Joseph Roth - The Antichrist

They knew that a crown had been given to them, but they trampled it with their feet.

They not only bore the Saviour; they also denied Him. They really were the chosen people of God. They were doubly chosen but not simply because they hardened their hearts and did not admit that the Son of God was the redeemer of the world.

The Jews were doubly chosen because they both brought Him forth and denied Him. They, the Jews, were chosen to bring forth the Saviour and through their denial make him into a Saviour. Through their virtue as through their sin have they prepared for the redemption of the world.

Of their own free will they took the burden of sin on to themselves, as sometimes a father will do who does not wish to share in the fame of his son.

Therefore, whoever believes in Jesus Christ but hates, or even has low esteem, for the Jews, his earthly womb, is the brother of the Antichrist.

The heathens still honour all the places where their saints and prophets revealed themselves in their human weakness.

The false Christians, however, despise or hate or esteem lightly the womb of the Saviour — the Jews.

For the Jews are the earthly womb of Jesus Christ.

Whoever thinks little of the Jews, thinks little also of Jesus Christ.

He who is a Christian esteems the Jews.

He who hates them or thinks poorly of them is not a Christian and mocks God Himself.

For since the Jews were chosen to bring about the earthly death of Jesus Christ, through it they confirmed the covenant of God with Abraham, the covenant with which the redemption of this world began.

And if God chose the Jews not only to bring forth Jesus Christ but also to deny Him, it was because God Himself struck the Children of Israel with blindness.

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.