unjust.
‘You thus have an unjust Jesus Christ. You thirst for vengeance and blood. Therefore you have made for yourselves a vengeful and bloodthirsty Jesus Christ. You have been baptized, but you aren’t Christians. It is true that you have received the grace of baptism. It will, however, only become reality after your death. So long as you live on earth you act like heathens. For I see with my own eyes that the unbaptized Jews work, get hungry, earn money and lie or tell the truth as you yourselves do. They love and they hate; they conceive and give birth; they make music and pursue many other arts; there are shoemakers and tailors among them just as there are among you.’
‘But they are more clever than we,’ said the people.
‘Even if they were more clever than you,’ said I, ‘that would indicate not only that you envy their intelligence — and envy is a sin — but also that you cultivate their intelligence through oppression.
‘Your envy is so immense that you not only gratify yourselves by feeding it with the already existing objects of your envy but you are zealous to supply it constantly with new nourishment!
‘Perhaps (but you’ve never tried it) the Jews would be more thick-headed than you are if you gave them the opportunity to be just as foolish as you and yet live as you do.
‘Since, however, you treat them unjustly and even oppress them, you develop their intelligence and thus also the object of your envy.
‘You are possessed by the Antichrist.’
Thus I spoke to the people.
But they replied: ‘How is it that we are possessed by the Antichrist when we are fighting the Antichrist among the Jews; among the Jews, where he alone still feels that he fits in and is at home?’
I said to them: ‘The Antichrist is at home not among the Jews but among you. And not only among you, but in each and every one of you. You yourselves are the Antichrist. It isn’t just that you hate someone; you make the objects of your hatred worse than they were so that you may hate them still more.
‘I see no difference between you and the Jews who live among you unless it be that it was from the womb of the Jews that the Saviour was born.
‘And were it so that I knew you envy the Jews because they were the Saviour’s womb, I would consider it a good excuse.
‘But it is not so.
‘You envy the Jews because they earn earthly goods. This is the truth.
‘You wanted all the earthly goods for yourselves. The Antichrist is among you and in you.’
I continued to go among the Jewish people, and all that I saw confirmed my conviction that there were good and bad among them, just as their faith delineated holy days and ordinary days.
And in a small town I witnessed one of their holy days, the highest of them all, the Day of Propitiation, or Atonement, which they call Yom Kippur.
Yom Kippur, however, is a day not of Propitiation but of Atonement, a solemn day, the twenty-four hours that contain twenty-four years of penance.
It commences on the previous day at four o’clock in the afternoon. In a town where the majority of the residents are Jews this greatest of all holidays is felt like an oppressive storm when one finds oneself on the high seas in a frail boat.
The lanes were suddenly dark because the candles in all the windows were blown out, and the shops were closed hurriedly and with timid haste but at the same time with such an indescribable finality that one believed they would not be reopened until Judgement Day.
It was an all-encompassing absence from everything worldly, from business, from joy, from nature, from the streets and the family, from friends and acquaintances. Men who two hours earlier had been going about their daily business with their accustomed expressions hurried as though transformed through the streets towards the temple, wearing heavy black silk or the dreadful white of their shrouds, with white socks and loose slippers, heads bent forward, their prayer shawls under their arms. The profound silence, in what was usually an almost orientally noisy town, seemed to be increased a hundred times and weighed heavily even upon the normally animated children.
All the fathers blessed their children. All the women wept in front of silver candlesticks. All friends embraced each other. All enemies begged one another for forgiveness. A choir of angels sang out to Judgement Day. Soon Jehovah opened the formidable book in which the sins, punishments and fates of the year are laid down. Lights burned for all the dead; others burned for all the living. The dead were separated from this world and the living from the hereafter by only a single step.
The great prayers began. The great fast had already begun one hour before. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of candles burning in a row and one behind another, bent over and mingled flames as they melted together. From a thousand windows erupted shouted prayers to be interrupted by nearly silent, low other-worldly melodies that seemed to echo the singing of Heaven.
People stood shoulder to shoulder in all the synagogues. Some threw themselves upon the ground, rose after a long period, sat down on stone tiles or footstools, crouched for a time and then sprang up suddenly, shook their upper bodies and ran continually to and fro in the small chamber. Whole houses, ecstatic outposts of prayer, were full of white shrouds, of the living who were no longer here, of the dead who were now alive. Not a drop of water crossed those dry lips to refresh those throats that were crying out so great a lamentation — not into this world but, rather, into the heavenly world. It was dreadful to think that no one would eat or drink, either on this day or the next. They had all become ghosts, with the characteristics of ghosts. Every small shopkeeper was a superman, as today he desired to reach God. They all stretched their hands outwards to grasp at the tip of His vestment. All, without distinction; the rich were as poor as the truly destitute, for none could eat. They were all sinners, and all were praying. A frenzy gripped them, and they swayed, they rested and whispered, they beat their breasts, they sang, they shouted out, they wept; heavy tears ran down their venerable beards, hunger was forgotten amid the grief of the soul and the eternity of the melodies heard by the enraptured ear.