Okay so someone help me to understand what this means? “Nicholas commissioned the publication of the anti-Semitic book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to discredit Nicholas’s political opponents as members of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.” I am not very sure what this means. Was he for the jews or was he against the jews? Hopefully someone will be able to help.
Thanx
P:confused:
He was against the Jews, obviously. Why on earth would he do such a thing if he was for the Jews? The Russian monarchy was historically always against the Jews but each czar went about it in a different way. Some of them tried actively to convert the Jews to Christianity. Nicholas I instituted a mandatory military draft to all Jewish boys older than 12; the system screwed them worse than non-Jewish conscripts because they had to serve for 25 years and they could not ever rise to the officer ranks (without converting.) The goal of the system was to assimilate into Russian culture, and it was not a great success; many of the young conscripts committed suicide rather than accept baptism. Eventually the Cantonist system was abolished (I think by Alexander II) and by that point the Russian monarchy had given up on trying to convert the Jews directly. So they instead encouraged persecution of Jews and attacks against them by Russian peasants, who needed a scapegoat.
Given a tiny kernal of fact (a number of jewish intellectuals like Karl Marx were part of the progressive/revolutionary avant-garde of the nineteenth century), the Jews were made scapegoats for the entire leftist radical end of the political spectrum. Or as Wikipedia puts it in the article about the Protocols:
Nicholas II was virulently anti-Semetic. It was a combination of traditional Russian anti-Semitism, a need for scapegoats, and a view that Jews were responsible for Marxism and other revolutionary movements. Nicholas once wrote to his mother after the massive pogroms of 1905 that “the impertinence of the socialists and revolutionaries had angered the people once more; and because nine tenths of the trouble makers are Jews, the people’s whole anger turned against them”. When a Jewish man named Mendel Beiliss was charged with the ridiculous charge of killing a child to use in making matzoh (the “blood libel”), Nicholas did everything he could to procure a conviction even though he knew Beiliss was innocent. He also financed anti-Semetic movements and refused to prosecute St. Petersburg police who printed pamphlets that urged people to “tear them (Jews) to pieces and kill them”.
I’ve read somewhere else that Nicholas, anti-Semitic though he was, got to the point where he repudiated The Protocols & ordered his officials not to distribute them because he thought they would discredit the noble cause of Jew-hating. It was Alexandra that was the big Protocols fan & had Sergius Nilus’ book (“The Great in the Small”?) on the AntiChrist, which was the first full publication of TPoZ, constantly on her nightstand.
I recall, I believe from Nicholas and Alexandra, that the worst he could insult English relatives was, “An Englishman is a Jew.” Maybe he just meant something about shopkeepers.
Marx had Jewish ancestry but was not himself Jewish; his parents converted to Lutheranism in 1817 so that his father Heinrich could hold public office (barred to Jews at that time) in the Rhineland. Even had he been born Jewish, his later embracing of the philosophy of materialism would still have led him to reject religion.
For antisemites, Jews are Jews even if they convert to another religion, or their parents do, or they have no religion at all.
Not just antisemites. As numerous religious Jews have told me over the years, “If your mother was Jewish, you are Jewish, period.”
Also, antisemites aren’t in lockstep over this. A particularly jolly Klansman in recruitment mode told my (Jewish) editor once that “Hell, we’ll take anyone who accepts Jesus Christ!”
Well aware of that; was just trying to point something out without casting unjustifiable aspersions on Lumpy.
Or maybe he didn’t really say that since that would make his wife and children Jews. He was married to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter. Alexandra was the daughter of Victoria’s third daughter, Alice Maud Mary.
But all of those people were basically Germans.
Yes, rumor had it Alexandra had a phone line from her room to Berlin. She was disliked for being German by the people.
He did. The quote is “An Englishman is a zhid”, which really translates better to “An Englishman is a Yid” or “An Englishman is a kike”.