This page needs to be proofread.
392
SHAKESPEARE'S MAIDENS AND WOMEN.

be created. Here the real reason for hating the Jews shows itself with its true face, and this face lias not the gloomy fanatical features of a monk, but the flabby tricky traits of a tradesman who with fear works in business, as in behaviour, to keep from being beaten by the Jewish commercial spirit.

"But is it the fault of the Jews that this business-spirit has twined itself round them in such a threatening manner ? The guilt lies entirely in that lunacy with which man in the Middle Ages ignored the meaning of industry, regarding trade as something ignoble, even that in money as something accursed, and therefore gave that most profitable part of all business over to the Jews, so that these latter, being excluded from all other occupations, necessarily became the most refined and expert merchants and bankers. The world compelled them to become rich, and then hated them for their wealth, and though Christianity has laid aside its prejudices against industry, and the Christians have become in trade and industry as great rascals and as rich as the Jews, still the old popular hatred against the latter survives, the people persist in seeing in them always the representatives of money, and hate them. You see that in history every one is in the right, the hammer as well as the anvil."